I outright refuse to do them. If I’m talking to a hiring manager already and they say I have to do one I’ll tell them no, and I’ll withdraw via email if they ask me to do that, I tell them it’s demeaning. I’m more than happy to actually talk to a human, but I’m not going to sit in front of a webcam and act like that’s normal.
I’ve been out of a job twice in the last 3 years thanks to layoffs, and I found a job both times relatively soon (2-3 months), and didn’t feel like I needed to stoop to that. They are a wonderful red flag for companies I don’t want to be at.
As an aside, make sure to grow your network, I get more roles from referrals and friends now than I do from resumes. Every job you have make some friends, play the linkedin game, and keep in touch with them, just popping in to say hello. That will go farther than you would expect.
neuracnu@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
I got to experience this for the first time a few weeks ago, from HireVue, when interviewing for a technical program management role at Lumen.
It was a combination of 5-7 painfully common interview questions that I’ve been asked during basically every TPM interview: describe a complex program you worked on, describe a time when you had to overcome adversity, describe a time when you needed to problem solve your way out a situation, etc. After being presented with the question, you get 60 seconds to prepare before the video begins. If you mess up on your first video, you are provided the option to re-record your answer a second time (but no more). It wasn’t clear whether both videos were being submitted, or if you were deducted assessment points for using the re-record feature.
Next, I was given a series of three timed “games” to play. The first was a collection of numbers that you needed to select in order to complete a simple math equation: like “? + ? = ?” with a collection of numbers that you could pick from to fill in the blanks. ( I managed to do pretty poorly at this game up, not realizing that we needed to be selecting the appropriate numbers in a specific order when the order of operations mattered; the instructions only said “select the appropriate numbers” and didn’t explicitly say they needed to be in any particular order. I only realized this after getting an answer wrong a few times, which certainly tanked my scoring. )
The second game was one of those “connect the pipes” puzzles where you slide tiles around a grid to create a contiguous line from a start to and end point. There was a third game as well that I don’t remember.
35 minutes after the process was over, I received an automated response:
The “insights” were a bulleted list of LLM slop based on my interview responses, the complete contents of which are below:
Two days later I received another automated email saying “we’ve decided to pursue other candidates whose qualifications better align with the role.”
I’m not unsympathetic to the interests of hiring teams. I’ve been involved in many hiring decisions over the years. It truly is a laborious, time-consuming process for HR, hiring managers and teams performing interviews. I’m deeply aware of the need to devise innovative ways to make this process less painful for employers, and recorded video interviews do make a ton of sense! Rather than scheduling 30-60 minutes for each candidate, why not let me look at a bunch of people (video-dating style) and let me pick who I’d like to hear more from.
But, that being said, I found the entire experience as a candidate profoundly dehumanizing. I know these responses and game scores are not being assessed by human beings first – speech-to-text is turning my answers into LLM-consumable data, and my scores/rankings in the games portion was being included in the ranking as well. This embodies all the humanity of a slave having their teeth examined to assess value. The vibes are absolute poison, and no employer who cares about their hiring candidate experience should use it.