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Comment by Fr3dd1 | Hacker News Reader

Context: I do recruiting as a team lead. I am happy you found what you were looking for. But from my pov, if you want to work less than fulltime and thats a non negotiable thing for you, please be open up front with the people who interview you. Typically when a full time position is offered, the workload of a full person is needed (lets not discuss if 8h of work a day results in better or more output than less hours, thats another topic). I was several times in the position where a candidate suddenly said, that he wants to work part time (at the last stage of the hiring process). By doing this he wasted not only mine but also his own time..

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I don't see what GP did as much different than how most recruitment processes work from the hiring side. You usually don't find out:

  - salary
  - stock options
  - contractual terms, like non-competes 
  - etc

until you have cleared their hiring bars first.

I'd love to see full transparency on both sides, but until we do I don't think they did anything wrong, and in fact just applied the same approach used by many companies, waiting until they were committed before making their big ask.

Telling a recruiter things you'd like usually leads to them telling you to fuck off, so this advice is very good for getting zero jobs. If you get through a whole interview process (i.e. you like them) and the fact that they don't want to sit in your (virtual) office for five days a week is still a complete deal breaker you have a poor process. If you feel like that realisation wastes your time, I think you have some growth to do as a team lead.

Actually telling things you like is a good thing. Why would it be a bad thing? Getting zero job offers is mostly, at least from my experience, a result of lacking the needed soft or hard skills (sadly errors can occure here - false negatives) or someone who doesnt meet organizational requirements (like the things we discussed here). In my process I tell in the first contact, that I am looking to fill a full time position in my team. If the candidate neither at the end of this call or in the organzation process for the second meeting says, that working full time is not an option, well sorry, thats just unfair. My opinion.

Telling this first is a good way to have every company think that 5 days/week is an organizational requirement and brush off the candidate. Having the candidate wait until after the interview puts them in a much stronger negotiating position, namely it forces the company to assess whether or not 5 days a week is a legitimate requirement or not. Many parts of the interview process are unfair to candidates, such as not advertising salary ranges in advance, forcing candidates to take vacation time to attend interviews, etc. This is merely a way to balance the scales away from the company, which generally holds almost all of the power in a negotiation, especially at the start, before an offer is made.

To be fair, most employers include a lot of things in their job ads that shouldn't necessarily be taken literally or in the strictest sense possible. For example, a decent chunk of ads I've seen ask for a set of qualifications that would leave them with zero applicants if taken literally. I've also heard from multiple hiring managers and recruiters that "if you're not qualified but you really want to job, you should apply anyway".

Applying for a "full time" job, if you expect to be able to handle a "full time workload" is not a great stretch.

Also, as several other commenters have pointed out, employers routinely leave a lot of critical details out in the early stages — especially details that might make applicants not bother applying at all. Unless you're very clearly a rare exception to that norm (i.e. an applicant can tell that easily from the job ad) then it's a bit rich to expect applicants to lay everything on the table before you've even met.

What if I'm confident that I can convince you my 32 hrs are worth just as much or even more than s.o. else's 40 hrs though?

I as an applicant would also not want to be ruled out only based on that, I would want to have a chance to present my own full offer to you as well.

Ok, I believe you. Your 32 hours are just as productive as an "average" developer's 40 hours.

and what if I can convince you that at our company, people with your level of talent set the bar?

We pay above market rate because we are looking for 40 hours of above average talent, which is equivalent to 55 hours of normal talent.

It's not a "chance to present my own full offer" when the role explicitly states full-time. That's called trying to re-negotiate and it's not great. Also, there's no way I'll let you convince me of formally hiring you at 32 hours because of the hassles involved on my side, and more importantly the slippery slope - say the next guy thinks he can do it in 16 hours, the next person is remote, the next person doesn't want to join Zoom calls because they're more effective async, another want to only work at night when they're "in the zone".. not everything is up for negotiation (even though in reality, you should try and have flexibility in the roles in day-to-day practice because we're all unique humans and stuff comes up etc. but you get my point). I think people in tech have gotten a bit precious and spoiled TBH :)

I think it's employers who've gotten a bit precious and spoiled, if they're so reluctant to consider the needs and desires of their employees.

