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Comment by jillesvangurp | Hacker News Reader

Most companies have recruiting backwards. The interview process is not about selecting the best candidates but about selling your company so the best candidates are actually willing to even entertain talking to you.

Recruiters, HR people, etc. mean well but they kind of just put up a lot of hurdles for the best candidates to even get far enough into the process that there's a meaningful interaction. The profile of the best candidate is that 1) they are probably not bored or unemployed 2) they have many options if they want to change their current situations 3) they are unlikely to engage with cold outreach via email or phone. 4) in the rare case they show any interest in your company at all, you should be ready to go and talk business.

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> The interview process is not about selecting the best candidates but about selling your company so the best candidates are actually willing to even entertain talking to you.

I recently started a new job and interviewed with multiple companies in the process. At the end, I was still interviewing with two companies. One of them put me in a room with two devs who went slightly hard ball on me and seemed to want to try and catch me on not being good enough. The other put me in a room with a member of leadership who wanted to discuss a role he thought would be a good fit for my profile and then have a casual chat about the organization and the challenges.

Both wanted to give me an offer. Guess where I ended up working.

HR and recruiting are very aware of this?

They're absolutely trying to filter out the overqualified.

Overqualified candidates will resign the second they see the terrible projects the company contains.

They're looking for the sweet spot of desperation.

Pretty much, overqualified means they have leverage and are independent, not easy to jerk around and power trip with.

> They're looking for the sweet spot of desperation.

You've seen through the fog my friend...

Most over qualified won't accept the job for the pay you are willing to give.

I have seen over qualified people take an entry level job - but it was only offered because they explained they had personal reasons to want to move to the area we were hiring (a non-remote job, though this was pre-covid), and were willing to take a pay cut. As soon as review time came they go a promotion. (At the time we only had entry level positions open, as we had "too many" senior people on the team)

IMO selecting the most talented candidates from among a candidate pool is, for all intents and purposes, impossible. Interviews are a joke, past experience ends up being basically meaningless, and references are too easily gamed. I think the whole idea of hiring the most talented individuals is a fools game. I'm sure many people disagree, but this has been my experience over the years. In fact, I think trying to go for the best candidates will hard backfire most of the time: you'll end up paying far more for no real gain.

So if we assume that we are going to get a more or less random sample of quality then what you can we screen for? As far as I can tell there's basically only two positive signals we can look for: motivation and agreeableness. So I think that explains why interview processes end up the way they do.

Maybe that's an overly cynical take, but I really just don't think that it's possible to find the "best candidates," so you end up just filtering for what you can control.

>The interview process is not about selecting the best candidates but about selling your company so the best candidates are actually willing to even entertain talking to you.

Best candidates will require best money.

Most positions don't need best candidates. For many, even mediocre candidates will do.

I'm not sure about that. I started programming some 30 years ago, and wrote quite diverse programs, but not always professionally. I've been working professionally some of that time, of course, but in between jobs I've been doing my own things, which didn't translate into a commercializable products (but some could some day, I guess) and I keep them out of my resume. Jobs always found me, not the opposite. So I don't have much experience seeking one.

But these last two years I did try to look for one, every now and then. All in all, I sent my one-sentence-per-job resume to about 10 companies, which I researched somewhat thoroughly and concluded that can put my skills into use. I know it's not the usual shotgun approach of mailing zillions of companies in hope that one will turn out to be The One, but that's how I work. Friends and family tell me that I should put more into the resume, but I'd rather explain stuff face-to-face. Of course, I don't get there. I'm also very picky (my ethics filter out so many companies, you know, tracking people, advertising, etc..). Anyway, out of those ~10 companies, only 3 got back to me. One of them rejected via email in a matter of hours. The other two had HR call me. One of the two invited me to a face-to-face nontechnical interview with a young manager... not the position I've applied for, but anyway. It was friendly though kinda stuck at why I decided quit some company 7 years ago. She might have also found me clueless, since I didn't have a formulaic conception of software development that she seemed to inquire about. The next day I got an email rejection.

Now, I'm a very technical person, and I'd probably have more success going via a different route, maybe meetups. I'm an introvert, but don't have difficulty opening up to other technical persons. So I'll try that. (No LinkedIn or "networking"... a privacy-conscious introvert).

But anyway, my point is that I projected a high probability of providing good value to these companies after nontrivial amount of research into them and their positions, but it seems they're all drowning in noise so manage to miss my signal. Industry situation is poor.

Luckily I'm keeping to my own projects as well. Some day they may bear financial fruit.

In the recent worker shortage, it has been apparent that people don't get "it".

"It" is a story of how they won't pay over $x but can't find workers who will show up.

There's likely a historic bias that many people have where historically, a 6%+ unemployment rate made gave people with open positions power; as we've stayed close to full employment for so long, we're due an awakening.

Mix this with the generational retirement of baby boomers, <2 child population control concepts, high costs of childcare /healthcare, and a lack of immigration limit increases in 30 years.

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