This “list of resources” email seems intimidating. As a candidate, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Should I read all the blog posts and watch all 7 talks, each of which about 30 minutes long? The manager says they will ask what the candidate read or watched, which is unreasonable to me. I have a full-time job, and yours is not the only company I’m applying to, there is no time for me to read and watch everyone’s propaganda.
You’re a stranger to me at this point. You think I should spend potentially hours of homework studying you, in the off chance that this phone screen will land a job?
I’d wager fewer than 1 in 5 phone screens lands a job on average. How many hours is a candidate expected to do homework for you? What are you doing as an equivalent investment in the candidate?
Maybe you should stop and reflect why no one is responding to this email and what that means…
Personally they would fail my initial screen for employers unless they were very upfront about paying a quite higher than market salary. If you send me that reading list and everyone else is just doing normal interviews without all the homework, you are asking for a lot more and I expect that trend to continue after you hire me, so I'll expect a lot more out of you. So far I haven't found anyone with these high expectations willing to pay more (got plenty of people who want me to drive into their office wearing a suit for less than what remote jobs are offering for example), generally the offers tend to be lower than normal companies with standard expectations. Another clue is the "we are looking for passionate people, they need to be excited" stuff, those things in tandem smell like a low baller.
I think it’s great. SingleStore and any database company that ships binaries and supports customers managing their own clusters running those binaries requires a very different programming environment and culture from your typical saas or consumer app. Just picking any two of those articles at random will help candidates
understand that. I think “cringy” is a very unkind description of a genuine attempt to answer the most common candidate question - “what is it like here.”
If all jobs are equal and you just want a job then sure, I guess you have a point. There isn’t an introduction in the template but presumably it would be described over the phone as something like ‘I’m going to send you an email with some links to talks and blog posts about the company so that you can learn more about us’. Maybe enthusiastic candidates would read a bunch right away. Maybe they would wait until they had offers and we’re choosing where they wanted to work.
Roughly, I think many candidates are not in some desperate must-find-job-ASAP mode and therefore will be more interested in finding the job that is best for them. Giving them information so that they can better understand the company/team seems good to me.
I don’t understand what the alternative to this is for you – just accept the first job offered? Or ask lots of questions to try to work out what the company is like? Or rely on network/back-channel communication to only apply to the right jobs?
As a candidate i consider having the EM taking the first call a positive sign for the company i am interviewing to.
As a hiring manager, i would even take the opportunity to quickly assess whether their experience and cv is close to reality. Hence i suggest the author also asking candidates to quickly go through their recent experience and describe in some adequate technical depth something they are proud of. From my experience this one question can be a very good filter for candidates that can be a good company and role fit.
The place to go through the candidate’s recent experience is the interview, not the phone screen. The point of phone screens is to quickly filter out obviously inadequate candidates.
Cv is usually 90% buzzwords and things the person didn’t actually contribute to. Why not figure this out on the first call with him, asking a couple experience related questions instead of letting hr do this (but have zero idea how to interpret them)? And obviously you are supposed to have read and filtered candidates from their CVs, and have this final step before committing to them for the next steps in the process.
Either the candidate could be filtered out by a better application process.
Or if the candidate is straight up lying, they wont be filtered out at this step.
At least in my experience job hunting, a lot of filtering at the call screen stage happens when the recruiter misunderstands the job (e.g. conversations like: How much experience do you have doing X, where X is clearly unrelated to the job you thought you were applying for)
I made a similar change in my last role and it was a great experience. The big difference is that I took about 30 minutes and also asked a bit about work on their resume to check basic things like whether their work had actually been deployed and used, awareness of user impact, double checking technical experience, etc.
