Ask HN: Is technical recruiting broken? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is technical recruiting broken?

8 pointsgo197911 comments

Context ... about to quit my job. Likely for entrepreneurship. On a lark, I emailed a few companies off of the Feb Who's Hiring thread on HN. Since I was interviewing anyways, I also applied to a few large corp jobs to see what is out there.

Pretty much every place I spoke to, I had 1-2 chats with a recruiter before I got to a phone screen. Did 2 phone screens each at 3 companies. Company 1 has gone mum. Company 2 wanted to fly me out (I declined) and Company 3 wants to do a third screening interview.

And those were the good ones. Two companies asked me to do multi-hour "homework assignments" as part of their screen. I declined those right away.

In the old days, I've gotten jobs with 30 minute conversations. Is that pretty much gone now? Do people take a month off of work when they need to find a new gig?

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Yes, it's broken.

It's an employers market and each employer has ridiculous demands. They expect homework, code tests and phone interviews with various team members. All that just to get your foot in the door. They don't value your time or efforts. You don't get any respect at any point. And if you do make it through their process, you will just get an insulting low-ball offer. Some companies are not like that. But the vast majority is.

IT is becoming more and more a robot-slave market. Companies are hiring profiles and specs, not people. They don't care about what you can do. All that matters is how you fit in their factory and how low their cost will be.

And the best part is, none of that is happening in the other areas. We're engineers. We could have easily become bankers, doctors, lawyers, rocket scientists or whatever else we wanted. We can still make the change if we want to start from scratch. The pay is better, you get infinitely more respect and nobody treats you like a criminal when trying to find work.

So stop pouring your energy into an IT job. Nobody cares. And you're definitely not going to be rewarded for it. Instead, you should leech off of any company and focus your attention on yourself and your future. That's what your manager does. That's what your CEO is doing. And that's how most people think. Juggle some simple office politics, work as little as you can and go build a startup in your spare time.

Fuck the IT job market. Start working for yourself.

> It's an employers market and each employer has ridiculous demands.

I don't agree. May be so where you are from, but here a lot of companies are desperately looking for candidates, meaning that I get spammed by multiple recruiters every week.

I think it's mostly an employers market when you are Google, Facebook or another popular company.

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Fair point. Last time I searched for a job was 11 months ago. I asked for an interview at 5 companies, interviewed at all 5 of them, and all of them wanted to offer me a contract (only one of them declined, because they couldn't afford it). Except for the one who declined, I didn't have to jump through a lot of hoops. Maybe 2 short interviews, that was it.

Companies asking their candidates to do a test? Doesn't sound broken to me.

If you want a job with just a 30 minute conversation, you then have to work with people who got the job with just a 30 minute conversation!

The test is not the problem. The fact that it's not paid is.

Each company wants at least a couple of hours of tests. So at most you could apply to maybe 10 companies a week (2 tests per day). That's a week you could work somewhere else. A week in which you could start building a startup. Or a week of vacation and recharging. Instead, you're doing useless and redundant tests FOR FREE. And the response is usually "Sorry, we chose to go with someone more qualified".

Candidates don't like tests because not only they don't get anything out of them, they lose valuable time. But if you paid for that time, I'm sure everybody will be happy to take any tests you want.

STOP EXPECTING FREE WORK FROM JOB CANDIDATES.

It depends on the relationship with the employer/hiring manager. If it's a former boss, good friend, etc. who knows your ability inside & out, then maybe you can bypass it.

Otherwise, the typical interview process is 1-2 phone calls (one high-level intro with company, another more technical) then at least a couple hours in the office for more in depth discussions. Some will throw in those homework assignments, which seem unnecessary in most cases IMO, but it's not uncommon. Good luck!

>In the old days, I've gotten jobs with 30 minute conversations. Is that pretty much gone now?

That's an unrealistic comparison. If I'm a hiring exec and I'm going to invest in you-- we want to thoroughly you check out. That includes multiple conversations, team buy-in, and a technical test. That's how we shake-out individuals who are serious from posers.

I don't usually defend recruiting practices, but in this particular case:

It sounds like you're experiencing what happens to a hiring process after lots of unqualified candidates apply to jobs they're not qualified for. The same companies who used to have 30 minute conversations now have walls and basic-literacy tests, and pre-pre-pre-screens and coding-challenges and all that nonsense. It's a shame really, for everybody involved. But I get why they feel like they need those hurdles.

Yes, it's broken... When MBA start writing 2,000 word essays for the their jobs it might start to get fixed...

I disagree that it's an employers market, I get 5 calls a week from recruiters that want to fill positions. (They usually aren't that great but there is definitely demand.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9107657

I had 6 interviews with 8 different people at a startup over about 1.5 months and ended up not getting the gig! It wasn't for a technical position, but it included different assignments and definitely put me off.

I mean after all that effort I at least expected to get a job out of it.

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