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Comment by indymike | Hacker News Reader

I've been in the job board / HR Tech space for a while, and every time I see a state pass a law requiring advertising the salary range, I'm reminded of a few facts:

* Showing your salary range as long as it is at market wage or higher delivers 14% more applicants. It is a good idea to show salary on job ads.

* If you don't give the job board a salary range, they will use tools like salary.com or their own tools to show an "estimated salary range" on your job so they pick up more clicks when they syndicate your job to other sources (i.e. email alerts and other job boards).

* If you are uncompetitve on wages, fix it. Even though there's a lot of doom and gloom out there, the truth is that unemployment did not go up in November.

* If you advertise a job respond to applicants quickly - as in within minutes of the application. A single day of delay in response causes 28% of candidates to become unresponsive to recruiters (this is from our company's research). It drops to 51% become unresponsive 48 hours later.

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> * If you advertise a job respond to applicants quickly - as in within minutes of the application. A single day of delay in response causes 28% of candidates to become unresponsive to recruiters (this is from our company's research). It drops to 51% become unresponsive 48 hours later.

My experience with being hired at non-FAANG places over a career of more than two decades is that I'm usually through a process and hired within a week. Often, like three days, from first contact to offer. I think my single longest job search was maybe a month, total. Companies that have these weeks- or months-long processes but don't pay FAANG-tier wages to make it worth the wait, I have no idea how the hell they manage to hire anyone at all. You've got to move or I'll already be looking at two other offers before you set the date for your second round or WTF ever.

I routinely hire developers in 24 hours from initial contact. It's fun watching them get random recruiter calls two or three weeks later. "I'm not interested, I STARTED my new job three weeks ago. No, I'm not willing to leave for that. Have a nice day." Except the "Have a nice day" part is usually less friendly and polite.

How can either side get an accurate assessment of the other in such a short time? I was hired by my current employer in less than 2 weeks from initial conversation and it was a bit of a smell that they weren't more thorough. Now I'm a hiring manager and am a little concerned with what I feel are "loose" practices that let too many marginal candidates through because otherwise "it's too hard to source talent".

For me a clear understanding of the process steps and how long it will take start to finish is more important than absolute speed. Example: "These are the N phases, we aim to be completed in X days/weeks and you will always know what's next and when it will occur." My last employeer was really good at communicating promptly with those that were not progressing, which is also very important.

I think we should all agree that limbo/ghosting is totally unacceptable and these companies (or people) should be called out by name.

You read the candidates CV, you ask them what they last worked on, ask them why they want to work at your company, if they are okay with the posted salary range. Maybe have them write a short bit of code to make sure they aren't totally bullshitting you.

That takes about one or two hours.

Then you think about it, and if you want to hire them send them an offer the next day.

First 3 months of the contract is trial period (you can fire them without severance in the trial period if it doesn't work out).

Not sure why you need weeks to evaluate a candidate, either they are a fit or not.

Agree - most of the interviews I have had have been 1-2 hours plus some sort of coding test or similar. I guess if you are trying to recruit people already in a job, you can't get away with that much more than that - unless the job is super-amazing, you can expect people to take a day off work but not more than that. I don't know that longer interviews etc. would actually have told the interviewers massively more about me, perhaps a tiny bit more but not a lot.

> How can either side get an accurate assessment of the other in such a short time?

There is little evidence that longer interview cycles produce better results.

"Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring. We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship."

- https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-...

Consider the number of hours you actually spend interacting with a candidate during the interview process. If it's 40(!), bring them in for a full week and decide at the end of Friday. If it's closer to 10, bring them in Monday morning and decide by close of business Tuesday.

All the delays are materially the fault of glitches in the hiring organization.

This is a good process to ensure you don’t hire anyone who is currently employed. I would not sign up for this even if I was between jobs unless I was desperate. I don’t mind coding challenges, etc, but the first few weeks at any job is mostly scut work getting things set up, meeting people, etc.

I was sort of being facetious with the 40 hours thing. Nobody really gets 40 hours of interaction of a candidate before hiring. More typical is closer to 5-8, which means they can make a decision in a single day.

