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Comment by indymike | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

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?

> 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-...

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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