I think all of those requests are reasonable.

Allowing someone to work the hours that they work most efficiently in increases productivity.

Everyone knows that meetings are a waste of time and lead to poorly thought out solutions.

Asynchronous communication is more efficient AND gives better results.

Both of these things are objectively good for the company, and a company which sees that will outperform a company that doesn’t.

Nobody wants to work 5 days a week. Most people just put up with it. The company doesn’t really have a way to measure productivity so they just say more hours worked = more hours produced. But we all know this relationship is not linear.

I know anecdotally that my productivity is vastly higher when working fewer hours.

I have had times where I get more work done in 4 days than I did in 5 days. That isn’t always going to be the case. But if the company is paying you 80% salary then the company is definitely getting more work out of you per unit salary, and that’s all that really matters in the end.

I do agree that modern work is quite broken and there's times we are more productive in shorter amounts of time. I don't think it's the "time" that determines it though but rather the nature of work and whether it motivates us and is in the perfect balance of flow etc. etc.

And good meetings are good meetings. That said, 2/3 meetings are considered "unnecessary" in surveys we did - so it's a matter of killing off the waste-of-time meetings and doing that async and using tech, and using the more synchronous ways of working for things that needs that (specific real-time collaborative work)

Why can't you just make more clear in the beginning that this position is full-time and only full-time and that (for what ever reason) you are not able to consider part time workers for this job?

There is an information asymmetry. People want to disclose things that make them less attractive to employ as late as possible. Similarly there are things you don't tell the candidate beforehand too.

> Typically when a full time position is offered, the workload of a full person is needed

Yet when there is demand from prospective employees for something that is not offered (4 day week) but known to exist if you ask later in the interview process with some companies people will have to try if you are some company. Whether you are offering reduced time jobs or not for some positions that is available is an information you hold. You do not seem to want to hold that information back so you can make a decision depending on the candidate so you should very visibly perform send a costly signal that makes it clear reduced work hours are not possible. A costly signal would be "we are not able to consider non full-time applicants for this position".

Ironically I think this attitude is what encourages the bait-and-switch scenario. If someone tells you before interviews they want to work 4 days, 100% chance they'll be rejected. But if a perfect candidate gets to the final stage and then tells you they will only work 4 days the odds are much better and the leverage is on their side.

Also there isn't really part time / full time with salaried work. I doubt you're paying overtime if someone stays in the office for over 40 hours. Hiring for presence over productivity doesn't seem like a good metric.

In the last two years I've been committing just 16-24 hours/week of actual sit-down-at-desk work to the projects/contracts I've worked on. Despite not working 40 hours, I hit all my deliverables and leave my clients very happy. No secret sauce - I just focus on getting deliverables done and religiously avoid "stuff-and-fluff".

That to say; recruiters, team leads et al have little idea of how workload converts to time. If you're measuring hours you've already lost. The only thing that matters is output value.

> Michael Scott: Jim Halpert: Not a hard worker. I can spend all day on a project, and he will finish the same project in a half an hour.

> Typically when a full time position is offered, the workload of a full person is needed (lets not discuss if 8h of work a day results in better or more output than less hours, thats another topic)

But that is the point.

If someone believes they can do a full-time workload in 4 days, how else should they approach this in a way that works?

Put another way: How many employers, do you estimate, would not even do an interview with someone if they knew they wanted to do 4 days? How would you, as a recruiter, figure out a candidate is capable of that? How would you pitch them candidate to an employer looking for full-time?

