

How not to interview someone who already has a job (2011) - jkw
http://www.recruitingblogs.com/m/blogpost?id=502551%3ABlogPost%3A1466641

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ilitirit
Sometimes the people who ask you to interview are not the same people who do
actually end up interviewing you, or they don't communicate with each other.

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.

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Decade
I think this also applies to someone who is unemployed. All I want is to do
meaningful work and get paid. I'm tired of the hamster wheel of job
applications.

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.

~~~
pan69
Had the same thing the other week. This guy want me to do a coding test, i.e.
build a complete smallish application with all bells and whistles, which was
going to take somewhere between 8 to 10 hours of my time. Really? This is
supposed to be a test to establish if I can write code or not? If you want me
to spend that much time, no worries, I'll invoice you for the privilege.

~~~
krampian
>> I'll invoice you for the privilege

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.

~~~
DanBC
> refund him 50% off your fee if he later hires you.

That would be incompatible with anti-corruption rules in some places.

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andreyf
For engineers without open source contributions, why not give a coding
project? It seems to me like there's no need to eat into the person's working
time, spending a few hours solving an interesting problem shouldn't deter
people you want hire to code all day, and the signals you'll get are
orthogonal to what you'll be able to assess in person.

~~~
crdoconnor
I wouldn't mind being asked to create a small piece of open source software
that would continue to look good on my portfolio even if the company never
talked to me again. Hell, if the company wrote the project boilerplate and the
tests and let me fill the code in and put it up with a GPL license, I'd be
thrilled :)

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.

~~~
mavelikara
Let me describe the situation from the other side.

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.

~~~
Decade
Are you still at AppDynamics? Because my application to your company back in
January is still listed in Jobvite as “New.” I applied for several positions,
and the distribution is pretty even between “New,” “Closed,” or “Not
Selected,” and I never got an interview or an invitation to come on-site.

~~~
mavelikara
Please email me offline at bthomas AT appdynamics DOT com

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kephra
> You will go through 6-8 interviews!” I thought: “YOU will hire a bunch of
> unemployed people”.

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.

~~~
hibikir
The advantage of interviewing employed people is that you have a better chance
of hiring someone that is competent. That's also the reason, in a one local
company's case at least, that your list of employers is looked at, as some
companies hire a very high percentage of frauds.

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.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>The advantage of interviewing employed people is that you have a better
chance of hiring someone that is competent.

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.

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throw_away
I don't understand why they dont lede with here's the $$ and here's the
problem. I don't want to work on bullshit no matter how many massages and
drycleaning you give me. I don't want to work for $40k plus lottery tickets on
earth shattering problems. Why do we have to play this time-consuming game
before you tell me the info I need to hear? This doesn't scale. I'll stick to
the devil I know.

------
pjmorris
The 'one phone interview, one on-site interview, make a decision' format is
how every good company I've worked for has hired, ranging over multiple
industries and multiple decades.

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.

------
bhayden
I once had an interview for a job while I was already employed. They asked why
I wanted to leave my current job, I told them I didn't and that I liked my
job, but I also look for better opportunities. My interviewer seemed
incredulous at this concept, and thought I was wasting her time. Does she only
want to hire unemployed or unhappily employed people? So dumb.

------
JoeAltmaier
I've had folks get irate when I wouldn't spend the day at their interview. I
was in alpha release, fighting fires and working on a deadline! I'm kind of
glad I never worked for that idiot.

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marcosdumay
Or, an even shorter TLDR: Decide!

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?

------
eli_gottlieb
I'll save this for the inevitable barrage of LinkedIn messages that will
appear after I start a new job soon.

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singingfish
Hah, my latest gig, one interview, around 10 minutes in it was like "so how do
we make it worth your while coming to work here?" (answer, ok money, excellent
working conditions). Working well. Nice to have special skillz

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vitalinos
It's easy to say when you do have a job

