> I had been talking to the candidate for months and they had completed our entire interview panel. We’d had great conversations where I’d learned about their background and developed a sense for how they would fit in this role. Unfortunately, I had to tell them we would not be moving forward with an offer.
"Hiring" isn't the emotional thing here. The emotional thing was knowing you were shitty to someone. You were shitty because you took months to build a relationship with this person and didn't have a compelling reason to say yes or no, and decided to say no. If you saw gaps, you should have said no sooner. If it takes you months of talking to someone and building a relationship to decide they're not right for the team, it's not hiring that's the problem, it's that you're bad at hiring that's the problem.
There's exactly no reason to lead a candidate on for months. If you ever get to the point where scheduling a 1:1 zoom conversation is implied to be a job offer, you've fucked up. Interviewing isn't personal, it's business—until you've spent long hours making it personal.
> Hiring is a roller coaster. It involves more ups and downs than normal engineering work.
It might be a roller coaster, but the longest roller coaster by duration in the world is four minutes. Keep that in mind.
That's a really good analogy that the longest rollercoaster is 4 minutes. You're absolutely right that a months long interview process would suck. Fortunately, that wasn't what happened. I've added an amendment to the story to clarify, take a look!
I obviously can't go into the details of the feedback but I share your wish that hiring decisions would more cut and dry! It would be a lot easier for everyone.
> They were close and had potential, but we also saw some gaps.
I would be really interested to hear more about the specific "gaps".
> After lots of discussion with my management chain, we decided not to extend the offer.
I wonder exactly what was said, given that this candidate was led on for months by this point and I presume the management knew about everything along the way. Also, was someone else hired, or did they just cancel the entire opening?
I understand some emotional pain about passing up a really nice candidate for an objectively unbeatable one (that's competition for you), but I only get the sense that it was a single person in the interview loop (who was then cancelled on): they were apparently hiring for just one extra manager position?
It was on the thirtieth interview when things went south. While excitedly explaining how they’d just scaled a business to eight million users the candidate casually picked up a shrimp fork and dug into the house salad with it!!
It was right then I realized we’d made a terrible mistake. I feigned gastric distress and headed for the restroom where I immediately called HR.
Months wasted but I feel we dodged a bullet on this one. Now it’s back to the drawing board but I’m sure we will eventually find a qualified junior web developer.
I can't share the specifics of feedback but you're right that's the most interesting part of this decision and where I could learn the most. Ultimately, it's a hard to reverse decision with imperfect information and that's why it can be so emotionally tough.
> I had been talking to the candidate for months and they had completed our entire interview panel. We’d had great conversations where I’d learned about their background and developed a sense for how they would fit in this role. Unfortunately, I had to tell them we would not be moving forward with an offer.
> It was hard because I wasn’t confident in the decision. They were close and had potential, but we also saw some gaps. After lots of discussion with my management chain, ...
WAY too long a time period, and WAY too much time invested. And hopefully you'll never, never, ever need this candidate's good word or goodwill for anything - 'cause you'll have precious little chance of getting either.
Curious how many other people were similarly taken for a ride while management was waffling on this decision. How many dozens of hours were invested on both sides.
Yes! You're right! That would be way too long for an interview loop. I'm sorry I wasn't clear in the article.
The candidate and I first met long before they were interested in interviewing. They had potential and I got to know them so that when they were interested in interviewing they'd reach out. Once they decided to interview, we made that happen as quickly as schedules allowed!
Hope that clarification helps! Thanks for the note!
It sounds as if the hiring managers got cold feet and made an emotional or impulsive decision. It's not surprising they could feel bad for treating a candidate that way, for indescribable reasons. It's not as if the justification offered was, "We lost our budget and couldn't go through with our offer" or "We have another much more highly qualified candidate and the organization needs that person." Managers that interact with candidates should be decent enough to anticipate the possibility of not going through with an offer and create sufficient emotional buffering to leave people with their self-respect, or give the candidate more useful clues about how they're really doing. There are many ways hiring managers can increase their skill at this difficult work. I will never forget, I made someone cry in an interview once. You can ask hard questions but we all have to decide if this is the kind of human being we want to be.
