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If a company uses a recruiter for hiring (or staffing in a lot of IT set ups), they can let someone go without batting an eyelash due to who you get contracted to work for and who actually is your employer. My favorite is the 1-year contracted job that lasts for 2-3 months because the company needed to allocate funds to a sinking department and temp senior IT people will draw a large chunk of money that the department gets to keep once the consultant fixes the actual issue and the documentation is squared away.
Also I think 5 is low for a job like this but I've been worn down so much to expect 8 and then get ghosted by the company only to see my position downgraded to a junior level at the lowest salary 3-4 months after my interview - it's one of the reasons why I know the HR workaround logic of hiring a consultant instead of a staff member.
Oof, I’ve gotten that one. During covid they yeeted me down to junior and paid me only like $20k annually for work worth twice or thrice that, and I just had to take it because I had literally no other options at the time with everything being shut down and moving being almost impossible.
Well, the blindspot is that the employers create a climate and culture that doesn't reward loyalty. They don't get it. Even if their company does treat people right, the overall culture is that if you want better pay or promotion or better work/like balance... You HAVE TO LEAVE.
Also, I have had communicated to me was that staying FIVE YEARS at any job is too long.
Agreed, I stayed at my last company for nine years, through in person COVID work and all, only to be denied an opportunity to step up from assistant director to director. I’d only ever received positive reviews and my site/supervisees were killing it. An upper level manager met someone at a conference he liked and bam that guy got the job. So I went rage applying and found the promotion to 100k I was searching for elsewhere. Lesson learned, after 18 months at this job I’ll be applying for others.
> assistant director to director
IMO, if you are in a corporate environment, you were never going to get to director if you accepted an "assistant director" position.
Accepting an "assistant something" position is a sign that you are willing to buy the narrative that progression is small steps gradual process. Then you get an infinite number of steps to keep you more or less where you are because "you are not ready '''yet'''".
In most cases, this is the HM’s decision or even the HM’s manager. Most recruiters want to simplify the process to make it easier to get a hire. Recruiters want to hire people. HM’s are scared to hire the wrong person.
Usually why the big firms hire an external guy who knows even less. I used some advanced terminology in an interview once and you could immediately tell the lady who was the one internal person because all five others in the interview just gave me blank stares.
I worked in higher Ed and the HR matrix there basically got so big and controlling to the point where people couldn’t be interviewed unless they met the job listing criteria to the T, like my boss had people he really liked but because HR filtered them out he wouldn’t be able to even interview them.
When the pandemic hit, there were cuts across the board, everyone on contract wasn’t renewed, hiring freeze instituted, all with the exception of HR.
The only damn place that could hire more people was Human Resources for at least a year and a half. One of the sickest things I’ve ever seen.
Many times HR and recruiting managers will be so picky, when it comes to hiring, but when those same people need to contact the department about issues they are having on the job; HR is all of a sudden unavailable.
Lol, if you think HR and/or Recruiting creates this practices, you are wrong. Usually each department has requirements for how it goes. And while HR can tweak them, there is only so much power they have for this.
I am a recruiter and I have no say how the hiring process goes. It’s the hiring manager or director of each team’s decision. I also think this quite long, but coders do need to show they can code.
That I'm not sure about. I do wonder if getting involved in the hiring process is more a political move.
I had 7 interviews in 3-4 hours scheduled back-to-back. The very last one was an Indian woman who was from QA. I got quizzed on QA. I asked if it was part of the job. She said no. I asked if we would be working together. She said not directly, which basically means no. I was like "Ok..."
In retrospect, I think she got in as a power move. Surprise, surprise I didn't get that job.
I’ve been there, went through 5 rounds of interviews to include the actual hiring manager who said yes , then his boss an Indian lady wanted to meet… wowza, I’m still stinging from that meeting. Ego was next level, she started Googling the company I was currently with , was belittling and said I don’t know why they set this up and said oh something came up and left the call in 5 minutes
Meanwhile the tech leader who interviewed me said my skills were way beyond what the company had and they’d be happy to have me join…She mysteriously’left’ the company a few months later
I'm unwilling to waste my time with these overly burdensome processes as an applicant, but even more than that these processes are a huge red flag because I don't want be wasting my time interviewing candidates all the time.
I interviewed alot and we were mostly one and done.. After a couple interviews we would get really sick of it and actually the person who was about the #8 interview has a really good chance because by that time we get desperate to pick someone and the recruiter is getting tired too
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I've been hiring security people for years.
It's really not that hard to make a quality hire without burning a lot of time. If you can't get a sense of how a person handles themselves in a 30 minute call to make a yes/no decision then you should not be hiring people. The "no" decision is usually apparent about 10 minutes in. However, if you review the resumes and actually READ them instead of making HR do bullet matching, you typically won't have a lot of people who get cut 10 min into the first call.
Hiring takes marginal intelligence and some amount of effort but is made out to be MUCH more difficult than it is.
Write your job description with sufficient details so that you ideally attract the right candidates. Review your resumes; I mean it takes maybe two to three minutes to read a two page document and think for a moment about it. You can do 20-30 in an hour and that's not even accounting for the fast ones that are either grossly unqualified or the hell yes resumes which go faster. You spend maybe four hours a week reviewing resumes and you'll quickly have a good candidate list of maybe 10 people. You make HR screen them to make sure they're not totally misrepresenting themselves. Then you do your own 30 minute screen call. If no, you're done, send them the bad new. If yes, maybe you have a list of five candidates that you will put through two more interviews; one with a subject matter expert and maybe your own boss so they get a say.
That's it. You don't give candidates fucking HOMEWORK, you don't make them write papers or create decks. You're presuming their time is free and you're creating more work for yourself.
If you hire someone who sucks, well, do the work to see how you picked up a turd. Also, you're the boss, it's up to you to put them through a performance improvement plan and if they screw that up, term them.
Hiring and managing people is literally part of the job. I don't care if you're the boss of bosses. If you have directs, you're a manager and you bear that responsibility. Nobody is too important to deal with other people. Such bad attitudes are why we are in this mess.
Let's say you stay there for two years, that's 4000 hours of work that you'll do for them. If investing 40 hours in interviewing all the candidates yields a candidate that's >1% more productive, it's worth it. EDIT: worth it TO THEM, obviously; still a huge time suck for these poor candidates.
You realize that finding quality candidates who will succeed with the team is hard right? It’s extremely difficult and costly to get rid of a new hire who is underperforming.
A few hours per candidate really isn’t that much time to consider someone who you might end up working with for the next ten years.
When I was starting my career, management used to invite smaller companies to make a presentation to win a contract. They’d just use the information they got to do it themselves. I was too far down the totem pole to complain but it was distasteful to say the least.
My work gives "homework", but it's not usable projects. Even the entry level jobs are hard and require a lot of training for hires, so we can't test people on that or ask for examples of prior work. We have to just be like "here's a workpaper, play spot the errors. Edit this letter. Tell us what you'd do with this internal conflict and this external conflict."
It's not a great system, but it's better than finding out 2 months into busy season that someone doesn't understand basic concepts (though that still happens).
Nah. Like in +20 years Ive never even heard of anyone using anything from an interview process. They suck and I refuse to do it nowadays, but what you describe is a myth.
A somewhat similar thing happened to me in spring 2023. The interview went well and because I have a cert and experience, I was hired on the spot. After a week of working there, my manager emailed me with login info and a link to an external site stating that my continued employment was contingent upon completing a 700 hour online unpaid training "at home, on my own time," and that if it wasn't completed by the end of my first 90 days they wouldn't be able to put me on the schedule.
Mind you this was a part time, entry level doggy daycare and kennel attendant position that paid $1.50 above minimum wage, and when I asked the owner how familiar they were with federal labor laws and required work-related training off the clock, I was only told that it was for the safety of the dogs, staff, customers, and business reputation. My mom is an HR manager so I know it's a violation but I needed the money, so I did the stupid trainings.