Edit: even an intense 6-interview loop including a "sell" dinner can be done in a day if scheduled properly. The multiple weeks thing is entirely poor scheduling on the part of the company.

5-8 still seems like a lot t me. 1-3 has been more typical of my experience.

3 tech interviews, lunch with team or other colleague, followed by general corporate HR interview and a "sell" session all fit neatly into a single business day.

This is great for 1 candidate. Say you have 20 applications at once? Do you pick the one with the best CV and dedicate this week for them. Or try to do a filter stage? Not saying I have the answer, but it is not as simple as chucking all your resources at all the candidates full time.

> Say you have 20 applications at once?

Yes, a filter should happen first. A 30/60 minute phone screen to determine who to bring in for the full interview set. Then, what companies did back in the 90s was to take a day (say Friday) and blitz through interviews that day. (Do companies still do this?) You will pull people from their normal work to do this, but conversely you don't lose applicants because your process leaves them hanging too long.

To add anecdata to your post here, in the height of the hiring craze last year, I accepted an "above-market" (from my perspective) offer from a company called Provi. They took less than a week from initial recruiter call to offer.

Fast forward to this past February, and I'm being let go for "performance reasons", but it's a lot clearer in retrospect that I should've been failed out of their interview process if it was any good, and that seeking to hire someone within a week is now sort of a yellow flag for me.

I want to move fast, but I also want my counter-party to do proper due diligence.

What do you think they should have asked you that would have properly filtered you out?

I don't know - isn't that the employer's problem, not mine?

I was let go two weeks after they acquired a competitor. They claimed it was my performance that was the reason I was being let go, but when you have zero "negative performance" conversations with your manager despite having regular weekly/semi-weekly 1-1s, it's clear to me "performance" was not the driving issue.

Are you sure that wasn't a spot of impostor syndrome? Or do you think it was just a bad culture fit?

They acquired a competitor, doubling their headcount. Two weeks later, I was being let go.

How long did it take them to let you go?

I was there four months in total. They acquired a competitor two weeks before I was let go. I can connect the dots.

>How can either side get an accurate assessment of the other in such a short time?

Hmm? you just perform 1-2h interview and decide?

>These are the N phases, we aim to be completed in X days/weeks and you will always know what's next and when it will occur."

Why would you need N technical interviews to decide whether somebody is worth their money?

You have to get these three things right:

* Define what a hireable candidate is so you aren't paralyzed in deciding who to give offers to and can be confident in screening.

* Front-load objective screening. Don't wait until after the interview to do a code test. Hiring managers should know what they've got, and focus on

* Make sure hiring managers understand their role in the process and are not running a different hiring process than the recruiting team so expectations can be met.

So you spend significantly more than a day on assessment for each individual candidate? Because if you don't, quick turnaround times are mostly a scheduling problem.

How often do you actually learn something material after the first hour of interviewing? In my experience almost never.

> How can either side get an accurate assessment of the other in such a short time?

Given the state of tech interviews, and what can be objectively determined _at all_, what makes you think more time would give you any more accurate assessment?

In most small companies you send in your CV, they bring you in for an interview, chat for an hour or so and get an offer the next day. The only reason big companies do these massive complex multi-hour interview processes that require ten plus people is because nobody wants to take responsibility for a shitty hire so they make sure everyone gets involved so it can’t be blamed on a single person.

> The only reason big companies do these massive complex multi-hour interview processes that require ten plus people is because nobody wants to take responsibility for a shitty hire so they make sure everyone gets involved so it can’t be blamed on a single person.

This is a very detached view from the reality. The only reason for the company to spend that much time on the interview process is to reduce the rate of "false positives" as it's deemed very expensive at the big tech. Avoiding individual accountability is not the reason

It is a structural property of committees. They dilute blame.

Not OP, I do not mean that there is an evil confabulation for this to happen, but if you have a hiring committee, this is happening. Even if it would reduce the amount of bad candidates (which is not a given at all), both effects can happen simultaneously.