It sounds like you understand the burden of being an interviewer!
Can you share a little more about what made the decision emotional or impulsive? I'd love to make sure my writing is clear and it sounds like it wasn't. While building a relationship with a candidate can be emotional, we always use a standardized rubric to evaluate candidates. Even with a rubric the decisions can be hard!
I remember not too long ago when you'd do a quick phone screen, then sit for maybe a technical interview and maybe come into the office for a panel to talk to other devs. Most of the time, hiring managers would say, "If you're close with your technical skills, we can teach you, but we're more interested if you fit in with our culture "
Months of interaction? Why did just a few years ago, managers could spot a phony a mile away and could see potential in people? Why is it I feel like I'm dating you just to try and get a job?
This story just confirms how broken and dysfunctional the process has become to make a simple hire.
Amen. If an organization is taking months to come to a hiring decision that’s a red flag, unless it’s a C-suite level position, where a misstep could have irreversible damage. A tech position should be able to close within a few weeks, lest the candidate get a better offer from a less dysfunctional company.
My first hand observations: took 4 months to hire, 5 months for the candidate to start.
My first hiring in a corporate world so I had to learn a bit.
Then we are expected to plan for diversity, not even looking at qualified candidates until we have met diversity benchmarks.
Then my group had a committee kind of setup where one person could veto a candidate. Being my first hiring, I had to go along with it for a while. At one point, we had a viable candidate, but there was one person who was sideways and my manager did not want to go ahead unless every single panelist said yes. We held on for another month trying to look for other better candidates. The candidate was nice enough to wait. BTW we had a viable candidate even before that, within the first 2-3 I think, and that candidate did not wait for us.
Then getting the offer approved and negotiated and signed takes time.
It has been a pain, and after hiring quite a few people in startups or consulting companies, I could have done it in less than a month, but we had our inertia.
> where a misstep could have irreversible damage.
However, when I see it help is that we have a person in our peer team who is not good and they are trying to let that person go. It is in Europe so laws a bit more stringent. It is quite a work to let someone go so the fear of a bad hire and then having months of work to let that person go is quite real. And this is for a run of the mill IC.
Four months worth of interviews is insane, as is the need for unanimity in a hiring panel. On top of that, diversity quotas are explicitly illegal under US law. The organization you work for sounds like it is profoundly dysfunctional.
Of course this was my first hiring, so I had some learning to do including understanding org politics and let's say I wasted a month in that. And 4 months was not all interviews, it was the end to end process from the time I was given the position till the time the offer was sent out. Pretty sure I will be able to do it faster next time around, all other things including job markets being same.
And there were no diversity quotas, just that management will keep asking are you being diverse and my manager will throw a fit every time his managers will ask this question since our org was pretty much uniracial, but it was not me who built it :)
> Most of the time, hiring managers would say, "If you're close with your technical skills, we can teach you, but we're more interested if you fit in with our culture "
This is my criteria:
1-Smart, problem solver, sees the big picture, etc.
2-Collaborative, flexible, not dogmatic
3-Responsible, takes ownership
4-Technical experience is in the ballpark, gaps ok and expected
The first 3 things are much more important than the tech because tech gaps can be filled, personality can't be changed.
Yeah you're right a months long process would be horrible!
Fortunately, that didn't happen in this case. Part of building a team is getting to know talented people before they're looking for a job so when they're ready they reach out to you.
And you're right, this is work, not dating. But that doesn't remove the human emotion involved in getting to know someone.
This is one of the key reasons you let the recruiting/HR do this. The other red flag is the amount of time you have engaged with the person before the decision which also sounds bad. You might have inadvertently let them have false hope.
One of my starting points for companies looking to grow from small founding team to a more larger structure is to define the hiring and firing process way up front. It is not worth playing around with people's emotion and putting everyone in a difficult position.
Figma? I'm curious if this type of behavior is a reflection on the organization's culture in the larger sense. If so, it would explain why the 20 billion dollar acquisition to Adobe fell through.
All human decisions involve emotions. We're human.
This piece is a bit over the top, though, verging on "seek counseling immediately" emotional. I hope you're not a bull, author, because I don't want to make you even more emotional when I tell you this is full of red flags.
