Comment on đŁđŁđŁ
sirblastalot@ttrpg.network â¨2⊠â¨months⊠agoYeah, it saves you moneyâŚby costing the prospective employee. Thereâs only so much we can or should be willing to give up for free, and itâs 3 interviews.
I also question if more than that is really improving the quality of your hires. Far more often, multiple interviews are more a symptom of bureaucracy; multiple managers insisting that they get to stick their fingers in the pie, rather than actually learning anything more meaningful about the candidate.
model_tar_gz@lemmy.world â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
Iâve rejected someone on their 4th round beforeâ1st round with me. That candidate had managed to convince the recruiter that they had the chops for a staff engineer (>$200k/yr!) and passed two coding rounds before mine, testing knowledge of relevant techs on our stackâat this level of role, you have to know this coming in; table stakes.
I was giving the systems design round. Asked them to design something that was on their resumeâthey couldnât. Theyâd grossly misrepresented their role/involvement in that project and since they were interviewing for a staff level role, high-level design is going to be a big part of it and will impact the product and development team in significant ways. No doubt theyâd been involved in implementing, and can codeâbut it was very clear that they didnât understand the design decisions that were made and I had no confidence that they would contribute positively in our team.
Sucks for them to be rejected, but one criteria we look for is someone who will be honest when they donât knowâand we do push to find the frontiers of their knowledge. We even instruct them to just say it when they donât know and we can problem-solve together. But a lot of people have too much ego to accept that, but we donât have time for people like that on the team either.
Look, I get what youâre saying and clearly Iâve been on the wrong end of it too, but if we make a bad hiring decision, it costs not just the candidate their job but also the team and company they work on can get into a bad place too. What would you do in that situation? Just hire them anyway and risk the livelihood of everyone else on the team? Thatâs a non-starter; try to see a bigger picture.
sirblastalot@ttrpg.network â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
The question that raises from a process improvement perspective then is âwere the first 3 rounds really effective tests?â Perhaps a better solution is not more interviews, but more focused interviews conducted by the people that actually have the knowledge and power to make the decision. (And if the knowledge and the power are divided among multiple people, another great improvement would be empowering the people with the knowledge.)
model_tar_gz@lemmy.world â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
Google has done way more research on this topic than both you and I collectively and they settled in on 4 interviews being the sweet spot to get enough signal to be 86% confident, while not wasting any more of anyoneâs time than needed chasing after single-point confidence improvements. In my experience, I agree with this. Iâve been through 6-round and 3-round (both to offer). Even as a candidate I guess I feel like i wanted that fourth round. Kinda hard to tell what a company culture is from just three meets. And after six rounds I was just freaking exhausted and didnât really have a high opinion of that company-they couldnât seem to figure out a clear mission/vision for their product and I thought their overly complicated and drawn-out interview process was a reflection of that.
Google goes into more depth as to why the three-tech + 1 behavioral/cultural model works for them. They call it a work-sample test.
Both articles linked are well worth the time to read. Hiring is a messy and inconvenient process for both companies and employees.
sirblastalot@ttrpg.network â¨2⊠â¨months⊠ago
That strikes me as highly reflective of googleâs position of power; from the employerâs perspective, the point where the diminishing returns are no longer worth it is related to the point where theyâre losing too many applicants from interview exhaustion. If youâre not google, not offering the kind of pay and such that google does, your break-even point is likely much sooner.
Additionally, from the workerâs perspective, the only-3-interviews rule is an assertion of our power. And, as an added plus, if enough people adhere to it, it will shift that break-even point even for places like Google, and resist the shifting of that burden onto unpaid workers.