The biggest benefit of taking more ownership of your own hiring pipelines is that you can use the results of each stage to improve the others. If many fail the formal tech assessment, you can dive into more tech in the screen or adjust the minimum qualifications. If candidates are rude in the full loop, you can check for that earlier. Or if most candidates pass the full loop, you can loosen up on earlier stages or reduce the loop
I’ve been doing the job hunt grind since being laid off in early December. If my initial phone screen is with a recruiter it’s usually 15 to 20 minutes. They usually just reconfirm what’s on my resume and validate I can legally work in the US. If my initial screen is with a hiring manager it’s always been over 45 minutes long. One screen I had which was over zoom, mind you I had no prior contact with anyone at this company other than applying to a job posting, turned into a technical interview that went on for over an hour and the call had been scheduled for only 30 minutes, that was fun…
If this is coming from the perspective of a young person who has only ever been in an academic environment and never worked in a collaborative job, I would say “okay, well welcome to work, where half an hour is considered a ‘brief call’. Sorry if it comes as a surprise, but you’ll get used to it”
If it’s coming from someone who has workplace experience.. then I am both confused as to how you have managed this feat, and also surprised that you would be unaware that other people consider half an hour to an hour to be a fairly normal length for a conversation.
I used to do that when I did hiring, with a very positive impression. Both sides can instantly get a feeling and can cut it off early if the expectations are wrong. HR can't really do that.
Do this same thing for my hiring pipeline. Pretty much same percentages for how I weed down resumes, etc. I usually go a bit over an hour as I like to discuss the company, our tech, and get specific about what the job will entail. At the end I ask if they are still interested, and if yes we dig into their specific history, questions, etc. I also make crystal clear the salary range and benefits and get a verbal confirmation this band is acceptable to the candidate. We don't have to decide right then, but we need to be in the same ballpark and they need to understand the upper end isn't likely to move. No point in getting through a long interview process and then having to pass cause they want to much money. Then I make a decision if the candidate is a waste of time for my engineers to proceed on a technical evaluation. Three rounds, with three separate people on the team, usually only two of those rounds are true coding, one is more technical discussion/team fit. Anyone in the hiring committee can veto for essentially any reason. Works as well as any process I've seen in my decade+ career.
Three rounds is also coincidentally my max to give a company I am interviewing. If you can't make up your mind on a candidate after 3 rounds then you don't know what your doing. This 5+ round crap FAANG convinced us all was good is such a waste of time and honestly costs more in time suck then just giving the candidate a shot.
What's your spam filter success rate with that email containing that many links? Whole email seems unnecessary, also initial phone call lasting 20-30 minutes is not short by any means.
But respect for doing interview instead HR, I despise clueless HR you can't talk to and where you need to switch to chatbot mode answering phrases they wanna hear based on few keywords they say instead of having actual conversation.
I think the spam filter success is 100% (I am on the call and confirm with candidates that they receive it), but I agree I need to make the email much shorter and more appealing.
I believe that initial phone screens are de rigueur, these days. They seem to usually be done by recruiters or HR people.
In my experience, I’ve always done quite well, with initial phone interviews.
It’s usually when I first encounter a tech person, that the process goes off the rails. I doubt it had anything to do with my tech cred. I have a very young-sounding voice, and I’m personable and enthusiastic.
I learned to quickly establish my age, up front, and that seemed to reduce my effectiveness at initial screens, but also reduced the “techie no likee boomer” thing that seemed to happen, later.
In any case, it’s all water under the bridge, these days. I just stopped looking for work, and everyone is happier.
This is great. All hiring should work like this. The issue with many companies is that they alienate good candidates and routinely waste a lot of time on bad candidates. Basically, you waste several rounds of interviews before the candidate even gets to talk to somebody that has decision power (or even a clue). It's very expensive to reject people late into the process. And it's stupid to have good candidates walk away from you because your process is prioritizing your convenience at the cost of their time.
The trick is dealing with the signal to noise ratio. If you have recruiters feeding you an endless stream of mediocre, vaguely buzzword compatible resumes, it's not feasible to stay on top of that. IMHO, that kind of process is in any case unlikely to produce good candidates other than by accident. I've interviewed plenty of people this way and you can end up wasting a lot of time like this. The way out is to fix the lead pipeline to be less desperate than that.
I work on the principle that the best people usually come in via your network and are highly employable. So, that puts the pressure on to act quickly and decisively when you come across a good reference. The next best thing is people applying to a job and reaching out. If they look remotely legit, talk to them. Ten minutes is enough to figure people out. This doesn't actually happen a lot. If you must use recruiters, make them work for a living and push back when they waste your time with a lot of poorly fitting candidates. Buzzword compatibility is not good enough. Make sure they can tell the difference between a good and a bad candidate.