This is true, but I'd still rather come in for an entire day and interview with 6 different people and get a thumbs up/down the same or next day versus come in for a single 1 hr interview then get called back for a second interview a few days later and then a third interview a week after that and then not get a decision for a week or two after the final interview. The latter used to be way more common with non-tech companies in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

I'm starting to come around to the TikTok suggestion for those tense closers. "Have the day you deserve."

There also seems to be a scam industry forming to take advantage of those quick moves plus remote work. If one such scam employee makes it to the first salary, it already more than paid for the few hours spent on interviews and communicating excuses why he doesn't get anything done. Also interviews and pretending to work can be spread out to specialists within a team.

Now do the math for multiple interviews per working day for someone who is decent in interviewing...

We had the same guy show up to scam interviews under different names twice! LOL

I started a new job in April. The hiring process was quite slow and disorganized, but included in that were three separate "interviews" with my now-manager.

I thought this was great - I felt like I really understood who I'd be working for and what I was getting into. And now that I've joined I understand that he was simply doing the same thing: getting to know me; making sure I wasn't someone good at technical interviews but with misaligned values. Hiring the wrong person can be very expensive.

I wish the whole process had taken 2 weeks rather than 6, but I'd view an offer in 24h as a huge red flag.

3 times with the same person? Yikes.. this is a much bigger red flag than getting hired in 24 hours. That tells me they are unsure of me or themselves getting an offer on the spot is a sign they actually need to fill the position and they believe you can

To me it just sounds like a small scale operation and the manager is being careful which is great.

Perhaps what happened after the first two meetings, the manager sat down and analyzed his list of reasons he's excited about the candidate as well as any potential concerns that he saw.

The subsequent rounds may have in part been structured to dig into the areas of concerns to assure themselves they aren't real issues or can be lived with.

This wouldn't scale at a FAANG but for a smaller shop it's probably close to optimal.

I didn't marry my wife after our first date :)

It was for a pretty senior role. Having joined, it was clearly not a red flag in hindsight; it didn't hunt at any actual dysfunction AFAICT.

This! It happened to me on my last job search. Was talking with three companies and two of the had the usual 4-6 meetings across 2-3 weeks stuff… the one I accepted did two interviews (technical and with PMs) and had an offer for me about 1 hour after I finished the last interview. I was blown away and the other companies couldn’t really compete, nor they were affecting anything so much better that would be worth the wait!

How do you deal with people lying on their resume? I'm curious what your hiring process looks like.

I have been through a process that took 4 months, from start to end, with almost two months of silence between. The only reason I knew I wasn't rejected was I had a friend on the inside.

I've been on the other side of a hiring process like that.

It literally went like this:

"Oh shit, didn't we interview so and so for that like 3 weeks ago? Oops! Are they still available?"

I had a 4 month hiring process - but in fairness they were very transparent. Early on in the process I was warned it would take a long time, and at each step along the way it was made clear what was happening. There was never a feeling of being half ghosted.

Wasn’t a bad experience at all.

I got a new job long before COVID--so mostly in-person process--and it was about a 3 month process. But a lot of it was I was interviewing with people who traveled a lot and getting on calendars even with flexibility on my part (I was very local) just took time.

They hire closer to average talent, who will typically wait because they don't have offers swarming in. The places that hire fast and choose good talent often screen those folks out.

I've seen the other side of this and it's not pretty. We had a round with a very indecisive manager who seemed to be apprehensive that an even better candidate might come along next week.

We interviewed 15-20 people over the run of 3 months, finally decided on someone and got in touch with them. They'd already taken a role. Tried our second choice. Then our third. Then we just started over.

Unless the candidate is looking for you in particular, the better than candidate, the sooner they'll be off the market. The only candidates still waiting 3 months later are the ones everyone else has passed over.

(This isn't particularly recent, and wasn't in the US. It's just stuck in my mind as a particularly educational experience.)

It would help things immensely if people were more honest. Sometimes it takes more than a week to verify everything on their resume. References often don't get back ASAP. It's not like we won't ever find out that they were lying about their previous job. There are always some applicants who talk a lot, take credit for others' work, but can't actually anything.