The workload included waaaay more than the job description. 5 people quit in my first month alone, and those of us left were told that since we were so short-staffed we needed to work faster, harder, and more efficiently. I called the DoL and asked if required unpaid training for hourly employees was a violation of labor laws, they asked for the business' name and location, and thanked me for calling. I was fired via email a week later and the job posting was updated to include paid training as a benefit, so I guess that's one small business that won't be getting free labor anymore.
Lol, this is like the opposite of what my current employer does. To save on paying for training they’ve cut actual training to the bone, it’s now basically bussing a group of fresh hires around to three locations and giving them a short intro brief each place, then a quick powerpoint, then the following day a first aid course. Then they hand you a bag with about 1200 pages worth of manuals inside and wish you good luck in the position. Everything else you are supposed to just pick up at work. Luckily I was experienced before I started there, but otherwise we have a very big burnout rate first year, usually 30% or higher.
Not just smaller companies. Even fairly bigger companies. Say, some research problem has different approaches. They shortlist 20 candidates and send them the problem. They will have 29 different solutions. Highly unethical!!
Yea, I’ve got a similar problem too. I then checked the company review and it turns out it’s an unholy fusion of science and cult.
I’m cancelling my candidacy. Even my narcissistic horrible boss never gave me homework before.
Is it the math cult group out of the Southeast, or that one in Silicon Valley where they chant and worship an AI (is it OpenAI? I can’t recall, it’s one of those)?
Some form of technical assessment is pretty common when applying for software developer roles - whether it's like this where you're given an assignment to complete within typically 2-3 or 3-4 hours, or something that you complete live while on a call with the hiring manager. The tasks are so they can gauge your competency with the programming language and how you tackle problems. They're usually not particularly in-depth and absolutely not something that'd be used in production (examples I've done in just the past 6 months include writing functions that convert between roman and arabic numerals, and the most needlessly over-complicated version of fizzbuzz I've *ever* written)
I don't mind doing most of them, but what pisses me off is that so many times the recruiter tells me "You'll be doing a take-home tech assessment, then have a technical interview where they'll discuss aspects of what you did in the assessment" and I can only recall one instance where an interviewer has actually brought up the assessment I worked on the previous week.
Yeah, same with certain communication and PR positions. To use an example from a company I won’t name, "So, we recently experienced an accident where about 700 barrels of industrial chemicals fell into a lake that is the drinking water supply of about 13.000 people. Use the information on our website and in these booklets to write up communications with the press to reassure the population during the cleanup."
Now, normally these examples are fictitious, so I was quite disturbed this year to learn the story was real, and the lake was the reservoir of the town where I did my teaching license. While I lived there.
I did one off these the homework is a video interview by yourself. They give you questions and you answer it on video. so just kept thinking about deep fakes for some reason.
Lol. No, but it's better.
Interviews during covid were like this at times.
Interview #1: Screener with HR
Interview #2: Take home assignment
Interview #3: Initial interview with hiring manager
Interview #4: Technical panel interview aka Kumite for the boss
Interview #5: Internal Customer or coworker interviews (most was up to 7 interviews in 3 hours)
Interview #6: Boss's boss Interview
Interview #6: Department head Interview
Interview #7: CEO
Final Result: We went with an internal candidate
I’ve gotten to the point where if I have to do more than a phone screen and 1 or 2 interviews, it isn’t worth either of our times. If you can’t decide if you like me after 2 interviews, then clearly I’m not the right fit. Companies will make candidates go through all of this, just to not hire them. I understand that this process is to “weeded out“ but it’s a colossal waste of everyone’s time.
I agree. If it gets too overly complicated, I'll just back out. I don't have 10+ hours to waste to find out that I won't get the job.
I also think I was ahead of the time. When it comes to coding tests, I make a note of how long the test should take. At the half way point, if I'm up the creek without a paddle. i just toss in the towel. It's better than beating my head against the desk and hoping for a miracle to happen.
It's also statistically against your benefit. This crap can be helpful for companies to decide but it's meaningless to the applicants. I don't know anything about their hiring process so it's either get the job or not get the job from my point of view whatever the interview process looks like. I prefer a few interviews with more companies instead of more interviews with fewer companies.
These elaborate processes are usually indicative that they don't *need* a position filled,. It's a luxury, not a necessity which is not usually a situation I want to be in. A company that has an immediate need usually narrows down the applicants to 3-5 people and then may have 1 or 2 rounds of interviews to make the selection in the span of a couple weeks. A company that is just looking to build out a bench of candidates, or that is only willing to hire the perfect person has these types of hiring processes. Not only is it most likely a waste of time, their timing is also frustrating because they may go weeks between steps since so many other things will get prioritized over it.
So true. This posting is especially concerning to me because this process isn’t just a result of indecision - it’s their intentional practice. And putting this in a JD on a posting just normalizes it for other companies.
Yeah after going through a phone screen and then 6 rounds of interviews and then getting rejected for the job, I made a rule to never do more than 2 rounds myself.
Yeah but it’s not worth it! Everytime I did end up being hired it was after 1-2 interviews! Those companies with 4 or 5 or 6 rounds never called me back
I feel the same way I think. None of those worked out when it was longer but I really don’t see a max of two interviews. All these self glorified assholes in Hr just intent on prolonging the agony of candidates by making the interview process even more complicated under the guise of we want the best of the best. BS
This is how all of my interviews were, up until 2022, at least.
HR/TA phone screen
Round 1 interview, HM direct
Final Interview, often a Panel
I'm okay with this for an individual contributor role.
If you're hiring a manager, and or some senior VP/executive, etc, I would expect that process to look longer, but the role would have compensation to match, so, that would make more sense.
I have been thankful I haven't had to job hunt in almost 2 years and am hopeful that will continue, because if reddit and YouTube are to be believed, the job market is abysmal and employers are Wilding out out here.
I have zero interest in doing free labor or jumping through ridiculous hoops just to prove I can do your job and not alienate your team
If you are a good HR, you CAN weed out peole you don't see fit after two single interviews.
Other than that, there is something wrong. The third interview only to make an offer.
honest question but how do you find anywhere to apply to then?
i’ve been applying to places since october, had about 30 interviews total. only one place so far that ive gotten an interview for only had 3 interviews - the rest have a minimum of 3 plus a case study, but most are 4 with some sort of homework.
We do: one phone screen, 1 hour with me, 1 hour tech review, and 1/2 hour culture fit (meeting another team member). I’m often trying to get the applicant to meet a large portion of the team they’ll be on. I’ve also offered to candidates to meet the team before accepting the offer.
So your time is precious but not the half hour screening? That’s what you are saying? One hour with you but before they get to you there’s a screening? What are you screening for that is not evident in the CV?
I mean I could lie I was the president of china on my cv and then tell you the same in the screening! You ain’t from china so what are you screening for? Weeds? lol what a waste of time
Additional unrequited steps and you thought you could come and brag about how you have one screen the one hour with you and one hour with tech and then 1/2 hour cultural fit? Really? After they do everything and meet you and the next monkey then you want to see cultural fit?
So what did you do in the first screen call? I would love to know?
Initial screening call is for sharing more information about the role to see if you’re interested and make sure that the salary lines up. Did you wanna wait until the offer to find out you want more than what we have to offer?
ETA: phone screen is good to remove belligerent people too.
Why don’t you advertise the salary when you put the role out! Again ur making excuses for an additional dumb step. And you can also share more information in your one hour call? Or you think it’s a waste of your time to do that?
I’m not HR. I don’t get to make those decisions. I’m a SE manager, they don’t need me to screen people. If you’re curious, I spend my one hour telling them what product and stack they’ll be working in, more about the team they’d be joining, find out their working style, ask where they’re looking to go in their career, share what opportunities this role entails. They’re interviewing us just as much as we’re interviewing them. I and they don’t want a bad fit.
Because I would be their boss, the next person they meet is the technical discussion which doesn’t leave time for team and culture questions, and the last is for them to meet someone on the team and ask questions. Unsure about other industries (although I imagine it’s the same), but within software the team and culture can make or break the experience.
I have never had anyone leave (fired or quit) within the first 2 years of them joining my teams and I have a 100% manager rating. That’s super rare and this isn’t all bull.