There's no better way than selling good people on the notion of working for you than just escalating really quickly and having them talk to a decision maker. Have a quick call to verify key assumptions, fit, and expectation management (salary, skills, seniority, eagerness, etc.). First impressions matter. If that's all fine, immediately set up interviews with key stake holders and make an offer if everyone still agrees. Coding interviews don't really factor into this process. I don't use them and I decline to take them. If you've had multiple conversations and then still are wondering if the person can actually code, you messed up. Badly.
If you do have a coding interview as part of your process and you get people reluctant to take those, escalate and talk to them immediately. IMHO nothing qualifies a person more than being mature enough to walk away from a bad deal. Chances are that those are the best leads coming through your filters. And you can find out at the cost of a ten minute screening call.
> I work on the principle that the best people usually come in via your network and are highly employable. So, that puts the pressure on to act quickly and decisively when you come across a good reference.
I completely agree. However, at my current job, referring someone for an open position just means throwing their CV in the mix along with everyone else's. There is no way to bypass even a single step in the weeks-long hiring process.
And I suspect this is slowly becoming the norm.
> However, at my current job, referring someone for an open position just means throwing their CV in the mix along with everyone else's. There is no way to bypass even a single step in the weeks-long hiring process.
I thought this was the case everywhere, except maybe very small companies. In the companies I’ve worked, if a candidate asks for a referral, I can’t do much more than input their resume into our internal tool, and then tell him “It’s job req. 54401, go apply online for it!” There’s no button on the page that I push to indicate “This candidate is a special referral! Bypass the interviews!”
Maybe it’s different higher up. At the VP level it’s more important who you golf with, and who were your buddies from business school, and who you did coke with at one of last year’s private CES parties. I doubt at that level they even have to apply to job reqs. I’m not even sure that a CxO even interviews!
Luckily, I'm the CTO, so I run the hiring process exactly like this and I wouldn't have it any other way. If somebody comes in via one of our existing people, I talk to them or at least make sure they talk to one of my team leads (i.e. their direct manager if the whole thing goes through).
If somebody approaches me directly with a good pitch (I get some spectacularly bad ones of course), I generally hear them out. We are also planning to put referral rewards in place too when the time comes (too small right now).
The company I run is close to opening its doors for new candidates soon (pending on budget/revenue), so this is not hypothetical. If you are excited about using Kotlin in frontend and backend and are in the Berlin area, feel free to reach out and find out if what I preach lines up with reality.
I feel so too, but I think it's a self-inflicted wound. When we were hiring last year I contacted people who referred candidates and well more than half of them never worked with the person, some admitted to have never been in contact outside of having gone to the same university. The first kind of referral is weak, the other one is purely useless.
You know good on you for doing the screen instead of an hr standin. Someone who will also happily ask what questions there are, but then fail to be able to answer anything but trivial non questions which are the same for all screens
But honestly, what’s actually the point of this call?
“What do we do here?
How do we work?
What will the rest of the interview process look like?”
Is any of that really worth it’s own call? The interview process should already have been established in the damn job posting. Why 99% of job postings in an industry that prides itself on intelligence is beyond me… It’s not complicated. X rounds, y and z hoops, done.
As for what we do and how we work, I imagine you can either express it in the posting or you’ll need a real call
I just don’t see the point of this step that everyone wants to do. It seems like a giant waste of time, inefficiency, and I can’t help but feel it’s interviewers flexing some weird ego thing
Basically second half of 2022 I was doing initial calls.
All the information has to be repeated at least twice. I always sent an email to ask for best time to have 15min intro call. People send CVs to multiple companies and even if I sent email that they could prepare by checking the posting lots of time I was having the same conversation.
People don’t care about my job posting, lots of times I have to sell them position/company.
Initial call is also to make sure they understand the offer like compensation/perks and work arrangement. Even if it is written out in the job posting people had sometimes weird ideas that needs to be addressed before we waste everyone’s time.