I work in such a company; it is easy to hire, there are people that FAANG does not hire, other companies don't hire, but somewhere at the bottom someone does. The entire industry that I work in (non-IT, but very large companies) do this, it is the practice for the past ~ 15 years and there is a non-compete agreement on this.

By the time a previous employer got around to making an offer, I had already interviewed and accepted a different job and been working there for 2 months. Still, I took the job for the 1.5x salary increase and better benefits.

Even FAANGs can pull this off. Amazon was routinely hiring folks in single-day loop with offer letter the following morning, back when I joined.

Likely you had a very particular set of (in-demand) skills. Right? What year was this?

I think it's rather the opposite: If it's a very generic position, to which a lot of applicants could match. In this case big companies often do hiring events, where a lot of applicants are interviewed at the same day, and potentially in the same physical location. Since for those hiring events all decision makers (interviewers, hiring manager, recruiting) are available at the same day, the process can be faster.

Not the person you responded to, but same story for me in 2007. Loop and verbal offer the same day. I was/am not a big get, just a regular engineer.

> A single day of delay in response causes 28% of candidates to become unresponsive to recruiters (this is from our company's research). It drops to 51% become unresponsive 48 hours later.

I've noticed my interest in a job tends to drop consistently the longer it takes for a response. This isn't surprising at all. I don't think it's because we're fickle, it's more that right when you apply you can picture what it might be like to start working for the company and start to identify with that future. As the days drag on, that picture seems less and less likely to happen.

> I've noticed my interest in a job tends to drop consistently the longer it takes for a response.

As a software engineer with a long track record, I somehow only just realized this about myself within the last couple months.

With the two fresh data points I have in mind, it wasn't about perceived likelihood of an offer, but about perceived likelihood of it being a good situation if I accepted the offer.

Delays (especially after a great initial call) can be felt as signal about how much they value the role, whether they're excited about me specifically for it (both of which can make the difference between a great role and an awful one), and how well they can execute (e.g., do they have a clout deficit or a huge-corporate bureaucracy that would also be a problem getting things done there).

And if there's a recruiter, HR middleperson, or other communication barrier -- blocking the normal ability to read people and pick up on clues, from direct interaction with a hiring manager or team member -- this signal can be all we have to go on.

This, to me, is a really good signal of how well run a company is. After all, a company is merely a collection of people on whom its outcomes are entirely dependent. Thus, the single most important function a company can perform is hiring. If a company fails to recognize this or just does it incompetently, its probably a crappy company. Thus, slow responses == crappy company.

I would postulate the single most important thing a company can do is make money. Hiring is also important though.

Making money at all costs usually implies a shitty culture that I personally seek to avoid.

Nobody said at all costs.

Maybe.

But whatever the goal of your organization, achieving that goal is going to depend on the people you hire.

I wish every organization had read that memo :)

Making money is a downstream output of the activities of your people. So, if making money is your goal, the most important thing you can do to reach your goal is to hire the right people.

If you want to hire the right people, you need to be making enough money to pay them.

> I would postulate the single most important thing a company can do is make money.

Nobody in the company "makes money" (unless the company is a bank, then they literally do, by giving out loans). The people perform various functions and the money made or lost by the company is a result of a sum total of their actions.

Companies with poor hiring likely don't make money. There maybe a select few that have such a desirable product that they cannot help themselves. Usually that is short lived as competition eats your lunch because your crappy employees cannot adapt.

"Making money" is the result of doing everything else well.

It's not difficult to find companies that cut costs in order to increase profits only for it to backfire and result in less money or even bankruptcy.

More importantly, as I remind my mentees, it's is an excellent signal for true interest. Nothing burns more than getting your hopes up and investing hours/days into a job interview process only to find out you were not the preferred candidate. This stings a bit if you don't get the job, becomes seriously annoying when it surfaces during compensation negotiation, and can be disastrous for your career and personal life if it surfaces post-hiring.

Definitely noticed this effect when applying now too.

Additionally a responsive and clearly communicating company is always a good sign that they really need to fill the role. It is always a plus if I go from hiring manager/recruiter straight upper management interviews in a matter of days.