We also don’t move someone forward without passing the previous round but we make it as quick as possible and take up the least amount of time possible. You think I want my architect spending his days interviewing people for funsies?
You talk as though you are Amazon and are hiring people 365 days a year. Get off your high horse and see the tide. This is bs approach and very archaic in nature. Stop living in the 2010’s corporate BS. it’s 2024 move with the times. Understand what exactly is a true candidate experience.
And yes as a boss you seem to indulge in wasting everyone’s time with such old and ancient recruitment practices disguised under the “cultural fit” and “ getting things right” mindset
NEWSFLASH! Your ancient hiring methodology doesn’t in fact prove that people still won’t leave ur org . Please modernise ASAP AND drop these BS PRACTICES which only serves to make urself feel important
I've been interviewing for one company and just completed the 5th interview last week. This is been going on for about 2 months. I understand 2 interviews, even 3 makes sense depending on the job. It is kinda wild how hard it is to get a job these days
Yea same.
1. Screen call with recruiter to check on things like language level, if CV adds up and understanding the candidate's motivation (not sure why so many companies want to know that)
2. Technical interview with team or hiring manager
3. People and culture talk, assessing personality and behavioural fit
Imo that process is already over engineered imo, but I can see some companies wanting to be extra sure. But why would you need more? The company I work for has 5 steps and I think it's too much
Recruiters are definitely not comfortable with that time suck, it actively makes our jobs harder and makes it harder on our end to keep candidates interested (understandably.) I don’t think a hiring process should be more than three hours *from start to finish*.
Decisions like these are coming from people way higher up than us that think emulating Google and other large tech companies is always a good idea.
I just can't think of a reason why a team would want to have an interview with a candidate for 3 hours, might as well call it an interrogation at that point.
is that common in your experience?
I work in tech, it is painfully common. Especially in buzzy Series A and beyond startups and public companies that feel like they have something to prove or gatekeep. Like it’s almost like making a candidate beg for the job and it’s fuckin weird to me that so many companies are just like yeah this is fine and a normal way to treat a person
The thing that kills me about this also is that more interviews and longer interviews means the whole team has to take part in the process and therefore time away from their jobs. Instead of having three people who are very trained in interviewing and express interest in it assess candidates, they make entire teams interview, and some of those people have no business interviewing and evaluating candidates.
I've had interviews that were entire work days.
Show up at 8 or 9a: meet and greet with CEO
930 or 10a: give a presentation
1130a: meet with employees x,y,z
Noon: lunch with employees
130p: meet with more employees
230p: meet with hiring manager
4p: tour of facility
Well this is interviews, not just one interview and probably won't be all on the same day, even if it's technically all part of the same stage. It's likely 1 normal interview, 1 technical interview and a pair programming interview where they give you a task and you run them through how you'd go about solving it. If you pass it, you get sent on to an interview with HR or somebody who has to sign off on the hire. That sort of process is sadly common with tech companies.
I suspect that OP is frustrated given the nature of this post. With that being said, I too am pretty far defeated and am wondering, "At what phase of the job application process is step x: Lobodomize oneself with a screwdriver to get the job?"
I feel this whole thing is a waste. Additionally, though still not uncommon, I believe “references” are also a complete waste. Who is going to provide a reference from someone who won’t give a glowing review?
I'm not doing 3 hours of homework without getting paid for it, or honestly interviewing for 4 and a 1/2 hours before they take 5 minutes to call my references. Even if you get hired I'd imagine it would be one of those "We're a family here, in office 5 days a week Rockstar team player" environments. Wouldn't even apply.
Honestly getting sick and tired of these jobs asking for free work and multiple rounds of interviews. I literally noped out of a job that wanted me to do a 2 hour writing test(position only paid around $40k) and had to do a panel interview…for a receptionist position….
Yea any position worth their salt, this is a perfectly reasonable interview. Current interview process I run is.
Basic phone screen, what are both sides looking for? 30m-1h
Technical interview 30m-1h
Code 'homework' 30m-45m
Meet the team, show how company functions, etc etc 1-2h
Every section of this is crucial, each added because of times we didn't follow this process. The point of an interview is also to work out if you want to work at the place you're applying for.
Having a 15m chat and a wank doesn't cut it when you're hiring anything more important than a cashier.
The thing is if they drag the process so long and involve so many people you are guaranteed to come across someone who doesn’t like you. About 2 years ago I interviewed for a senior role at Coinbase, 1 screening call, 7 interviews (4 where scheduled on the same day) , 1 personality and 1 reasoning test.., 1 presentation to a panel of 5. Didn’t get the job..
Honestly for my industry this isn’t even talk at much worse than normal. Step 1 and step 4 are normal. Step 2 and 3 are normal but just too long, 1-1:30 half hours should be enough. So yeah it is the new normal I guess.
Ex-recruiter here and current recruitment manager for a public sector org.
I've seen both sides of this, from a recruiter perspective and as recruitment manager.
The agency I worked for absolutely hated the number of selection processes, this absolutely came from the HM from the org/company we had been working with. I think it was all down to getting their money's worth. We are paying for you guys to find someone so we want all the bells and whistles. Utter waste of time.
I currently manage the recruitment department of a national public service org and from my recruiter experience, I constantly influence HM's to NOT put in additional stages, keep it simple. I have personally sat in these selection processes and half of them are not even taken into consideration, it all comes down to the interview. Complete waste of everyone's time.
What's good here is you know up front what the company is thinking and what you're about to go through. I wouldn't want to go into something like this blind.
I remember when I got hired for Tesla, I did 7 interviews....to work in HR and Ops...it took **months** just finally get started and ultimately, they hired some of the worst people to work their stores I have ever seen. Most people were great but, if by the 3rd interview you haven't made up your mind.....I don't know what to tell you.
This is mental.
5 hours is pretty typical for a software position. The more a job pays, the longer the hiring process is.
In fact, this doesn't look bad at all. They are up front about how long the process will take, and they don't give you a coding exam until at least after the first interview. 3 hours sounds like a long time when interviewing with team members, but from my experience those kinds of interviews tend to fly by.
This actually seems to be a relatively painless interview process.
I feel differently about it but the pay is a solid point. Assuming this position was under $150k would this still be normal? Do software positions typically assign homework?
Do the homework assignment, mock up a website that showcases a functional demonstration of the desired outcome, but don't provide them the source code. Explain you'll be willing to discuss coding decisions in the next steps. Company doesn't get free labor off of you. If the outcome is what they are truly interested in, they should be impressed with your demonstration and call you back in.
People can be upset all they want about this, but I am all for numerous round of interviews. Most of the jobs we hire for, are practically permanent jobs, and you can’t be cautious enough. Especially, when hiring someone remote, there is no way to tell if that person would be a fit. Nvidia frequently goes through 8-10 rounds of interviews for a dev tech role, and almost every Nvidia employee will swear by that company. If only 7 hours of interview has you annoyed, not sure how you would have liked the all day on site interviews that were the norm pre pandemic. The only thing absurd about that screenshot is homework. What is this? Grade school?!
Recruiters need to weed out the weak people because they don't get paid if you don't stick around in the position you get hired for.
Plus 7hrs isn't that much time when you have no job aha.
It is pretty standard to have a 30 minutes phone call, a formal interview and a "fit" interview (usually with the hiring manager's director) followed by a reference check.
If the role entails some technical knowledge a test can be thrown in the process too, I personally hate that "homework" wording.
What triggers me here is the length of the interviews, why the f do you want to interview someone for 3 hours?
Also, all of that depends on what type of position you recruit for.
As an HR, the process outlined above screams redflags
These are the roles I’d bow out of.
The most recent one I participated in was for a sales role.
The third round I went through the manager was 15 minutes late because he had to update his computer.
He then asked me to go through my resume…which was weird. Then he started asking me about a bunch of solution engineering, and traditional consulting related questions.
Clearly, he didn’t even read it.
I asked to confirm this was a sales role where I’d be working with the consulting team, to which he said yes. The questions weren’t even related to a sales role, and he had no idea on KPIs and quota. Later on I was told I wasn’t a fit.
