How not to interview someone who already has a job (2011)
recruitingblogs.com
recruitingblogs.com
At one of my last interviews I was told I don't look like I want the job enough because I was dressed casually. I was very confused. I reminded them that they requested an interview with me several times, even after I told them I was not on the market, and that I had actually taken time of work for the interview. I only showed up because they practically begged me. I was so annoyed at some of the questions. "What value can you add to this company?" No sir, how can YOU make it worth MY while to join you, considering that I have to leave a position that I'm perfectly comfortable with? After finally understanding that I was happy with my current job, one of the interviewers asked me "So why are you here wasting our time?" I was infuriated.
The whole experience left a bitter taste in my mouth. I don't think I would ever consider interviewing at that company again.
For coders, a major offender is the variety of TrueAbility/Codility/HackerRank/custom code challenges. FizzBuzz is fine. You want to filter out people who just can't code. Beyond that, timed challenges don't tell the recruiter anything about how a person interacts with others, or maintains code, or researches solutions for new problems.
And then, after I successfully complete the code challenge, investing time that I really can't afford, they just look at my resume and delete my application, anyway.
I would have no hesitation on actually bringing this up. Charge him your regular rate and refund him 50% off your fee if he later hires you.
That would be incompatible with anti-corruption rules in some places.
Why not? Make it a test that is easy to score and then finding people who do well on it and are interested in working for you is rather high, no?
I want to hire someone to do a job. That job requires a base level of competence. If they exceed that level such that I think they will bring positive value to the company I vote to hire them. I don't care about their motivation or "passion" beyond what is required to take them over that bar.
I don't see it as a waste of time; it's about the potential payoff, which is a (presumably) better job with better opportunities. I wouldn't apply to a job unless I was reasonably sure I wanted to work there anyway. I might be very lucky in that I've worked for good companies in the past few years and the only reason I'd leave one of these companies is for a much much better one. Usually when I leave a job, I've become bored of the problem domain anyway and am looking to solve new problems.
Disclosure: 31 year old man, no kids, I live with my partner.
I hate to be that guy, but everything changes when you have kids. Trust me, a spare hour when you have nothing better to do than jump through some hoop for a company is an extremely rare luxury item when you've got little ones. I love solving problems too, but there aren't any technical problems as interesting as reading a book to your snuggly little human(s). :)
c.f. http://blog.codinghorror.com/on-parenthood/ (not about interviewing, but filter your thoughts about free time through the perspective that article provides...)
On the other hand, when I am looking for a job (I am unhappy at the current job ) I go far and wide as I am applying to multiple companies. In this situation I talk to the ones that ask for interviews first, as they appear more committed, and push all the tests after the interviews. From my limited experience, by the time the interviews clear up I have at least a couple of offers on hand. Offers I can identify with people I've been talking to, the environment I've seen, the location, the projects etc. Spending several days on tests, which, at best will bring an interview, which may or may not lead to an offer, which, in its turn, may or may not be better than the offers I already have now looks like plain gamble to me. So I take the best offer instead of doing any tests.
As a front line filter it is cheap, simple and revealing.
Won't hold my breath.
I'm sick to the back teeth of most of these mini coding projects, though. They're too often sent by companies who aren't even sure they want to hire at all or wouldn't hire you anyway for some unrelated reason (age, race, etc.). The projects are always boring and almost never suitable for a portfolio.
It's also too easy to hit the 'send email' button and too easy to ignore the responses. Unless there is some cost for the company sending you the mini-project, a lot are going to waste your time.
For this reason, I actually prefer interviews. They're going to at least do a cursory examination and reject you outright before wasting an hour of their own time.
Another thing to keep in mind is that for a lot of people who are already employed, permission must be obtained from current employer before contributing to open source (and more and more companies are actively enforcing that unfortunately).
I am always puzzled about contract clauses that try to limit what an employee can do in their free time. I understand that some people may be in a bad situation and have no choice but to put up with it. But if we're really in a seller's market, as everyone says, how can this kind of thing become a tendency?
This is further reinforced by various employer-specific clauses in the hiring contract / code of conduct.
Its screwed up but its the world we live in.
Any employer who puts that clause in their contract and whinges about not being able to find good developers has only themselves to blame.
Where I am employed we are actively hiring. In late 2012, three of us started a small experimental projected which became a hit with our customers. As more feature requests came rolling in we realized that we need a bigger team to work on the project. We have been hiring since the start of 2014. We now have a team of about 15 engineers, but we still have few more open positions.
From our experience, resumes usually are not a good predictor of anything we care for. The only useful thing it tells us is what firms the candidate has worked at, and what those groups were doing while the candidate was there.
When a candidate comes onsite we spend significant time showing a demo of our product, what our groups ambitions are, discussions to understand what the candidates career goals are etc. We also have the standard white-board interviews, often attempting to design a small feature on our product. This takes significant effort on our part. Before investing this time, we will prefer to see some code from the candidate.
The candidate is offered an option to show us (1) some code they wrote which is out in the public domain, OR (2) some code from their employer (if their employment terms allow it) OR (3) solution to a small coding question we provide. Our coding question takes about 4-5 hours of the candidates time.