I did not think this gets so much attention. A lot of the points you all wrote are correct. But still, if I am looking to fil a full time position (of course this is written in the ad...) and you dont want to work full time than this is totally fine but not a match. Maybe you think you can convince a company that you can generate the same output as other employees who work full time - and maybe that is true. But its insanely hard to do so. To this day (at least in germany in most companies I know) people are just not ready yet to admid that working time != working results. Just the turh for now (I myself hope too that this will change and I do my bits). And by the way I would assume that a lot of people who are active here are above average in there profession. I dont have proof for that but thats what I think. And guess what: a lot of candidates are not above average.

If he had been up front his his ambition to work 4 days a week then he wouldn't have made it to interview at most of the places he did, let alone to offer stage.

Unfortunately you're in the minority in my experience. Maybe your colleagues and yourself all act in good faith during negotiations, but they are no longer the majority in a large part of the industry. Many recruiters don't act in good faith with candidates these days, especially as KPI's are getting stretched and firms are starting to close out their recruiting efforts.

For candidates who have this as a dealbreaker with a hard-sell like this, I have one suggestion: Don't tell them it's a deal-breaker, just say you're looking at another offer with this perk and see what they can do. That way it doesn't look like you're gaming their hiring process, nor that you were interviewing in bad faith.

"Please be an easier mark for me."

I work as a developer, and recruiters emails me in a daily basis. We all should try to minimize the recruiting efforts, but the amount of secrets that recruiters won't tell is just annoying... Sometimes even the company name they're recruiting for is a secret until you pass 1 or 2 interviews.

I know, there must be reasons for that, but from my point of view, it makes me lost a lot of time, and just for context, I spend 3 months looking for a job (with several interviews each week), this is just the proper market research everyone should do. And the end I was able to double my salary, work less, and get a lot bunch of great benefits.

And of course, the most annoying thing from this, was all the wasted time because recruiters 1) didn't wanted to handle me the proper information (like salary ranges or benefits) and 2) recruiters didn't make their own job, there was like 3-4 companies I applied for where, at the end of the process they wanted to hire me, but we're not able to do it since they have a contract with my previous company. Recruiters (or somebody else) should check that info before starting the process.

I'm usually upfront with my demand to work 4 days. I share it with them as soon as I know their basics like the location and the pay range.

I consider the hours worked as part of compensation. It's something to be discussed during the negotiation phase. The company decides the structure of the hiring process. If you don't want to waste time, nothing stops you from moving the negotiation phase to the very start of the hiring process. I would personally prefer it if you did that as well. As an applicant it seems very awkward and unprofessional to come in and try to negotiate right from the start unless the company makes it clear that is what they want.

Yeah, and potentially the 3-5 other people who interviewed them as well! That would get me a bit fired up if they didn't ask me that until the end of the process.. as bad as when people tell me they want a remote role when it's clearly advertised as an in-city office-first role!

Do you tell them the salary and % of the company they’ll get up front?

% in company not a thing here. I ask for a salary range from the candidate. If that meets the range I can potentially offer, I say so. If it is too high, I also say so. If it is lower than usual and it is a final match, our offer will be higher. If the candidate "refuses" to name it (acutally didnt happend in the last years) I can only assume that I would say my budget. Guess its fair or what would you say?

Yeah, that’s fair. It’s very common that candidates get surprised on the downside at the end of the process, though, so I think it’s generally fair for the candidate to hold back some information until you’re sold on them. Though it’d be nice if they didn’t have to.

Instead of asking for range from them, why not tell them your budget first? Or at least both write them down on pieces of paper and reveal simultaneously.

99% of candidates come through some 3rd party recruiter (in our case). They know our ranges and communicate this. The other 1%, well I just dont do, no special thoughts. Its not in my intention to push compensation down. This only has future downsides if I hire the candidate and he performs well.

Absolutely not. There are certain questions you can’t ask until after you have an offer because they will otherwise unfairly shade people’s perception of you. This is no different than waiting a few dates before disclosing medical issues and such to a potential mate. Convince people of your value first, then hit them with the conditions.

This isn’t a flaw to be fixed. It’s just how human interactions work. It has always been this way and always will be, no matter what you try to do about it.

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