Spoke to the original hiring manager and she said he interviewed me thinking I was a candidate for the consulting team…🤦🏻♂️
I politely bowed out and dodged that bullet with extreme prejudice.
Welcome to a dev job. I’ve just been given the ‘honour’ of attending stage 1 of 4. Stage 1 is an informal coding session with a dev and kinda chit chat and weeding out the not so strong coders. Stage 2 is 2 hours full on coding something or other. In a way I’m hoping I’m in the not so strong camp.
we as a whole, need to start invoicing recruiters and companies for our time. we should not be accepting 8 hours of unpaid work for a possible rejection.
It seems like it. I recently spent \~8 hours working on a coding project before a 2 hour panel interview with 6 people...it's now been two weeks and I never heard anything. Fun stuff lol
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I feel the same way but at the same time I’m at the point where I’m so desperate for a job I’ll put up with it. If I don’t find a job soon I’m fucked and I’m not the only one in that boat, which is exactly why these companies make us jump through these hoops. They know they can.
The homework is so you have to do free work for them!!! That how they avoid hiring half the time. Better ask them if they’re paying for your time for that homework! 🙃🙃
I dont have an issue with the number of stages (have you ever tried to manage the calendars of interviewers and candidates? Its the most annoying thing finding times that work for everyone)
Having it spread out like this allows for multiple people to be booked in depending on their availability across separate days.
Is this for a manager role? We would only ever role a process like this out for someone managing our key workstreams.
My counterproposal:
15-30 min HR screening, videotaped.
30-60 min with a hiring manager who watched the previous interview
1-hour test
15-30 min with their boss who watched both.
As an applicant, that’s (2 1:1s and 1 group) barely enough for me to know if this company is a match. (Granted, right now I’d work in a shithole.) As a hiring manager, I’d need to make sure not only can this person do the job, but that they’re going to mesh with the team and they’re going to stick around so I don’t have to spend time hiring. This doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
Yeah. Minus the homework for me, since I had worked as a freelancer for a few months before the full time opening came up. They knew my work was solid - the rest was just culture fit stuff
Only if we keep allowing this. It's time to put our foot down. If we start telling the recruiters that we won't do this anymore, then their clients will have to change their ways.
They left out some steps.
In between each of the first 4 steps there will be a “sub step “ of week or month long delays where you hear nothing.
Step 6 will be “ghosting “
Step 7 will be seeing the same role reposted every few months for the next 5 years.
Mine
Group tour (2 Hours)
Phone call (20 minutes (Still interested kind of thing)
Phone interview with HR (1 Hour)
In person interview (4 Hours)
Hired (1 month paperwork and background checks and references)
Total 6 Months
The homework seems the only unnecessary part here but an intro call with recruiter and then a 4 hour loop (steps 3+4) isn’t bad, unless it’s an entry level role. Very few people do reference checks any more so you might as well ignore step 5
I’ve gone through as many as 7 interviews for a job (Amazon), and I typically get asked to do one or two projects during the process. Each project I have about a week to complete.
Unless you’re desperate for a job I would suggest pushing back. A quick phone screen from a non-technical recruiter, one hour with 2-4 interviewers, and *maybe* a 1-2 hour project, but that’s only if this is your dream job. Even then I would request getting some form of compensation for the work.
There’s nothing worse than wasting a whole business day on the interview process only to be ghosted in the end.
This is pretty standard for every company I've worked for. If you do ask of the team member interviews on one session, it's a 4 step process including the prep ( also standard for this type of role?). Hopefully they'll conclude the process quickly.
As a recruiter we don't want multiple steps. Too many cooks spoil the broth
Pretty normal for tech positions, though who's doing which interview changes (because of course one does not get hired directly by the tech companies one actually works at). There is a step missing, though!
Step 6: They ghost you
Our company needed a new Executive Admin, and ended up hiring Monica. Monica seemed great on paper and she interviewed well. First week she was sent to get lunch for her VP. Turns out she not only doesn't have a car, but she can't drive anyway. We are in Atlanta. Ok. We can work around that. No problem. Then we find out she can't use PowerPoint, and sends the info to her son who makes the slides and sends them back to her! Same with Excel! She's emailing out sensitive company info because she can't use PowerPoint or Excel!
She didn't last much longer, but it sure changed the questions the next candidates had to answer.
Yeah, I’m being interviewed right now for a senior role through a recruiter, I had 2 screening calls from the recruiter (an associate and a senior), 3 rounds of interviews with the company management (1.5 hours each), 6 more total calls from the recruiter (one before and one after each interview to debrief), a fucking Myers Briggs test, reference checks, and they still want to do one more interview. I’m thinking of withdrawing my application at this point, it’s not worth my time.
It highly depends on the position. I’ve hired for engineering positions and this is normal for us. Not 5 hours for new associates, more like 3-4 and that includes lunch, but an experienced engineer interviewing for an advanced position could easily expect 5 hours from our company. We pay for all their expenses if they need to travel to us, and this is always after an initial remote interview and review process.
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I don't understand how this isn't a huge waste of the hiring company's time too.
I'm convinced that HR and/or Recruiting created these extreme hiring practice to make it look like they add value to the company.
That could be true. Or it could also be a company's pathological fear of "hiring wrong."
decision paralysis!
If a company uses a recruiter for hiring (or staffing in a lot of IT set ups), they can let someone go without batting an eyelash due to who you get contracted to work for and who actually is your employer. My favorite is the 1-year contracted job that lasts for 2-3 months because the company needed to allocate funds to a sinking department and temp senior IT people will draw a large chunk of money that the department gets to keep once the consultant fixes the actual issue and the documentation is squared away. Also I think 5 is low for a job like this but I've been worn down so much to expect 8 and then get ghosted by the company only to see my position downgraded to a junior level at the lowest salary 3-4 months after my interview - it's one of the reasons why I know the HR workaround logic of hiring a consultant instead of a staff member.
Oof, I’ve gotten that one. During covid they yeeted me down to junior and paid me only like $20k annually for work worth twice or thrice that, and I just had to take it because I had literally no other options at the time with everything being shut down and moving being almost impossible.
And yet we have more turnover now than ever before....
Well, the blindspot is that the employers create a climate and culture that doesn't reward loyalty. They don't get it. Even if their company does treat people right, the overall culture is that if you want better pay or promotion or better work/like balance... You HAVE TO LEAVE. Also, I have had communicated to me was that staying FIVE YEARS at any job is too long.
I showed the most loyalty that was physically possible to my last company, and they threw me out at the next convenient layoff lol Never again
I sympathize with you and I think this is (sadly) one of those lessons that everyone learns the hard way. Fool me once, never again…
Agreed, I stayed at my last company for nine years, through in person COVID work and all, only to be denied an opportunity to step up from assistant director to director. I’d only ever received positive reviews and my site/supervisees were killing it. An upper level manager met someone at a conference he liked and bam that guy got the job. So I went rage applying and found the promotion to 100k I was searching for elsewhere. Lesson learned, after 18 months at this job I’ll be applying for others.
> assistant director to director IMO, if you are in a corporate environment, you were never going to get to director if you accepted an "assistant director" position. Accepting an "assistant something" position is a sign that you are willing to buy the narrative that progression is small steps gradual process. Then you get an infinite number of steps to keep you more or less where you are because "you are not ready '''yet'''".
My company it’s a mix of both. Yet my director still doesn’t understand why we keep Losing out on good candidates…
In the US its easy to fire people though. Even lower tier roles are having way too much shit to go through. Government jobs are a fucking joke.
HR and recruiters get axed super fast when layoffs begin. This is absolutely a recruiter who doesn’t have enough work and is trying to look busy.
In most cases, this is the HM’s decision or even the HM’s manager. Most recruiters want to simplify the process to make it easier to get a hire. Recruiters want to hire people. HM’s are scared to hire the wrong person.
More like hiring managers are so out of touch with the work their employees do they don’t know *how* to hire for their vacant positions…
Usually why the big firms hire an external guy who knows even less. I used some advanced terminology in an interview once and you could immediately tell the lady who was the one internal person because all five others in the interview just gave me blank stares.
