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Comment by steakejjs | Hacker News Reader

EVERYONE does a horrible job recruiting. I think a very low number of companies are doing this correctly.

The thing about the process is one bad moment spoils the entire process for the candidate. Shallow/No responses, or horrible questions, or something unprofessional being said during the interview.

It's not just $AAPL it is everyone, but if you are an interviewer or a recruiter, please fight for the candidates to get good responses and good questions, especially if you fly someone across the globe to awkwardly sit in a room for 6 hours.

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I agree that most companies get it wrong, but what is right? It seems like interviewing and recruiting is a field dominated by "sounds right, common sense" styles of thinking (like most HR) where there is no post-mortem of how well a candidate did in the next 6-24 months.

Even if you look at most MBA programs, the stuff on recruiting and interviewing aren't as research and evidence based as you would expect, and instead you just get spoon fed a bunch of best practices seemingly out of thin air.

I think programmers and technology companies in particular are very trend-following. For example, Microsoft decided to do some out-of-the-box questioning about circle manhole covers and suddenly tons of other companies had to have their own version. Google did CS algorithm questions, so everyone else had to have them also (even for jobs which use high level libraries like Java, C#, PHP, etc).

They get it wrong because no one knows how to do it right. Actually...evaluating human knowledge and behavior into a bunch of 1 hour interview slots doesn't lead to much accurate information.

But no one seems to spend time on trying to figure out how to do it right or even how well the current methods perform.

Studying people is much harder than doing math proofs or experimenting with chemicals.

I meant that corporations should be trying to figure this stuff out, not academics.

They have the same problem as academics do, only without the benefit of being able to consistently apply the scientific method and good experimental practices (the only hope of cracking that nut).

The difference is they have lots of funding and a large monetary incentive to do the research.

Their development teams have funding to build products, rarely do they have funding/resources/expertise to do "meta" research on processes.

Obviously you wouldn't fund it through the development team budget, it would be a corporate level initiative.

$AAPL ? Why not “Apple”?

It's shorthand on Twitter to refer to a company: https://twitter.com/search?q=%24AAPL&src=typd

In this case, it's the same number of characters as the longhand.

But $AAPL is clearer, because "Apple" may refer to the record company, or the fruit!

(I'm stretching, I know.)

It's the stock symbol.

With the $ sign?

he's trying to belittle the company

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