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Comment by bettercallsalad | Hacker News Reader

While this is pretty outrageous process wise, it’s not unheard of that many non-FAANG companies follow some of these “standardized” approach such as meeting with some “talent advisor” and filling out some automated forms in the form of testing your “behavioral” side.

Truth is many tech (and non-tech) companies are so bloated in their Human Resources departments, it’s beyond even point of productivity saturation.

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Part of the problem is that for any job you'll be inundated with completely inappropriate candidates (like, people who literally cannot use a computer for positions as Linux programmers), and you have to somehow exclude those in as automated way as possible.

This is not to defend the Canonical hiring process which sounds weird and inappropriate, and potentially illegal.

Yup. If you have name recognition, even in a niche field, you'll be inundated with nonsensical resumes and/or desperate people. We get hundreds of applications per position, and many of them are downright nonsensical. No, we can't sponsor a visa for a developer from a different country for an entry-level analyst position. We're a hospital.

Yeah. It goes both ways. Interview processes may often be terrible. But it's also the case that, in a world where you don't even need to put a stamp on an envelope, a lot of people looking for a job/any job (or hoping to get a story written about their client, etc.) will just blast out email/applications to any valid or even invalid endpoint.

ADDED: And, to be fair, if you don't have connections or past history that really jumps off the page, it is a numbers game to a large degree.

> Part of the problem is that for any job you'll be inundated with completely inappropriate candidates (like, people who literally cannot use a computer for positions as Linux programmers)

I once received an application for someone looking for a position as a railroad engineer. Unfortunately my job listing was for a Ruby on Rails engineer. :-)

... Now I'm trying to imagine a train made out of Al2O3:Cr .

At least it's an easy way to weed out companies early in the process. Behavioral interviews work both ways, after all.

I am not against behavioral interview if it’s part of the loop, but these attempts to force candid to answer some standardized questions make no sense. Especially you can easily come up with many of the answers using GPT now a days anyways. I for one don’t even have access to these when I interview candidates and I am pretty sure HR doesn’t even look at them or even have a quantitative way to judge them or verify their authenticity.

In this case, the company seemed to be very hung up on irrelevant bullsh*t. Huge red flag.

If I did that, I wouldn't land the job with ~2 the compensation of what I'd have otherwise and the best job overall.

It turned out that the interview process wasn't representative of my actual work at all. Thinking about my previous jobs, I can't really see a correlation between interviews and work there either.

When I applied for a government job many years ago, I had to take a number of standardized tests of various kinds.

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