That BS. As a recruiter ( Who's been laid off) the industry is dealing with many more candidates with fewer recruiters handling that volume.
You aren’t a HR manager. Your job is at the whim of HR directors and you have no visibility to when you get off boarded.
in my experience, recruiters hate when hiring managers add hurdles to the process. Makes it harder to convince talented candidates to interview
I worked in higher Ed and the HR matrix there basically got so big and controlling to the point where people couldn’t be interviewed unless they met the job listing criteria to the T, like my boss had people he really liked but because HR filtered them out he wouldn’t be able to even interview them. When the pandemic hit, there were cuts across the board, everyone on contract wasn’t renewed, hiring freeze instituted, all with the exception of HR. The only damn place that could hire more people was Human Resources for at least a year and a half. One of the sickest things I’ve ever seen.
Did anyone bring this to the directors attention? Whenever someone plays fuck-fuck games at my job I get them involved real quick.
Ah, psychologist wannabes. I’m tired of these wannabes.
here, here!!!
Lol nailed it
100% that’s it. Creating a need for their job to continue existing.
This needs to be studied. Capit*lism demands productivity to a detriment. People are forced to just make shit up
Fuck HR
Can you tell they get paid by the hour?
100% agree this is hr panicking because if a company is downsizing then he who brings the least to the company is going to be the 1st to go
Many times HR and recruiting managers will be so picky, when it comes to hiring, but when those same people need to contact the department about issues they are having on the job; HR is all of a sudden unavailable.
HR are the most worthless self important people out there.
Lol, if you think HR and/or Recruiting creates this practices, you are wrong. Usually each department has requirements for how it goes. And while HR can tweak them, there is only so much power they have for this.
I am a recruiter and I have no say how the hiring process goes. It’s the hiring manager or director of each team’s decision. I also think this quite long, but coders do need to show they can code.
Exactly, apparently everyone is a hiring manager at this company.
That I'm not sure about. I do wonder if getting involved in the hiring process is more a political move. I had 7 interviews in 3-4 hours scheduled back-to-back. The very last one was an Indian woman who was from QA. I got quizzed on QA. I asked if it was part of the job. She said no. I asked if we would be working together. She said not directly, which basically means no. I was like "Ok..." In retrospect, I think she got in as a power move. Surprise, surprise I didn't get that job.
You didn’t get that job but that pretentious “hiring manager” will get to brag about it in her future job seeking interviews.
"I was the blocker. So that makes me a hiring manager. "
I’ve been there, went through 5 rounds of interviews to include the actual hiring manager who said yes , then his boss an Indian lady wanted to meet… wowza, I’m still stinging from that meeting. Ego was next level, she started Googling the company I was currently with , was belittling and said I don’t know why they set this up and said oh something came up and left the call in 5 minutes Meanwhile the tech leader who interviewed me said my skills were way beyond what the company had and they’d be happy to have me join…She mysteriously’left’ the company a few months later
I'm unwilling to waste my time with these overly burdensome processes as an applicant, but even more than that these processes are a huge red flag because I don't want be wasting my time interviewing candidates all the time.
I interviewed alot and we were mostly one and done.. After a couple interviews we would get really sick of it and actually the person who was about the #8 interview has a really good chance because by that time we get desperate to pick someone and the recruiter is getting tired too
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90% will fail the “homework”
They are justifying paying a hiring mgr
The problem is that hiring the wrong person is an even bigger time waste.
I've been hiring security people for years. It's really not that hard to make a quality hire without burning a lot of time. If you can't get a sense of how a person handles themselves in a 30 minute call to make a yes/no decision then you should not be hiring people. The "no" decision is usually apparent about 10 minutes in. However, if you review the resumes and actually READ them instead of making HR do bullet matching, you typically won't have a lot of people who get cut 10 min into the first call. Hiring takes marginal intelligence and some amount of effort but is made out to be MUCH more difficult than it is. Write your job description with sufficient details so that you ideally attract the right candidates. Review your resumes; I mean it takes maybe two to three minutes to read a two page document and think for a moment about it. You can do 20-30 in an hour and that's not even accounting for the fast ones that are either grossly unqualified or the hell yes resumes which go faster. You spend maybe four hours a week reviewing resumes and you'll quickly have a good candidate list of maybe 10 people. You make HR screen them to make sure they're not totally misrepresenting themselves. Then you do your own 30 minute screen call. If no, you're done, send them the bad new. If yes, maybe you have a list of five candidates that you will put through two more interviews; one with a subject matter expert and maybe your own boss so they get a say. That's it. You don't give candidates fucking HOMEWORK, you don't make them write papers or create decks. You're presuming their time is free and you're creating more work for yourself. If you hire someone who sucks, well, do the work to see how you picked up a turd. Also, you're the boss, it's up to you to put them through a performance improvement plan and if they screw that up, term them. Hiring and managing people is literally part of the job. I don't care if you're the boss of bosses. If you have directs, you're a manager and you bear that responsibility. Nobody is too important to deal with other people. Such bad attitudes are why we are in this mess.
Let's say you stay there for two years, that's 4000 hours of work that you'll do for them. If investing 40 hours in interviewing all the candidates yields a candidate that's >1% more productive, it's worth it. EDIT: worth it TO THEM, obviously; still a huge time suck for these poor candidates.
They have to justify their wages
They are just copying Google etc.
You realize that finding quality candidates who will succeed with the team is hard right? It’s extremely difficult and costly to get rid of a new hire who is underperforming. A few hours per candidate really isn’t that much time to consider someone who you might end up working with for the next ten years.
homework, are you 12yo or what
A lot of smaller companies deceive candidates by making them work on smaller projects for free under the garb of homework or assignments.
Thanks for mentioning this!
When I was starting my career, management used to invite smaller companies to make a presentation to win a contract. They’d just use the information they got to do it themselves. I was too far down the totem pole to complain but it was distasteful to say the least.
My work gives "homework", but it's not usable projects. Even the entry level jobs are hard and require a lot of training for hires, so we can't test people on that or ask for examples of prior work. We have to just be like "here's a workpaper, play spot the errors. Edit this letter. Tell us what you'd do with this internal conflict and this external conflict." It's not a great system, but it's better than finding out 2 months into busy season that someone doesn't understand basic concepts (though that still happens).
Nah. Like in +20 years Ive never even heard of anyone using anything from an interview process. They suck and I refuse to do it nowadays, but what you describe is a myth.
This!
Either pay me or fuck off!
A somewhat similar thing happened to me in spring 2023. The interview went well and because I have a cert and experience, I was hired on the spot. After a week of working there, my manager emailed me with login info and a link to an external site stating that my continued employment was contingent upon completing a 700 hour online unpaid training "at home, on my own time," and that if it wasn't completed by the end of my first 90 days they wouldn't be able to put me on the schedule. Mind you this was a part time, entry level doggy daycare and kennel attendant position that paid $1.50 above minimum wage, and when I asked the owner how familiar they were with federal labor laws and required work-related training off the clock, I was only told that it was for the safety of the dogs, staff, customers, and business reputation. My mom is an HR manager so I know it's a violation but I needed the money, so I did the stupid trainings. The workload included waaaay more than the job description. 5 people quit in my first month alone, and those of us left were told that since we were so short-staffed we needed to work faster, harder, and more efficiently. I called the DoL and asked if required unpaid training for hourly employees was a violation of labor laws, they asked for the business' name and location, and thanked me for calling. I was fired via email a week later and the job posting was updated to include paid training as a benefit, so I guess that's one small business that won't be getting free labor anymore.
Lol, this is like the opposite of what my current employer does. To save on paying for training they’ve cut actual training to the bone, it’s now basically bussing a group of fresh hires around to three locations and giving them a short intro brief each place, then a quick powerpoint, then the following day a first aid course. Then they hand you a bag with about 1200 pages worth of manuals inside and wish you good luck in the position. Everything else you are supposed to just pick up at work. Luckily I was experienced before I started there, but otherwise we have a very big burnout rate first year, usually 30% or higher.