Additionally the quicker the employer response the more likely the applicant is mentally primed for the responder and does not yet have their mental/time bandwidth taken by competitors.

It's kinda nice to hear that things that sound obvious actually are. All these seem like they can be summed up with: treat your potential hire like you'd want to be treated when you're looking for a job. Would it be naive to assume that similar rules apply for retaining workers?

> the truth is that unemployment did not go up in November.

Do you have a source on this that breaks out unemployment by sector? 100k tech sector layoffs could be easily overshadowed by holiday season retail hiring.

You can dive through US DOL JOLTS report if you want to understand this. Big tech did layoffs. IT departments still need people.

While both IT and engineering jobs in Big Tech involve computer technology, IT tends to be a cost center while Big Tech’s engineering groups are profit centers. (Or supposed to be).

It would be interesting to compare the unemployment numbers to comp.

you'd think it's on the person making the statement about IT hiring numbers to do the diving.

It's a pain to link to the BLS data, since you have to generate a report which needs POST data in order to display properly.

I went and found the data and it maps with what indymike is saying. Layoffs are up, but not abnormally so (in line with previous years), while hiring is down compared to last year, it remains well above pre-2020 figure.

Overall, it looks like the IT job market is the best its ever been by a 20% margin, aside from 2021, which was slightly better than this year.

He did the diving, he told you the statement and the properties of it and he told you where he gets his data.

Unemployment is tracked on a seasonally adjusted basis to account for such things.

> Showing your salary range as long as it is at market wage or higher delivers 14% more applicants. It is a good idea to show salary on job ads.

This is one number, which even if it is true doesn’t matter. There are so many easy way to increase the number of applicants like posting it in linkedin, decreasing number of years of experience in posting(which are more often than not, not a hard limit for job) etc. They want to decrease the applicants if at all while keeping the number of new hires same.

> If you advertise a job respond to applicants quickly

A friend of mine is superbly qualified for a job posted by Apple. She applied for this job expecting a reasonably quick reply. What I mean by "superbly qualified" is that she is a recognized expert in the domain, has conducted seminars attended by hundreds of engineers and business people and, back in the day, was actually invited by Steve Jobs to come to Cupertino and help Apple engineers understand issues related to this product category.

Her application, last I checked, has gone without response for somewhere around 30 to 45 days. This has caused her to have lost her interest to work for Apple. She is now considering offers from competitors.

Ghosting can happen in many forms. Why is it that tech companies don't seem to understand how important is is to treat people with respect --customers, suppliers, candidates and employees. Once someone forms an opinion about you or your company it takes a thousand times more energy and effort to change it.

I feel for your friend but this sounds naive.

Public job postings get hundreds or thousands of applications, most of which are terrible and need to be filtered out. Expecting an immediate response on one is not reasonable.

If your friend is such an industry insider, it's surprising she didn't have a network that could short circuit this process for her.

In general, my experience that if you are cold-applying for a job, you are very likely to get lost in a pile of trash. The recruiting experience is much better if the company finds out about you on their own and goes after you. Having an internal referral is a form of that.

Expecting a response to your job application in less than a month sounds naive?

Month does sound long to me, but "a few weeks" isn't crazy given the reality on the ground.

Note, I am not saying this is good or how it ought to be, I am just saying how it is.

Let me ask you - if you were the recruiter at Apple and let's say you owned 5 roles each of which got 2000 resumes (I am stabbing at a number but it's Apple, so likely tons of people jump on every role) - how long would it take you to get through it all?

Back of the envelope: 5 roles x 2k resumes = 10k resumes. If it took you just one minute to read a resume and you did nothing but read them every day for 10 hours that's like 17 working days = so 3+ weeks.

Keep in mind that this pile of resumes is your lowest likelihood of success pile - these are not the people you'd identified priori as targets, they weren't even internally referred, they are just mainly random people spamming you or are very weakly qualified. It "doesn't matter" if one of them is a diamond in the rough like the op was describing - it might take you weeks to get to their resume, and that's only if you don't fill the role w someone from the higher bandwidth channel.

