We are deeply honored to have received your application (which we did not bother to read).
We’re sorry we didn’t hire you, but also never contact us again.
Signed,
Someone in HR who has nothing to do with this process.
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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At my old company I offered to help with the hiring. I said we should make job postings and just see if a great candidate applies.
My CEO told me "oh, we already have some postings. Let me give you the credentials".
I log in to (BreezyHR). There's over 2,000 applicants in the last 6 months. Tailored resumes, cover letters, everything. All the effort people put in to applying. Never even acknowledged by someone at the company. Reading the cover letters from people saying it would be such a great fit was kind of sad.
I've stopped tailoring resumes and doing cover letters. As someone who has been on the hiring end, they make maybe a small difference but the amount of time spent isn't worth the potential upside.
Keep in mind that the people doing the hiring don't want to be reading resumes either. That's why networking is still the best way to land a new job.
If I were applying I might do a cover letter for like my top 2-3 picks just to try and tip the scales.
I do the hiring for my department and most cover letters are AI/template garbage but sometimes I'll get a short and sweet one that seems genuine and it gives a legitimate edge.
But somehow they'll still expect you to have tailored resumes and cover letters. This is the one positive thing that's come out of "Ai" writing: Spend 2 seconds generating some tailored business jargon they love so much, which is still 2 seconds more than any effort they'd bother with on their end.
Oh, and also, all the information in your CV that you also painstakingly rewrote into our forms, is going to be spread around to other companies who will use it to send you spam and phishing messages.
Good luck with your future endeavours of staying sane with others trying to get money out of you, that you don't have.
I once had to post a position that was specifically made for my employee, but my recruiter was awesome. I told her there was no possibility I would pick anyone else, so she suggested I make the requirements hyper specific. So, I met with my employee and we worked up a list of 10-20 things that she had done in her career and put them all in as requirements to qualify.
I received no other "qualified" applicants, so I only had to interview the one. My next meeting with her I said, "this is your official interview, do you have any questions for me?" She said "no" and I congratulated her on being selected for the role.
Job postings like yours are extremely common when the applicant has been pre-selected but the company still requires an external posting. Your applicant likes off-grid hiking, is a hobbyist drone pilot, and enjoys grilling?
Now the job posting for a IT position requires an applicant who is capable of accurate pathfinding using a paper map and compass, two years of drone pilot experience, and four years of culinary experience.
Deleted
"Ha! Yeah right. You're TOO PERFECT. This must be fake, obviously. You can't fool me! NEXT."
Deleted
Yeah, that's how we did it for my PhD position as well. Someone still send an application anyways but they were clearly not fulfilling these hyper specific requirements so my prof didn't have to invite them :)
I took an interview like this before. I checked the vast majority of the boxes of technologies used, and experience in a specific type of processing models prior to deployment. Thought it was bagged and tagged mine. 4 rounds of interviews, two technical rounds and a system design.
Asked me some hyper-specific question about X and wanted a hyper-specific implementation of Z technology to solve the problem. The way I solved it would have worked, but it wasn’t the X they were looking for.
Turns out the guy interviewing me at the second tech interview round was the manager of the guy he wanted in the role—and the guy working for him already was the founder of the startup that commercialized X, and they just needed to check a box for corporate saying they’d done their diligence looking for a relevant senior engineer.
That fucking company put me through the wringer for that bullshit. 4 rounds of interviews.
Never again.
… come to think of it now, I would have played ball with them if they’d just been transparent about the situation upfront. It was good interview practice and in retrospect prepared me well for the interviews at my current role. And I’m way happier with this company than I would’ve been there.
The Universe does funny things.
Never do more than 3 interviews. And that's assuming they're relatively short, maybe 1 hour apiece. Any more than that, and they don't want you bad enough.
I don’t know if I agree with that. Having been on the hiring side of the table more than a few times.
Hiring a new employee is a risk; especially when you’re hiring at a senior enough level where the wrong decisions are amplified as the complexity of the software grows—and it becomes far more expensive to un/redo bad architectural decisions.
And the amount of time it takes for even an experienced engineer to learn their way around your existing stack, understand the reasons for certain design decisions, and contribute in a way that’s not disruptive—that’s like 6 months minimum for some code bases. More if there’s crazy data flows and weird ML stuff. And if they’re “full stack (backend and frontend) then it’s gonna be even longer before you see how good of a hiring decision you really made. For a $160k+/yr senior dev role, that’s $80k (before benefits and other onboarding costs) before you really expect to see anything really significant.
So you schedule as many interviews as you need to get a feel for what they can do, because false negatives are way less expensive than false positives.
Sometimes people can be cunning: charm, wow annd woo their way past even the savviest of recruiters with the right combinations of jargon patterns.
Sometimes they can even fool a technical round interviewer.
4-5 interviews (esp. if the last is an onsite in which you’ll meet many) seems to be about the norm in my field. Even if it kinda sucks for the person looking for the job.
Yeah, it saves you money...by costing the prospective employee. There's only so much we as employees can or should be willing to give up for free, and it's 3 interviews.
I also question if more than that is really improving the quality of your hires. Far more often (100% of the time, in my experience), 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.
I’ve rejected someone on their 4th round before—1st 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 stack—at 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 resume—they couldn’t. They’d 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 they’d been involved in implementing, and can code—but it was very clear that they didn’t 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 don’t know—and we do push to find the frontiers of their knowledge. We even instruct them to just say it when they don’t know and we can problem-solve together. But a lot of people have too much ego to accept that, but we don’t have time for people like that on the team either.
