
Ask HN: Do you think companies should pay applicants for interviewing them? - symbolepro
The reason I am asking this is many times companies interview candidates and give them no result. This frustrates the candidates both mentally and physically. I think there should be a contract which not only reimburses the candidate but also gives proper details about compensation, result timeline etc.<p>What do you think?
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kasey_junk
There are lots of jurisdictions & employment contracts that would require pre-
approval from a candidates existing employer before they could accept that
contract.

You can imagine why that wouldn’t be ideal.

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gfarah
It would be nice if there was an escrow platform that would pay the applicants
for their time if the company failed to give a response in an agreed upon time
span. This way, applicants would be compensated for all the time/lost
opportunities of the “Well give you a response very soon” that never arrives.

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quickthrower2
The problem is how much to pay? And does paying help the candidate at all.
Usually the candidate is taking some kind of leave, and is already being paid
so they don't desperately need the money. I think better than paying is to
have equal consideration.

For example if a company gets 100 devs to do a 2hr online dev test, then picks
1 for an interview then they have generated 200 hrs of work in the community
but only at a cost of 2 hr of their time. This is like 'spamming' in a sense.
And this is what can waste a lot of time for candidates. They should have
filters before those stages to minimise the time of candidates that they
waste.

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ecesena
I think you raise a good point, but in general no.

No, for what’s considered the classical interview of one or two phone
screenings + one day onsite. No because I think it’s already very expensive
for companies (both the process and accounting for errors), and it would
create a false incentive for people to just randomly shop for interviews just
to get paid an extra.

Probably yes, though, for everything that goes beyond. For example, the
“classical” come for a day to work on w/ the team, or build this feature, or
solve this problem and prepare a presentation.

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ithilglin909
Oh gees. I've only recently spent a lot of time on the interviewer side of the
table, and realized how much resume inflation there is out there, which
doesn't come out until there's an in-depth technical interview. I can only
image how much worse this would be if just getting into an in-person interview
is incentivized. I see your point, but can't see that the benefits outweigh
the drawbacks.

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smt88
I don't think companies "should", but my companies do when we give people
take-home projects to assess programming skill. Our preference is to do
contract-to-hire, but not every applicant can assume that risk.

Thanks to this post, my companies will now pay applicants for interviews as
well. Time is time.

I've honed my hiring process over the years, so we only spend more than 15 min
with 3-4 candidates at most (and one of them is always a home run). It won't
cost much to pay 3-4 people.

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tmastro
What do you look for that only 3-4 people who applied are able to demonstrate?
Interested to learn from your experience.

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smt88
It's mostly a process rather than a set of criteria. Email me via address on
my profile and I can do a deeper dive for you.

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kypro
I think you're expecting someone to give over an hour of their time then yes.

I've had companies compensate me for interview time before and for me it
certainly improves my likelihood to accept an offer. Knowing a company will be
respectful of your time is important.

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purpleunicorn
What do you mean by "no result"? Do you mean no communication or feedback
about why the candidate didn't get the role? Also curious how much
compensation you would suggest for an interview?

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samfisher83
Some of the places I interviewed gave gift cards between 100-200 bucks +
expenses.