This process has worked very well for us. We have been able to screen our candidates with very impressive resumes who wrote horrible code. We have also found many great candidates (some who are my colleagues now!) with ordinary looking resumes.
I hope I have tried to explain our thought process behind asking candidates for some code.
FWIW we have a coding project but it's part (a large part) of the on site and really just replaces the whiteboarding and such. Candidates are not asked to code on the fly in ither sessions
For what it's worth, I'm not talking about the 2-4 hours an interviewee spends on-site. I'm talking about the additional 4-8 hours some companies expect interviewees to spend doing coding projects or time spent on-site above and beyond 2-4 hours.
So for instance, my coworkers that complained when I said they should be spending several hours reviewing code samples before an interview are being just as silly in my mind as people who get bent out of shape over 5-6 hours of leg work. At the end of the day it behooves both parties to spend a fair amount of time and energy here, in theory this could be a relationship which last many years - isn't it worth it for everyone involved to put in the effort to make sure it's a good fit?
And really, at the end of the day it's entirely possible that the way a particular company or candidate conducts things reflects right away that it's not a great fit (e.g. a candidate loathes the coding challenges, or a company balks at a candidate requesting money). There's nothing wrong with that, a fast fail isn't a bad thing.
A job candidate loses both time and money. I complete your challenge, I don’t get paid, I get thrown into the street and starve. I would have made more profit washing dishes at a restaurant.
Besides, word on the street is that nobody can expect to have “a relationship which lasts many years” with any company, so drop your pretense at perfection. That is a contributor to the tech industry’s problems with lack of diversity and actually filling positions with people who can do the job.
This assumes you're not currently employed
"nobody can expect to have “a relationship which lasts many years” with any company"
If I'm taking a job I'd like it to be a place that I could see myself staying for a number of years. It might not work out that way, but it's my goal.
Can someone explain why HR managers have such a severe prejudice against hiring unemployed people? Imho, its their job, to select those people from the unemployemnt pool that fits the company, and have the skills. A HR who only poaches employed people, is doing a bad job, and hiding his laziness under an evil prejudice.
The other HR stupidity is, that its much easier to get a raise, if you switch jobs often, then if you stay in a job long enough to be productive.
The result are projects broken by HR causing to much fluctuation.
That's grossly overgeneralized.
I think this quote from Keynes sums it up best:
>"A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him. It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances, and to confess a conventional respectability, which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men."
The Ivy league is a conventional and orthodox disaster. Nobody can blame you for hiring them, their credentials were impeccable!
That previously unemployed guy, on the other hand...
Given a competent A student is there knowledge you will gain from the finance department at say Harvard that you wouldn't see at state university?
A better example might be what's the measurable difference between an engineering degree at a low tier school versus MIT?
Note that the process she suggests (one phone screen, one on site and a decision) is good for unemployed applicants as well.
Quick hiring decisions are good for all parties involved, as long as they are thorough.
Its terribly difficult to get hired when unemployed because of this bias.
But the reverse is also true. HR managers that devise a recruitment process so arduous only the unemployed (and possibly then only the involuntary unemployed) will consider participating in it is doing a bad job. There are good unemployed candidates, but there are more good employed candidates, and most of the good unemployed candidates also have better options than your 6-8 interview process, which also screams of bureaucracy, indecisiveness and pedantry further down the line.
One local employer, always looking for people, and not a bad place to work, has 3% of people pass the on-site interview, and it's not especially onerous: It shows you have general programming competency. Everything their exercise asks is something you'll use on the job. But most people that apply fail, because there is a local glut of people that know less than a proper entry level candidate, but ask for senior level salary. Those people tend to be the first to get laid off, and the ones that stay unemployed the longest.
There are great unemployed people out there sometimes: A SF startup that is 95% remote laid off 60% of their staff three weeks ago, and anyone would be fortunate to get that unemployed talent when they can. HR has to shift through a lot of unemployed people that you probably don't want to hire to find a great programmer, and a great programmer probably already has a network that gets them snapped up in days.
It's absolutely not fair to the good programmers that end up being unemployed for one reason or another, but given my experience interviewing, it's not hard to see why someone unemployed and without a good network gets passed up far more often than they deserve.
How can you say that? All being emoyed means is that you got through the interview process and haven't annoyed anyone with the power to fire you. That hire may well be incompetent and looking to move out before they get fired.
How many people who apply get an on-site interview? Has this company considered if their prescreening process is broken and is actually filtering out mos of the people who could pass the on-site interviews?
I think I have to call Base Rate Neglect Fallacy here. Being already-employed may be evidence that someone is competent, but without knowing the strength of that evidence (ie: how many incompetents get hired anyway) and the base rate of competence/incompetence among all job-seekers, employed or not, we can't really say much about whether it's a good practice to poach rather than hire from the general pool.
You can tell a lot about a company from your very first interactions with them. I'd steer clear of anything more elaborate than what she described, they are probably guessing about how to hire, and that mean's they're probably guessing about how to run a business. That kind of risk can be entertaining and instructive, but might not be great for your career.
How much does it cost to have 7 people interview a candidate anyway? Even without considering that the best candidates will run away, how can companies justify that?