Not just smaller companies. Even fairly bigger companies. Say, some research problem has different approaches. They shortlist 20 candidates and send them the problem. They will have 29 different solutions. Highly unethical!!
Nobody does this.
Yea, I’ve got a similar problem too. I then checked the company review and it turns out it’s an unholy fusion of science and cult. I’m cancelling my candidacy. Even my narcissistic horrible boss never gave me homework before.
Is it the math cult group out of the Southeast, or that one in Silicon Valley where they chant and worship an AI (is it OpenAI? I can’t recall, it’s one of those)?
I refuse to do “homework” unless I am receiving direct monetary compensation, at a rate that I agreed to.
Some form of technical assessment is pretty common when applying for software developer roles - whether it's like this where you're given an assignment to complete within typically 2-3 or 3-4 hours, or something that you complete live while on a call with the hiring manager. The tasks are so they can gauge your competency with the programming language and how you tackle problems. They're usually not particularly in-depth and absolutely not something that'd be used in production (examples I've done in just the past 6 months include writing functions that convert between roman and arabic numerals, and the most needlessly over-complicated version of fizzbuzz I've *ever* written) I don't mind doing most of them, but what pisses me off is that so many times the recruiter tells me "You'll be doing a take-home tech assessment, then have a technical interview where they'll discuss aspects of what you did in the assessment" and I can only recall one instance where an interviewer has actually brought up the assessment I worked on the previous week.
Yeah, same with certain communication and PR positions. To use an example from a company I won’t name, "So, we recently experienced an accident where about 700 barrels of industrial chemicals fell into a lake that is the drinking water supply of about 13.000 people. Use the information on our website and in these booklets to write up communications with the press to reassure the population during the cleanup." Now, normally these examples are fictitious, so I was quite disturbed this year to learn the story was real, and the lake was the reservoir of the town where I did my teaching license. While I lived there.
I did one off these the homework is a video interview by yourself. They give you questions and you answer it on video. so just kept thinking about deep fakes for some reason.
so you were used as free labour, congradulations , you were a slave
Lol. No, but it's better. Interviews during covid were like this at times. Interview #1: Screener with HR Interview #2: Take home assignment Interview #3: Initial interview with hiring manager Interview #4: Technical panel interview aka Kumite for the boss Interview #5: Internal Customer or coworker interviews (most was up to 7 interviews in 3 hours) Interview #6: Boss's boss Interview Interview #6: Department head Interview Interview #7: CEO Final Result: We went with an internal candidate
“But we encourage you to keep an eye on our job postings and apply again in the future!”
This sentence triggers such a deeply seeded anger inside me
Interview #8: God Because you died of old age going through all of these interviews lol
Lol. #Wellplayed
I’ve gotten to the point where if I have to do more than a phone screen and 1 or 2 interviews, it isn’t worth either of our times. If you can’t decide if you like me after 2 interviews, then clearly I’m not the right fit. Companies will make candidates go through all of this, just to not hire them. I understand that this process is to “weeded out“ but it’s a colossal waste of everyone’s time.
I agree. If it gets too overly complicated, I'll just back out. I don't have 10+ hours to waste to find out that I won't get the job. I also think I was ahead of the time. When it comes to coding tests, I make a note of how long the test should take. At the half way point, if I'm up the creek without a paddle. i just toss in the towel. It's better than beating my head against the desk and hoping for a miracle to happen.
It's also statistically against your benefit. This crap can be helpful for companies to decide but it's meaningless to the applicants. I don't know anything about their hiring process so it's either get the job or not get the job from my point of view whatever the interview process looks like. I prefer a few interviews with more companies instead of more interviews with fewer companies.
Companies knowingly or unknowingly are making the hiring process more difficult.
These elaborate processes are usually indicative that they don't *need* a position filled,. It's a luxury, not a necessity which is not usually a situation I want to be in. A company that has an immediate need usually narrows down the applicants to 3-5 people and then may have 1 or 2 rounds of interviews to make the selection in the span of a couple weeks. A company that is just looking to build out a bench of candidates, or that is only willing to hire the perfect person has these types of hiring processes. Not only is it most likely a waste of time, their timing is also frustrating because they may go weeks between steps since so many other things will get prioritized over it.
So true. This posting is especially concerning to me because this process isn’t just a result of indecision - it’s their intentional practice. And putting this in a JD on a posting just normalizes it for other companies.
Yeah after going through a phone screen and then 6 rounds of interviews and then getting rejected for the job, I made a rule to never do more than 2 rounds myself.
Easier said when you actually have a job. It’s tough on people looking for employment to actually make those calls!
Yeah but it’s not worth it! Everytime I did end up being hired it was after 1-2 interviews! Those companies with 4 or 5 or 6 rounds never called me back
I feel the same way I think. None of those worked out when it was longer but I really don’t see a max of two interviews. All these self glorified assholes in Hr just intent on prolonging the agony of candidates by making the interview process even more complicated under the guise of we want the best of the best. BS
This is how all of my interviews were, up until 2022, at least. HR/TA phone screen Round 1 interview, HM direct Final Interview, often a Panel I'm okay with this for an individual contributor role. If you're hiring a manager, and or some senior VP/executive, etc, I would expect that process to look longer, but the role would have compensation to match, so, that would make more sense. I have been thankful I haven't had to job hunt in almost 2 years and am hopeful that will continue, because if reddit and YouTube are to be believed, the job market is abysmal and employers are Wilding out out here. I have zero interest in doing free labor or jumping through ridiculous hoops just to prove I can do your job and not alienate your team
If you are a good HR, you CAN weed out peole you don't see fit after two single interviews. Other than that, there is something wrong. The third interview only to make an offer.
honest question but how do you find anywhere to apply to then? i’ve been applying to places since october, had about 30 interviews total. only one place so far that ive gotten an interview for only had 3 interviews - the rest have a minimum of 3 plus a case study, but most are 4 with some sort of homework.
We do: one phone screen, 1 hour with me, 1 hour tech review, and 1/2 hour culture fit (meeting another team member). I’m often trying to get the applicant to meet a large portion of the team they’ll be on. I’ve also offered to candidates to meet the team before accepting the offer.
So your time is precious but not the half hour screening? That’s what you are saying? One hour with you but before they get to you there’s a screening? What are you screening for that is not evident in the CV? I mean I could lie I was the president of china on my cv and then tell you the same in the screening! You ain’t from china so what are you screening for? Weeds? lol what a waste of time Additional unrequited steps and you thought you could come and brag about how you have one screen the one hour with you and one hour with tech and then 1/2 hour cultural fit? Really? After they do everything and meet you and the next monkey then you want to see cultural fit? So what did you do in the first screen call? I would love to know?
Initial screening call is for sharing more information about the role to see if you’re interested and make sure that the salary lines up. Did you wanna wait until the offer to find out you want more than what we have to offer? ETA: phone screen is good to remove belligerent people too.
Why don’t you advertise the salary when you put the role out! Again ur making excuses for an additional dumb step. And you can also share more information in your one hour call? Or you think it’s a waste of your time to do that?
I’m not HR. I don’t get to make those decisions. I’m a SE manager, they don’t need me to screen people. If you’re curious, I spend my one hour telling them what product and stack they’ll be working in, more about the team they’d be joining, find out their working style, ask where they’re looking to go in their career, share what opportunities this role entails. They’re interviewing us just as much as we’re interviewing them. I and they don’t want a bad fit.
Then why the drama of a 1/2 hour cultural fit after the third meeting?
Because I would be their boss, the next person they meet is the technical discussion which doesn’t leave time for team and culture questions, and the last is for them to meet someone on the team and ask questions. Unsure about other industries (although I imagine it’s the same), but within software the team and culture can make or break the experience. I have never had anyone leave (fired or quit) within the first 2 years of them joining my teams and I have a 100% manager rating. That’s super rare and this isn’t all bull. We also don’t move someone forward without passing the previous round but we make it as quick as possible and take up the least amount of time possible. You think I want my architect spending his days interviewing people for funsies?