Hey everyone, it's the author here! Many of you have made an inaccurate assumption about something that I should have clarified in the article.
As a hiring manager you do cold out reach and meet people well before they are ready to look for a new job. You build a relationship over time so that when they are ready for a new job they reach out to you. That's what happened in this case.
I appreciate the feedback that I was not clear about that. I agree with you all that spending months actually interviewing is horrendous and unfair.
Let me know if you have more questions or thoughts!
Not ideally. I feel completely confident saying it should never last more than a month. That’s enough time for the slowest, oldest mammoths in the industry. There is no reason you should have to.
Yes, in pro sports the negotiation for a contract renewal often takes months if not years.
For players between contracts, the off-season will usually be several months, and many players won't sign until just before the season begins, negotiating with teams along the way.
Do you read the sports page? If you're the elite of the elite, yeah, hiring decisions are often quick. If you're only good enough to get drafted in the 3rd or later rounds, expect to spend a lot of time doing combines and visiting exercises and then be assigned to minor leagues. Even if you get called up, expect to be traded without your input unless you're the best of the best. Don't get injured. Even the best of the best can't always pick their teammates.
Nearly every comment so far is reacting to this line:
> I had been talking to the candidate for months..
and how appalling that is. But TFA says nothing about why the process took months, because that's not what the article is about. Maybe the author had been talking to the candidate for some time before the hiring process started? Maybe the process took unusually long for reasons on the candidate's side? We have no idea, so why even take issue with it?
It's insane if the facts are what you're imagining - the company strung the candidate along for months for no reason. If the facts are something different, like the process took months because the candidate kept rescheduling, then it's not insane at all.
TFA gives no details either way - hence, the thing you're calling insane is something you've imagined, not something described in TFA. That's my point.
I think many people would prefer bad news like this in an email. I know this was a long (!) hiring process and the willingness to tell someone to their face is noble, but I imagine it might be both unexpected in a Zoom call and hard to process with someone looking at you.
If the intent is to give a verbal explanation, I’d send an email with the news and then offer to connect on Zoom for that.
(But I’d also avoid a process anywhere close to this long.)
I never understand that idea, that having a face to face rejection (or over Zoom) is better than an email.
How much less can you value an applicant's time? You already are a 'no' so set them free to spend time on finding a job elsewhere. Sure, if you want to offer a call to go over the details some people will take you up on it, but recognize this call is for the hiring manager to feel less bad about saying no, or so people won't badmouth the company for jilting them during hiring.
Either way, it is self-serving and the opposite thing any company should do if they want to treat applicants with actual respect.
LOL this can't be real. Who the fuck would sit through a multi-month process if it isn't FAANG. And for FAANG they just have a process, you're in or out and once they do the interviews they're fast to tell you, they're just slow to schedule.
I keep reading comments that this could have been acceptable if it was some c-suite position. This is so funny, because we keep seeing ceos destroying the businesses or doing some funny incidents to always get rewarded with bonuses or into new ceo adventures.
Let’s admit businesses are picky in people they don’t know. If it’s some friend or twitter/ceo persona, he gets hired with 0 interviews. I have seen this so many times with heads, vps and c-suite hired out of the blue. While i have to struggle to get my feet into any position and bypass the ai filtering of ats.
"Figma's growth team" - All I needed to know, ROFLMAO! (I've dealt with them and the people that use them, and this abusive interview process fits that. No thank you!)
[1] Penpot is a great open-source alternative for people who value freedom.
The candidate was being considered for a management position, with a lot of responsibilities including creating a good workplace for their reports. This is something you absolutely don’t want to get wrong, it can’t be a “I dunno… seems ok to me” hire because it will literally set the tone for that department for years.
I can agree with that in principle, however it shouldn’t take months. If there are multiple levels of middle management here, issues that arise in a probationary/grace period should be addressed and course-corrected. You have that period post hiring, not in a drawn out review process.
There aren’t multiple levels of middle management though. This position reports directly to a very senior manager and will be expected to grow an “tree” of managers and employees under them.