Ok and do you know why people don’t read job postings?
Because the attitude you and OP and honestly nearly 100% of companies and hirers out there take is “fuck it, we don’t want to do this the right way. we don’t want to respect potential employees time, we want to be vague about what we’re seeking and unreasonably selective as we put candidates through a meat grinder”
No I won’t read the 500th repetitive job posting with business hr speak and no clue what actually lies ahead
I’m not blaming you in particular, this is an industry wide thing. But the problems didn’t start with people seeking a career, they started with entitled hiring practices that are more often than not outright abusive
You saw my job posting? You seen my hiring process?
I wrote everything that is relevant in our job posting.
Salary range, perks, technologies. Maybe 3 sentences about company would fall into hr speak.
My process is super light and easy - I don’t grind people and our company keeps employees happy for years.
It is not my attitude that people are bad because they don’t read job posting.
It is realization that me and my company is not the most important part in their lives and that is why I put work into explaining everything diligently over the phone.
I got offended by this comment but I know you did not have any idea about who I am and what really is the process. So I also understand you read my previous comment through your life experience.
I disagree. A 20-30 min interview that filters 37% of candidates (for his case) while selling the company to the other candidates is the most effective interview in the whole interviewing pipeline, saving a lot of time downstream.
The alternative is to do basic filtering within a more expensive interview, ie to include basic salary/visa requirements while doing a "regular" interview, then for bad candidates you either cut the interview short (effective but rude) or go through the interview wasting everybody's time.
9/10 of the questions I get from candidates during phone screen are answered in the job descriptions. Our stack, our main tools the job's responsibilities and day to day, etc.
As a candidate, trying to gather as much information as possible in a short time, it can actually be really useful to re-ask a question that you already "know the answer" to. Different people will offer different perspectives on things, and you can end up with a fuller picture.
That said you should phrase it in a way that doesn't sound like you're just asking for the same information that's already available: "So the posting said the team uses Agile; how does that show up in a typical week?"
At this point I don't even know what is "real" about a job posting vs copy-paste boiler plate that the poster/team/HR-person included. I assume it's all crap except for some portion of the required qualifications or experience. You really have to read between the lines, and if I'm just firing off CVs, then I couldn't be bothered to put effort into deciphering your HR-departments specific "hip" way of describing the job that they think is unique but is really just muddying the waters and wasting everyone's time.
tldr: I'll start paying attention to job postings when they stop including vague non-sense like "must be a team player", "should thrive in an energetic fast paced environment" and "be a go-getter".
From the candidate’s point of view, job descriptions are often dry and generic, and it might be difficult to get an idea about what the company does even from their web site. “BigCo: We provide business solutions for increased sales and customer satisfaction!” OK, I’m gonna have to talk to a human there to understand what these people do. Plus, your company is number 58 on my list of 80 resumes I’m sending out today. I’m not going to read your entire web site and earnings report.
If it’s looking good, like this is a real job and I’m not ghosted, and I’ve passed at least one filter, yea, I will do deeper research on what the company does.
Search your job title on a few job aggregator sites or on the job pages of a few companies in your field; how closely does your day to day get represented in an intelligible and understandable way from the postings you find?
The Job Search process is fraught with a lack of clarity for both sides; businesses "fluff" their positions just as much as candidates "fluff" their CVs because the wrong wording, incorrect wording, misleading wording, or wording that sounds less appealing than what other businesses use makes you less competitive in the eyes of potential candidates.
Talent Acquisition teams can only go so far; I work with a great TA team who meets with us frequently to discuss our needs and to ask for help interpreting questions/comments from potential candidates and how to best represent our needs to some of the challenging (but good!) questions potential candidates have. I am well aware that I am quite lucky in this regard as many TA teams do not work closely with the teams they're finding candidates for.
I wouldn't fault a candidate for explaining their understanding of the position but asking for a more clear picture of common activities they might do during a week, or about team/reporting structure, advancement prospects, etc. That's different than if they come to a position and balk when being asked about their experience with elements directly on the posting or normal/expected for the given position.