So like I said, not "great" but - what would you do differently if you were HR here?

Pull out 200 of each set, or whatever number you like. Email the other 1800 and say "thanks, but we have decided not to interview you for this role. We'll keep your resume and contact you again if we have a role that you seem good for". Read all the remaining resumes over the next week.

Seriously, it isn't complicated.

And for all the AI prowess these large companies purport to have, I would expect a very efficient automated first-pass filter to significantly reduce the search space.

Also, there are roles --where time and expertise are a requirement-- that cannot possibly get thousands of legitimate applicants. Some not even hundreds.

> what would you do differently if you were HR here?

Hire more HR staff to reduce queue times? Apple literally has $100b+ of cash that they don't know what to do with, they could spend some of it on improving their hiring.

Expecting any response to dropping your resume into a online form sounds naive IMO. Does anyone actually get jobs this way?

> if you advertise a job respond to applicants quickly - as in within minutes of the application

i mean it's nice to get a response as soon as possible but this seems completely unrealistic... it seems perfectly normal to expect a wait of a few days or weeks to me

> i mean it's nice to get a response as soon as possible but this seems completely unrealistic

If you run recruiting like it is important, making sure recruiters and hiring managers have the tools and time to talk to candidates quickly is really easy to do. A lot of companies run recruiting like it's a surprise when they have to hire or view it as less important than other functions... and then put lines like "our people are our greatest assets" on their careers page.

If a customer rang would you pick up the phone right away?

Why not treat your potential staff as more important than any of your customers?

Which is harder to acquire? Customers or Staff?

> Which is harder to acquire? Customers or Staff?

Customers. By far.

Most people who respond to job ads are actively searching for jobs, they usually apply to multiple places simultaneously. If the other places responded quickly then, by the time you responded in a few days, the applicant could be far along the interviewing with several others and might not be considering your vacancy any more or prioritize it after everything else already in the pipeline. If you responded in a few weeks, the applicant might already have taken an offer.

weeks would drag the application out for months though

>* If you advertise a job respond to applicants quickly - as in within minutes of the application. A single day of delay in response causes 28% of candidates to become unresponsive to recruiters (this is from our company's research). It drops to 51% become unresponsive 48 hours later.

Related: apply to jobs during [earlyish] business hours whenever possible - you're a lot more likely to hear back in a timely manner

Don't apply at 9pm on Friday night if you can avoid it

Thanks for posting those recruiting stats, they certainly seem to hold true from what I've seen.

no opinion about these laws but:

> * Showing your salary range as long as it is at market wage or higher delivers 14% more applicants. It is a good idea to show salary on job ads.

might not be what you want. You might want the best engineers who you will have to make exceptions for in their TC

My unsolicited advice (for founders) is to hire the best people you can afford.

I've seen startups blow 2-3 headcount worth of budget to secure a FAANG engineer, only to realize that engineer needed an SRE to deploy their code, a tools engineer to setup their CI/CD, etc. The founders were so excited to add "FAANG engineer" to their Series A deck.

Firing this engineer was tough because the startup went to the board to get approval for the salary + equity offer letter. To make matters worse, this engineer was kept on for 6+ months without shipping anything ... because firing would've gone into the next board and investor update.

A CEO eventually has to develop the courage to deliver bad news to the board.

100% agreed, but for the CEO's who are making the above mistake, if they have other bad news to deliver to the board (low revenues, etc), then they might be afraid to deliver yet another piece of bad news on the hiring side.

Yep, and a mis-hire is one of the easiest problems to push off. You can talk yourself into believing the first project wasn't a good fit, your management skills aren't good so it's your fault, and so on.

All of those things might even be true! But doesn't change the reality that you're burning 2-3 engineers of runway on 1 engineer with no valuable outputs.

It's a range. If you are hoping to hire someone outside that range, you're lying about your range. If you're worried about the 1% chance you'll end up hiring outside that range, you probably need to just get over it.

This is really besides the point and in this context seems to argue it would be fine to break the law if it were beneficial, it just happens that it's not the case.

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