Look, I get what you’re saying and clearly I’ve 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? That’s a non-starter; try to see a bigger picture.
The question that raises from a process improvement perspective then is "were the first 3 rounds really effective tests?" 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.)
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 anyone’s time than needed chasing after single-point confidence improvements. In my experience, I agree with this. I’ve 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 didn’t really have a high opinion of that company-they couldn’t 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.
The best predictor of how someone will perform in a job is a work sample test (29 percent). This entails giving candidates a sample piece of work, similar to that which they would do in the job, and assessing their performance at it.
Both articles linked are well worth the time to read. Hiring is a messy and inconvenient process for both companies and employees.
That strikes me as highly reflective of google's position of power; from the employer's perspective, the point where the diminishing returns are no longer worth it is related to the point where they're losing too many applicants from interview exhaustion. If you're not google, not offering the kind of pay and such that google does, your break-even point is likely much sooner.
Additionally, from the worker's 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.
The article I posted pointed out that they’re trying to not waste the candidate’s time, as well. They used to do 12 fucking rounds of interviews—and because it’s Google, people tolerated that crap. One of my best friends is an old-school Googler that got in through that gauntlet.
Keep that in mind when you claim it’s an employer’s power play—in this case, it’s really not. More than four interviews, twelve, sure I can believe that. You should read about what some of the elite tier government special ops groups go through.
At this point we’re quibbling over a delta of one interview—I think we’re probably pretty close, or close enough to say “agree to disagree on the rest.”
Cheers.
I worked at a job for a long time as a contractor. I was originally hired as a temporary filler, but they liked me so well that they kept me on, and let other lower-performing contractors go instead, despite me being the newest. Eventually due to economic downturns they released all their contractors, including me.
A few years later as the economy recovered, they brought me back as a contractor again, with the intention of hiring me once a position became available. Months later, one did open up and they specifically told me to apply for that position as an internal hire - but they would have to open it up for external applicants too.
I was a tad annoyed that some external applicant could in theory swoop in and take my “promised” position away from me, even though I’d been doing the job for years and was clearly the favored candidate.
I felt bad for the external applicants who probably never really had a chance, but at the same time I felt I’d earned that job.
I did get hired, of course, and I am still at the company to this day - fifteen years later. And I’m up for another promotion at the end of this fiscal quarter.
I'm fine with internal preselected individuals getting positions and promotions. What is universally disliked is us also getting interviews only to find out later they were a waste of time for this exact reason.
Exactly. I’m just saying it’s not fair to the external applicants whose time is wasted- like you said; but it’s also unfair to the internal preselected people who have to “compete” for a job that should already be theirs.
It all seems it’s just done to satisfy some bureaucratic quota nonsense.
I think it’s usually done to let them pretend their being impartial and “equal opportunity” despite never really intending to be. I personally think it’s bullshit, internal promotions are totally valid and shouldn’t be seen as favoritism (unless the candidate is wildly unqualified).
It also sucks for the hiring manager who has to interview candidates they know they won't hire just to stick to the process. It's a waste of everyone's time.
How does the old saying go?
Ah, yes: "This is funny because it is true"
Where science?
Academia counts as the realities of working in a lab. This is a big thing in academia.
Nothing lab-specific about this though, it's the case for every industry!
I guess human science?
Having been on the other end of this where they picked an applicant from outside so they could pay them less, despite more than one person being more qualified and already working for the company, I'm not sure who's side to be on here. On the one hand, if you've already got someone lined up for the job, this is disingenuous. On the other hand, if someone already working for you can do the job but you don't want to pay them what they're worth, that's just messed up on several levels.
Companies do 2 things:
-
lie to you
-
underpay you
If you are going to play the game of working in a corporation, the best time to apply to new jobs is the moment you get one. Loyalty died a long time ago, so don't pretend your manager is on your side.
Or also go freelance and never let 1 person control your income. In capitalism, money is freedom. If someone controls your money, they control your freedom.
Your manager might be on your side, but most impactful decisions come from one or more levels above your manager, and they're just as powerless as you to change corporate decisions.
It's a real bummer interviewing these external applicants that you know won't get the job. Like I wish I could just let them know, but we're required to go through the entire interview process.
As someone in the inside, what's the rationale behind having to publicly post jobs like this? Why can't you just offer the job to the person you want to give it to?
It's because of anti-discrimination laws. In some US states it can be illegal to hire someone for a position without posting it publicly. The concern is that if you're not posting the job publicly, it can be because you want to prevent certain people from applying.
When you do post it publicly, the company can demonstrate that they allowed anyone to apply, show records that they considered multiple people for the job, and then decided on the internal candidate as the best fit. No room for a discrimination lawsuit.
Source: I'm a hiring manager at a multi-billion dollar company and have actually learned a thing or two from annual compliance training over the years.
In other words - like 99% of the laws: good ~~publicity~~ intentions meets reality.
In academia (my line of work) they’re required to have positions posted and open for a certain amount of time, interview a certain number of applicants, etc.
In theory, it’s for equal opportunity and finding the best person for the job.
In practice, it’s a waste of time, money, and hope.
Likely corporate and/or legal politics. I would imagine things not unlike EEOP loopholing would play a big role in it. (Yes, gov'ment we are offering this opening to "anyone". So, send that funding check right over)
This is very polite and surprisingly honest for him to say.