The author was already managing the team though. So it seems like there is an obvious recovery plan if the manager doesn't work out after a few months. Sure it sucks for the author to have all that work re-added, but the effect of a bad hire isn't dire enough to justify the long hiring process. They should have identified any unsure feelings about the candidate within a couple interviews and maybe had one more to address them before making a decision.
I haven't met anyone I couldn't tell in less than a month if they were good (enough) or not (about two weeks if you push me and two work conversations if you push me even more). I don't understand doubts after a couple months or the typical 3-month period.
Echoing what others are saying. This is just too much. I have been on both sides of this process. As a candidate, show you respect my time by being direct about the process (how long will it take? What fundamentals are you looking for? Who will I meet?). If you can't describe that in a 5 minute conversation your hiring practices are vague and could potentially give your company a bad reputation.
I know it's practically a meme in tech at this point how bad hiring is, but I honestly think we have too many people in the hiring chain who have no proper experience with evaluating people. This leads to this mentality of infantilism and perfection that will constantly lead to unhappiness from both sides of the decision. Can we somehow take cues from the past and improve hiring process efficiency while recognizing that hiring will always carry inherent risks for both parties?
This is the most puzzling thing I have read in a long time.
In my current job, I manage offshore teams. I have hired a lot in the past couple years because we have grown a lot and turnover tends to be high for entry level positions.
I don’t find hiring particularly emotional. You are basically looking for a skillset and a mindset compatible with the work environment. I agree that you are indeed trying to build a relationship but that’s a professional one. The essence of it is evaluating the candidate ability to do the job. There is no tension here. You are not looking for a friend.
I mean if you find it hard to politely tell someone you are not going to offer them a position when you don’t believe them to be a good fit, you are probably doing something wrong.
Of course you're not particularly emotional; these are low-stakes hires that aren't even in the same country. The process is likely a fraction of the time for a fraction of the money.
Maybe it's gotten better in recent time, but you also get mediocre results with hiring fast and cheap + offshoring.
Managing multiple teams mean I also hire their managers and the people here in charge of the whole things. I don’t feel more emotional then than then. Hiring is a skill conducted in a professional environment with all that implies. That was the main point of my comment (I’m highlighting because you obviously missed it).
Why be so uncharitable in your reading? It doesn’t make you look smart.
Appalling. You were lucky the candidate was available for months of interaction. You deliberated too much and you lost out on what sounded like an excellent fit. No one is going to be perfect. No one is going to be at their best during interviews. Yet not understanding that when someone shows strength and promise that you bring them in to the role where there's a probationary period to do further evaluation shows a complete lack of competence in hiring.
This is the key takeway, not hey you know what, I'm evaluating this person or poor me my job is hard. Unless this is for astronaut training for a manned trip to Mars to build a colony that time line is insane.
Months as in 2 months is pretty normal. FAANG processes often take 6+ weeks.
And after that, this is a fully general critique. Hiring well means that there's a bar hires have to meet somewhere. You can argue that their bar is too high, but there's an identical story with a lower bar. It's disappointing to see someone interview and just barely not make the cut because we're human and can empathize. That doesn't make it the wrong decision.
Goes to prove that sometimes hiring and work itself is bs, based on the whims of whether someone will get along. In the end, hiring decisions are not made objectively based on competency but subjectively based on superficial and biased preferences. Complete incompetence as a higher up, seems to be a lesson for management.
"Hiring" isn't the emotional thing here. The emotional thing was knowing you were shitty to someone. You were shitty because you took months to build a relationship with this person and didn't have a compelling reason to say yes or no, and decided to say no. If you saw gaps, you should have said no sooner. If it takes you months of talking to someone and building a relationship to decide they're not right for the team, it's not hiring that's the problem, it's that you're bad at hiring that's the problem.
There's exactly no reason to lead a candidate on for months. If you ever get to the point where scheduling a 1:1 zoom conversation is implied to be a job offer, you've fucked up. Interviewing isn't personal, it's business—until you've spent long hours making it personal.
> Hiring is a roller coaster. It involves more ups and downs than normal engineering work.
It might be a roller coaster, but the longest roller coaster by duration in the world is four minutes. Keep that in mind.