Jobs to Fill, Employers Wait for Perfection | Hacker News Reader

Jobs to Fill, Employers Wait for Perfection

nytimes.com

17 pointsdyno1234511 comments

I pose an alternative hypothesis: They do not, in fact, have jobs to fill. They are seeking to add outstanding talent, but they're not hiring unless they see it. What has changed is that it has become advantageous to leave phantom job listings open as advertising for anyone of outstanding talent. (where 'outstanding talent' means 'someone who was already employed doing this precise same thing, but left because your competing firm is his only means of getting a raise')

An employer with jobs to fill, at the end of the day, is going to want to fill them. He's going to have trouble if he doesn't fill them. It will be a problem for the company if the jobs go empty. Yes, they may technically be job listings, but the jobs are not, on average, designed to be filled. Any listing that stays open longer than a training program would need to bring an average applicant up to spec represents a job that for the purposes of the unemployed, the economy, and the company, statistically doesn't exist.

This is really outlandish and predatory behavior. It should be illegal to interview anyone more than 3 times. If they want more, they should be required to compensate for travel, time spent in interview, etc.

This was frustrating to read, and I feel pretty bad for the candidates. The only mitigating thing I can think of here is that it does cost the company money to spend so much time on interviews as well (though the cost to the candidate is typically personal, whereas interviewers themselves usually don't foot the bill from their own paychecks).

The thing that really rankles me (discussed in an earlier HN thread) is the "homework" assignment. It sounds like they asked this guy to produce a sample video. The reason I don't like this is that it places a large burden on the applicant with no corresponding investment of energy from the interviewer. I've been in a similar spot where I was asked to write a sample program (the "rule" was to spend no more than 7 hours on it - almost a full workday). I did this and sent it in, waited 2 months, and then finally got a call from a recruiter telling me that they had decided not to pursue me as a candidate anymore. I can only guess that they didn't like my code, and I can guess as to why, but I'll never really know. What I do know is that they found a way to place all the inefficiency of a long, drawn out interview process on me with no cost to themselves.

If they'd given me a detailed analysis of the code, I'd feel less irritated, even if I'd done it all wrong. I understand why they might not want to do this, for legal and other reasons. But I really do hope employers see the problem with asking for a full workday from a candidate, followed by two months of crickets chirping and a one line brush off from a recruiter.

I know, I know, if you really need a job, you'll put up with almost anything. That's why this kind of thing happens.

This is the classic "we will make a position for the right person" tactic.

Some firms put ads out just to get a constant stream of applicants through so they know what the current job market is like, plus they get the benefit of looking like they are "growing". In reality they will only hire scalps from competitors or glowing recommendations from current employees - neither example in the article appears to be one of these cases.

What I would like to say is "If it takes more than one on-site visit, then I'm out", but I know in the end that I'd have to deal with it because as a job seeker you have no choice. The hiring process and job market is a small but not insignificant part of why my life goal is be to be my own employer. I don't like to be at the mercy of interviewers and be judged by how I perform whiteboard coding in an extremely stressful situation.

The hiring process and job market is a small but not insignificant part of why my life goal is be to be my own employer. I don't like to be at the mercy of interviewers and be judged by how I perform whiteboard coding in an extremely stressful situation.

People say this all the time, but is an interview really more stressful than starting your own company? You impress a few interviewers with a bit of code on a whiteboard that you reviewed the afternoon before. Big deal. How is that any more stressful than having to impress generally much larger groups of people to give you money?

Stressful is putting in months of work and still not making it. Stressful is worrying that your latest update is going to piss off your best customer or mess up a possible upcoming sale. Stressful is seeing a deadline that has to be met in order to get the next sale done. I could go on. I guess what I'm saying is that if a whiteboard coding session stresses you out then you're going to have a tough time being your own employer.

It's all about perspective, and frankly a whiteboard coding session sounds like a good time at this point.

Meh. Short-term versus long-term are different kinds of stress. Actually, having months or years of "job-in-potentia" riding on a 45-minute interview is packing on the stress a bit.

It's a very different kind of stress. Might be different for you, but an interview for me is like running for your life from a lion while trying to solve a Rubik's cube. I can code, but I find that I'm unable to perform very well in those situations. The financial stress and the stress of getting something done in time is something I handle pretty well in comparison. I would also like to emphasize that it's a "small" part of the reason, not a very big one.

There is a factor in the ever-expanding hiring process that the article does not touch upon: the ever-increasing set of liabilities and regulations that accompany each new employee.

Today there are tens of thousands of pages of federal and state regulations that pertain to hiring and firing, including regs pertaining to taxes, discrimination, work hours, retirement funding, facilities, materials, health care, leave, wages, and more. Each one exists for a good, defensible reason, but in aggregate they have an effect on companies.

As more and more potential liabilities come in the door with each new employee, companies feel more and more pressure to get it right--because if they don't, they could easily be facing a lawsuit or criminal prosecution.

I understand what you are saying, and it certainly has an element of truth, but I don't think it's as valid as many companies think. The liability exposure occurs in the hiring process not the onboarding process. When they interview these people MULTIPLE times and act (if you use the articles examples) in bizarre ways during that process, the liability and prosecution risk is already there.

It may very well be the reason some companies do these things, but its not going to help them a lick. Hiring incompetence is an obvious sign of what the work environment would likely be.

It seems that most people in this country have just accepted the interview process as a 1 way thing. It's not, it shouldn't be, and the examples of why its broken are readily apparent.

More than two months later, he said, “They still haven’t given me my start date.”

Well that's just fucking cruel.

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