Comment by trentnix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trentnix | Hacker News Reader

I just went through the job search process (and actually found my job thanks to Hacker News) and was astonished at how many job posting and job application antipatterns I observed. Here’s just a few:

- job descriptions that don’t tell me anything about what the company actually does to make money

- repeating the same question in your application form, sometimes in sequence

- “submit application” buttons that resulted in a server error or 404 (and when pressing back to try again, all your previous info is gone)

- requiring me to generate an account (with an overwrought password complexity requirement), validate my email, log in, and then I can finally upload my resume

- "we don't discriminate" promises followed by way too many questions about gender preferences and vaccination status and diversity pledges

- absurd captchas asking you to identify the “smiling dog” or "plant on a table" or "picture of a living room" through multiple pages

- asinine questions like "tell us why you want to work at (Acme Corp or Bunyon Doctors of America or Dunder-Mifflin Paper Company or whatever)"

It’s all out there and extremely common. If you manage to get to complete the application and get to the interview process, things don't get much better:

- 5 stages of interviews with 11 people over 4 weeks before the committee meets to decide if we want you to pitch us on whether to offer you

- "as a policy we don’t provide feedback" but here’s multiple nagging emails requesting your feedback to help us improve our process (looking at you, Amazon)

- 3-4 weeks between submitting an application and receiving a request for a phone screen

- an endless barrage of “tell me about a time when…” questions

Companies often remark they are desperate for good talent but then invest seemingly nothing in making the process efficient, enjoyable, and succinct.

> asinine questions like "tell us why you want to work at (Acme Corp or Bunyon Doctors of America or Dunder-Mifflin Paper Company or whatever)"

"Tell us why you're passionate about middle-of-the-road paper-pushing" is a favourite. Come on people, I don't think "passionate" means what you think it does.

> "Tell us why you're passionate about middle-of-the-road paper-pushing"

You're missing out on the perfect opportunity to tell them about your severe head injury and/or paper-pushing fetish...

"Before I reply, why don't you tell me why you are (pause) literally (pause) passionate about working here." - maintain eye contact until escorted from building...

Tempting, but no.

I have both asked and been asked versions of this question.

As an interviewee, I like to ask something like "One of my favorite things at work is when I have a win. Like, something I've been working on launches successfully, or I notice people are using my work months or years later. It makes my day! Can you talk to me about the last time you had something like that at work?" I've had people freeze up for 30+ seconds with this question, which is usually not a good sign.

As an interviewer, I've gotten "why do you like working at {company}?" or "why are you in the data management/marketplace space?" from interviewees. and boy do I love talking about that one. Work isn't my whole life, but I am actually passionate about the stuff I do, so it works out.

> - "we don't discriminate" promises followed by way too many questions about gender preferences and vaccination status and diversity pledges

That made me laugh :D

It's funny as a non-american dealing with those kind of things. Onetime I amused myself by checking their definitions: a person from Spain, which speaks Spanish and has a non-white skin is neither Latino or Hispanic; a diabetic is a disabled person.

Since most those questions are optional, I just do not answer them to any of them.

I'm interested why you think a diabetic isn't disabled?

Because they can go through life without a lot of hassle.

Being in a wheelchair, being blind or having just one arm you're always facing limitations in your life, a diabetic usually just takes medication and is more careful with their diet. So they don't seem comparable to me.

Some diabetics probably have a worse life but overall I don't think it's a disability.

Havent looked for a job in about 10 years but even back then it was already loaded with these huge forms that you have to fill out which i loathe.

I get it that they want to automate stuff but how much would an extra employee or two cost to analyse the resumes? The scraping software is also not that cheap.

I guess it also says a lot about the companies itself if the first experience you have with them is using some shitty tool that nobody really wants to use.

Same. Oh, the wonderful difference between sending a small shop my resume by email with an in-email "cover letter", followed by an invitation to interview the next day, and submitting to a big company's convoluted, bug-ridden, idiosyncratic application procedure.

> how much would an extra employee or two cost to analyse the resumes?

just send them to the hiring manager. It is very obvious who doesn't have the skills at all so it takes seconds to reject them.

I suppose you could fake someone with the right skills, but I don't understand how such a scam could make you money so I don't see why anyone would.

> just send them to the hiring manager

Yes, please do. Spotting odd patterns in CVs is a good skill. Even with lots of garbage being funneled my way. The clearly hopeless or flat-out misplaced applications indeed do get rejected in seconds.

For one role I was hiring earlier this year, I noted how a few [recruiter fed] CVs had a striking similarity. Same set of skills in the exact same order. Same wording in the skill descriptions. All coming from the same geographic region. After the third I wrote a remark about the CVs looking either plagiarised or coming off of a weird template. Mentioned the similarity explicitly on the fourth one, with a slightly acidic comment about clearly being a wrong fit for the role.

Never saw a fifth one.

<<tell us why you want to work at (Acme Corp or Bunyon Doctors of America or Dunder-Mifflin Paper Company or whatever)>>

I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I read this! "Dunder-Mifflin" -- Me thinks: But, do they know it is a Python term (__xyz__)?

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