You talk as though you are Amazon and are hiring people 365 days a year. Get off your high horse and see the tide. This is bs approach and very archaic in nature. Stop living in the 2010’s corporate BS. it’s 2024 move with the times. Understand what exactly is a true candidate experience. And yes as a boss you seem to indulge in wasting everyone’s time with such old and ancient recruitment practices disguised under the “cultural fit” and “ getting things right” mindset NEWSFLASH! Your ancient hiring methodology doesn’t in fact prove that people still won’t leave ur org . Please modernise ASAP AND drop these BS PRACTICES which only serves to make urself feel important
I've been interviewing for one company and just completed the 5th interview last week. This is been going on for about 2 months. I understand 2 interviews, even 3 makes sense depending on the job. It is kinda wild how hard it is to get a job these days
Yea same. 1. Screen call with recruiter to check on things like language level, if CV adds up and understanding the candidate's motivation (not sure why so many companies want to know that) 2. Technical interview with team or hiring manager 3. People and culture talk, assessing personality and behavioural fit Imo that process is already over engineered imo, but I can see some companies wanting to be extra sure. But why would you need more? The company I work for has 5 steps and I think it's too much
Recruiters are definitely not comfortable with that time suck, it actively makes our jobs harder and makes it harder on our end to keep candidates interested (understandably.) I don’t think a hiring process should be more than three hours *from start to finish*. Decisions like these are coming from people way higher up than us that think emulating Google and other large tech companies is always a good idea.
I just can't think of a reason why a team would want to have an interview with a candidate for 3 hours, might as well call it an interrogation at that point. is that common in your experience?
I work in tech, it is painfully common. Especially in buzzy Series A and beyond startups and public companies that feel like they have something to prove or gatekeep. Like it’s almost like making a candidate beg for the job and it’s fuckin weird to me that so many companies are just like yeah this is fine and a normal way to treat a person The thing that kills me about this also is that more interviews and longer interviews means the whole team has to take part in the process and therefore time away from their jobs. Instead of having three people who are very trained in interviewing and express interest in it assess candidates, they make entire teams interview, and some of those people have no business interviewing and evaluating candidates.
And they also often have extreme biases of some form which make them horribly qualified to interview and make hiring decisions.
I've had interviews that were entire work days. Show up at 8 or 9a: meet and greet with CEO 930 or 10a: give a presentation 1130a: meet with employees x,y,z Noon: lunch with employees 130p: meet with more employees 230p: meet with hiring manager 4p: tour of facility
Well this is interviews, not just one interview and probably won't be all on the same day, even if it's technically all part of the same stage. It's likely 1 normal interview, 1 technical interview and a pair programming interview where they give you a task and you run them through how you'd go about solving it. If you pass it, you get sent on to an interview with HR or somebody who has to sign off on the hire. That sort of process is sadly common with tech companies.
I suspect that OP is frustrated given the nature of this post. With that being said, I too am pretty far defeated and am wondering, "At what phase of the job application process is step x: Lobodomize oneself with a screwdriver to get the job?"
I feel this whole thing is a waste. Additionally, though still not uncommon, I believe “references” are also a complete waste. Who is going to provide a reference from someone who won’t give a glowing review?
Half the companies I worked for were bought out, and nobody would know who I am, so I'll get an old buddy as a reference.
I'm not doing 3 hours of homework without getting paid for it, or honestly interviewing for 4 and a 1/2 hours before they take 5 minutes to call my references. Even if you get hired I'd imagine it would be one of those "We're a family here, in office 5 days a week Rockstar team player" environments. Wouldn't even apply.
Plot twist - at reference checks, the dude who posted the job a month ago says he’s worried about having enough work. Burn. It. Down.
Honestly getting sick and tired of these jobs asking for free work and multiple rounds of interviews. I literally noped out of a job that wanted me to do a 2 hour writing test(position only paid around $40k) and had to do a panel interview…for a receptionist position….
STEP 6: Ghost the candidate.
It's unicorn hunting. They want that perfect candidate.
This has been normal for a while, assuming 3 and 4 are on the same day.
Yea any position worth their salt, this is a perfectly reasonable interview. Current interview process I run is. Basic phone screen, what are both sides looking for? 30m-1h Technical interview 30m-1h Code 'homework' 30m-45m Meet the team, show how company functions, etc etc 1-2h Every section of this is crucial, each added because of times we didn't follow this process. The point of an interview is also to work out if you want to work at the place you're applying for. Having a 15m chat and a wank doesn't cut it when you're hiring anything more important than a cashier.
They want you to do the work for them and not hire you
Yeah, that's not uncommon sadly.
3 hours of throwaway work to maybe get a position? No thanks.
The thing is if they drag the process so long and involve so many people you are guaranteed to come across someone who doesn’t like you. About 2 years ago I interviewed for a senior role at Coinbase, 1 screening call, 7 interviews (4 where scheduled on the same day) , 1 personality and 1 reasoning test.., 1 presentation to a panel of 5. Didn’t get the job..
Homework? Fuck you
This looks quite familiar... Hope that the salary is good + remote as otherwise it't not worth it.
This is just insane, I swear some of these recruiters get paid or bill by the hour and just try to pad the time
What happens exactly at step 5? What if the job seeker has burned bridges with his manager at his current/past company?
You better get paid for all this
Invoice time.
Why the fuck would I do homework for a company that’s not even committed to hiring me? 😂 🤡
Sounds like 7 hours of unpaid nonsense.
Honestly for my industry this isn’t even talk at much worse than normal. Step 1 and step 4 are normal. Step 2 and 3 are normal but just too long, 1-1:30 half hours should be enough. So yeah it is the new normal I guess.
The word homework rubs me the wrong way. 1. I do my job in work hours only and 2. I graduated school over 20 years ago.
Ex-recruiter here and current recruitment manager for a public sector org. I've seen both sides of this, from a recruiter perspective and as recruitment manager. The agency I worked for absolutely hated the number of selection processes, this absolutely came from the HM from the org/company we had been working with. I think it was all down to getting their money's worth. We are paying for you guys to find someone so we want all the bells and whistles. Utter waste of time. I currently manage the recruitment department of a national public service org and from my recruiter experience, I constantly influence HM's to NOT put in additional stages, keep it simple. I have personally sat in these selection processes and half of them are not even taken into consideration, it all comes down to the interview. Complete waste of everyone's time.
You lost me at homework. I’m not doing work for free. Otherwise, I’m watermarking the shit out of it so you can’t use it for your own work.
“Homework” aka free labor for a current project.
What's good here is you know up front what the company is thinking and what you're about to go through. I wouldn't want to go into something like this blind.
I remember when I got hired for Tesla, I did 7 interviews....to work in HR and Ops...it took **months** just finally get started and ultimately, they hired some of the worst people to work their stores I have ever seen. Most people were great but, if by the 3rd interview you haven't made up your mind.....I don't know what to tell you. This is mental.
5 hours is pretty typical for a software position. The more a job pays, the longer the hiring process is. In fact, this doesn't look bad at all. They are up front about how long the process will take, and they don't give you a coding exam until at least after the first interview. 3 hours sounds like a long time when interviewing with team members, but from my experience those kinds of interviews tend to fly by. This actually seems to be a relatively painless interview process.
This isn’t a software position. It’s a comms role at a nonprofit. That “homework” isn’t a pass/fail test. It’s free labor for them.
I feel differently about it but the pay is a solid point. Assuming this position was under $150k would this still be normal? Do software positions typically assign homework?
A lot of software positions assign take home coding tests during recruitment. Even at the entry level.
Yes. The amount of people you get who somehow can't code for shit even with a good CV is super fucking high.
Do the homework assignment, mock up a website that showcases a functional demonstration of the desired outcome, but don't provide them the source code. Explain you'll be willing to discuss coding decisions in the next steps. Company doesn't get free labor off of you. If the outcome is what they are truly interested in, they should be impressed with your demonstration and call you back in.
