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Comment by wintogreen74 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 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?

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