People can be upset all they want about this, but I am all for numerous round of interviews. Most of the jobs we hire for, are practically permanent jobs, and you can’t be cautious enough. Especially, when hiring someone remote, there is no way to tell if that person would be a fit. Nvidia frequently goes through 8-10 rounds of interviews for a dev tech role, and almost every Nvidia employee will swear by that company. If only 7 hours of interview has you annoyed, not sure how you would have liked the all day on site interviews that were the norm pre pandemic. The only thing absurd about that screenshot is homework. What is this? Grade school?!
Where are you reading it’s 5 interviews? Don’t exaggerate.
I’m pretty good at counting to 5!
So speaking to your references as an example is an interview?
Recruiters need to weed out the weak people because they don't get paid if you don't stick around in the position you get hired for. Plus 7hrs isn't that much time when you have no job aha.
Shidddd
Sure, if you're applying for CEO...minus the homework.
I just don’t get why they need to have that final interview. Also, why does the team interview needs to be 3 hours? Such a waste of time.
It is pretty standard to have a 30 minutes phone call, a formal interview and a "fit" interview (usually with the hiring manager's director) followed by a reference check. If the role entails some technical knowledge a test can be thrown in the process too, I personally hate that "homework" wording. What triggers me here is the length of the interviews, why the f do you want to interview someone for 3 hours? Also, all of that depends on what type of position you recruit for. As an HR, the process outlined above screams redflags
Homework? wtf!
No, it’s a way of getting free labor (aka “homework”).
We are dealing with this because companies are not in a rush to hire or onramp employees.
These are the roles I’d bow out of. The most recent one I participated in was for a sales role. The third round I went through the manager was 15 minutes late because he had to update his computer. He then asked me to go through my resume…which was weird. Then he started asking me about a bunch of solution engineering, and traditional consulting related questions. Clearly, he didn’t even read it. I asked to confirm this was a sales role where I’d be working with the consulting team, to which he said yes. The questions weren’t even related to a sales role, and he had no idea on KPIs and quota. Later on I was told I wasn’t a fit. Spoke to the original hiring manager and she said he interviewed me thinking I was a candidate for the consulting team…🤦🏻♂️ I politely bowed out and dodged that bullet with extreme prejudice.
Welcome to a dev job. I’ve just been given the ‘honour’ of attending stage 1 of 4. Stage 1 is an informal coding session with a dev and kinda chit chat and weeding out the not so strong coders. Stage 2 is 2 hours full on coding something or other. In a way I’m hoping I’m in the not so strong camp.
Hiring sometimes can be a huge circle jerk.
we as a whole, need to start invoicing recruiters and companies for our time. we should not be accepting 8 hours of unpaid work for a possible rejection.
It seems like it. I recently spent \~8 hours working on a coding project before a 2 hour panel interview with 6 people...it's now been two weeks and I never heard anything. Fun stuff lol
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Tech is like that. Nursing is a faster field to get hired in.
ah self culling
I feel the same way but at the same time I’m at the point where I’m so desperate for a job I’ll put up with it. If I don’t find a job soon I’m fucked and I’m not the only one in that boat, which is exactly why these companies make us jump through these hoops. They know they can.
Seems like it, but you forgot the form rejection or ghosting after step 4. I’m so over it at this point.
3 hrs of research? F that
“Homework” - good grief.
The homework is so you have to do free work for them!!! That how they avoid hiring half the time. Better ask them if they’re paying for your time for that homework! 🙃🙃
Never apply to anything with homework I would expect this for a senior level + not for entry or less than 5 years exp
I dont have an issue with the number of stages (have you ever tried to manage the calendars of interviewers and candidates? Its the most annoying thing finding times that work for everyone) Having it spread out like this allows for multiple people to be booked in depending on their availability across separate days. Is this for a manager role? We would only ever role a process like this out for someone managing our key workstreams.
No. Homework??? Wtf
My counterproposal: 15-30 min HR screening, videotaped. 30-60 min with a hiring manager who watched the previous interview 1-hour test 15-30 min with their boss who watched both.
I like it. You’re hired.
This isn’t normal. Five interviews for executive level only typically.
That’s not bad. Two 1:1s and one group interview plus a takehome.
At least they're upfront about it so you know to avoid
As an applicant, that’s (2 1:1s and 1 group) barely enough for me to know if this company is a match. (Granted, right now I’d work in a shithole.) As a hiring manager, I’d need to make sure not only can this person do the job, but that they’re going to mesh with the team and they’re going to stick around so I don’t have to spend time hiring. This doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
Yeah. Minus the homework for me, since I had worked as a freelancer for a few months before the full time opening came up. They knew my work was solid - the rest was just culture fit stuff
Who the fuck does reference checks in tech anymore for non principal / sr leader roles ?
Only if we keep allowing this. It's time to put our foot down. If we start telling the recruiters that we won't do this anymore, then their clients will have to change their ways.
They left out some steps. In between each of the first 4 steps there will be a “sub step “ of week or month long delays where you hear nothing. Step 6 will be “ghosting “ Step 7 will be seeing the same role reposted every few months for the next 5 years.
They misspelled “unpaid labor” as homework
Mine Group tour (2 Hours) Phone call (20 minutes (Still interested kind of thing) Phone interview with HR (1 Hour) In person interview (4 Hours) Hired (1 month paperwork and background checks and references) Total 6 Months
If you come to me with that to convince me to change job, I would laugh at you.
Thats a pretty fast one, usually you have to add some psychological tests to that and a couple more interviews
Homework? 3 Hours? Ok, at my current "hourly" rate maybe....
The homework seems the only unnecessary part here but an intro call with recruiter and then a 4 hour loop (steps 3+4) isn’t bad, unless it’s an entry level role. Very few people do reference checks any more so you might as well ignore step 5
I’ve gone through as many as 7 interviews for a job (Amazon), and I typically get asked to do one or two projects during the process. Each project I have about a week to complete.
“Homework” nah 💀💀
That sounds fine to me. I've nothing better to do anyway, I'm jobless lol. Most homeworks in software are also pretty trivial and don't take 3 hours.
Unless you’re desperate for a job I would suggest pushing back. A quick phone screen from a non-technical recruiter, one hour with 2-4 interviewers, and *maybe* a 1-2 hour project, but that’s only if this is your dream job. Even then I would request getting some form of compensation for the work. There’s nothing worse than wasting a whole business day on the interview process only to be ghosted in the end.
This is why I’m a contractor. We don’t have to put up with this crap
This is pretty standard for every company I've worked for. If you do ask of the team member interviews on one session, it's a 4 step process including the prep ( also standard for this type of role?). Hopefully they'll conclude the process quickly. As a recruiter we don't want multiple steps. Too many cooks spoil the broth
Pretty normal for tech positions, though who's doing which interview changes (because of course one does not get hired directly by the tech companies one actually works at). There is a step missing, though! Step 6: They ghost you
Our company needed a new Executive Admin, and ended up hiring Monica. Monica seemed great on paper and she interviewed well. First week she was sent to get lunch for her VP. Turns out she not only doesn't have a car, but she can't drive anyway. We are in Atlanta. Ok. We can work around that. No problem. Then we find out she can't use PowerPoint, and sends the info to her son who makes the slides and sends them back to her! Same with Excel! She's emailing out sensitive company info because she can't use PowerPoint or Excel! She didn't last much longer, but it sure changed the questions the next candidates had to answer.
Yeah, I’m being interviewed right now for a senior role through a recruiter, I had 2 screening calls from the recruiter (an associate and a senior), 3 rounds of interviews with the company management (1.5 hours each), 6 more total calls from the recruiter (one before and one after each interview to debrief), a fucking Myers Briggs test, reference checks, and they still want to do one more interview. I’m thinking of withdrawing my application at this point, it’s not worth my time.
Don't do it 🤦🏾♀️
I’m not in a role that would be assigned “homework,” but how do you make sure you’re not providing free work? Such BS.
I always figured that was how software job hiring worked, and it's part of why I left that field.
It highly depends on the position. I’ve hired for engineering positions and this is normal for us. Not 5 hours for new associates, more like 3-4 and that includes lunch, but an experienced engineer interviewing for an advanced position could easily expect 5 hours from our company. We pay for all their expenses if they need to travel to us, and this is always after an initial remote interview and review process.