How not to interview someone who already has a job (2011)

http://www.recruitingblogs.com/m/blogpost?id=502551%3ABlogPost%3A1466641

by jkw • 11 years ago

60 69 11 years ago

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

andreyf4• 11 years ago

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

jmartinpetersen• 11 years ago

Because you want to minimize friction. They already have a job so they don't really need you. You want them to want you, and making them jump through your hoops (one way or the other) is alienating.

andreyf4• 11 years ago

Nah, you want to minimize friction for the people you want to hire and maximize it for people you don't want to hire. Even without the evaluation signal coding exercises give you (one could argue that it's hard to make it representative of actual work), I think there is a correlation between someone who will spend a couple hours working on a coding problem to demonstrate their skill and the kind of person you want to hire.

pandaman4• 11 years ago

This is a question of hiring people who already have a job. Would you spend few hours solving an interesting problem while being gainfully employed and, hopefully, having interesting problems of your own? Honest question. I, for one, would not.

andreyf4• 11 years ago

Absolutely, for a company that I want to work with. For companies that I'm not super excited about, I politely decline-for-now. Seems to me like that saves everyone tons of time. Do you really want to hire someone that doesn't want to be there enough to spend a couple of hours coding for you and doesn't have open source code to evaluate them on?

bucky• 11 years ago

I would! I love coding exercises meant to gain information about a candidate; they're like yardsticks for my professional growth. I love evaluating how I solve a problem now vs how I would have solved it while interviewing for the job I'm leaving. I also just enjoy solving problems. To me, doing a coding exercise is like doing a Tuesday crossword puzzle (they're never hard enough to be stressful) that I get to show off: Look how correctly I solved this, and in ink, with no mistakes, with very well written, clear words.

I don't see it as a waste of time; it's about the potential payoff, which is a (presumably) better job with better opportunities. I wouldn't apply to a job unless I was reasonably sure I wanted to work there anyway. I might be very lucky in that I've worked for good companies in the past few years and the only reason I'd leave one of these companies is for a much much better one. Usually when I leave a job, I've become bored of the problem domain anyway and am looking to solve new problems.

Disclosure: 31 year old man, no kids, I live with my partner.

parados• 11 years ago

This is exactly what we do where I work. We send them a small problem that any competent person can solve in 15-30 mins in Python/Java/C++. It is amazing what an effective filter this is and submitted results range from fully tested code, innovative O(1) solutions down to code submitted in MS Word that gives the wrong answer.

As a front line filter it is cheap, simple and revealing.

ddebernardy2• 11 years ago

Yes, and 15 min makes sense. What the parent wrote ("spending a few hours solving an interesting problem") does not.

nodelessness• 11 years ago

As someone who is employed, I don't have the inclination to solve a open ended problem that somehow subjectively interests you or some individual arbitrarily in what little time I have in my life. I have other projects I could be working on, my family to give my life to. Not engage in something like this. The test problem should be small. Not a 'coding project'. It is unethical to ask for anything more.

ddebernardy2• 11 years ago

I'm not so sure that a software engineer who doesn't have any time (because you know, family) or desire (because it's unpaid work) to spend on open source software would suddenly find it OK to spend more than short amounts of time on a company's test project -- especially if they have a job or clients or any type of regular work lined up.

crdoconnor3• 11 years ago

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

Won't hold my breath.

I'm sick to the back teeth of most of these mini coding projects, though. They're too often sent by companies who aren't even sure they want to hire at all or wouldn't hire you anyway for some unrelated reason (age, race, etc.). The projects are always boring and almost never suitable for a portfolio.

It's also too easy to hit the 'send email' button and too easy to ignore the responses. Unless there is some cost for the company sending you the mini-project, a lot are going to waste your time.

For this reason, I actually prefer interviews. They're going to at least do a cursory examination and reject you outright before wasting an hour of their own time.

drglitch2• 11 years ago

Agree on mini coding, useless projects - especially when an HR drone sends out Java test to a python dev :)

Another thing to keep in mind is that for a lot of people who are already employed, permission must be obtained from current employer before contributing to open source (and more and more companies are actively enforcing that unfortunately).

mavelikara2• 11 years ago

Let me describe the situation from the other side.

Where I am employed we are actively hiring. In late 2012, three of us started a small experimental projected which became a hit with our customers. As more feature requests came rolling in we realized that we need a bigger team to work on the project. We have been hiring since the start of 2014. We now have a team of about 15 engineers, but we still have few more open positions.

From our experience, resumes usually are not a good predictor of anything we care for. The only useful thing it tells us is what firms the candidate has worked at, and what those groups were doing while the candidate was there.

When a candidate comes onsite we spend significant time showing a demo of our product, what our groups ambitions are, discussions to understand what the candidates career goals are etc. We also have the standard white-board interviews, often attempting to design a small feature on our product. This takes significant effort on our part. Before investing this time, we will prefer to see some code from the candidate.

The candidate is offered an option to show us (1) some code they wrote which is out in the public domain, OR (2) some code from their employer (if their employment terms allow it) OR (3) solution to a small coding question we provide. Our coding question takes about 4-5 hours of the candidates time.

This process has worked very well for us. We have been able to screen our candidates with very impressive resumes who wrote horrible code. We have also found many great candidates (some who are my colleagues now!) with ordinary looking resumes.

I hope I have tried to explain our thought process behind asking candidates for some code.

Decade4• 11 years ago

I have a limited number of hours and a lot of need for money. I would be a lot happier with these multi-hour code challenges if successful completion led to guaranteed job offer. As it is, they disproportionately waste my time, for the amount of care the recruiter puts on the rejection.

sheepmullet• 11 years ago

Or if they offered 30-50% above market if you aced their tests.

hidro• 11 years ago

I strongly prefer this approach, as long as the project is interesting enough to attract engineers, and allows you to assert the aspects you want to see in them. The coding project we give to candidates is to implement an open source Hacker News client. If it were me I won't mind doing one and put it on my portfolio (which I did), regardless of whether I pass the interview.

hvs2• 11 years ago

If you are asking someone to develop something for "a few hours" on their own time, you should be willing to pay them for it. Companies regularly pay recruiters 30% of the first year salary for candidates, companies should be willing to pay a few hundred dollars to someone that they are asking to dedicate a significant chunk of time for the "honor" of developing code for them.

jghn4• 11 years ago

Do you also ask that they pay you for the time spent on site during an interview? It's possible that these projects are replacing on site time.

FWIW we have a coding project but it's part (a large part) of the on site and really just replaces the whiteboarding and such. Candidates are not asked to code on the fly in ither sessions

macspoofing• 11 years ago

If you're interviewing 10 people for 1 position, you've just wasted 9 people's time. Maybe a smaller problem that takes a few minutes, but not hours.

JoeAltmaier3• 11 years ago

That's what the resume is for, including a code resume. No, I'm not going to work a day for free for you.

kephra2• 11 years ago

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

Can someone explain why HR managers have such a severe prejudice against hiring unemployed people? Imho, its their job, to select those people from the unemployemnt pool that fits the company, and have the skills. A HR who only poaches employed people, is doing a bad job, and hiding his laziness under an evil prejudice.

gaius• 11 years ago

It's called validation, or social proof, and it shows up in all sorts of ways, incl. dating.

kephra2• 11 years ago

So a HR who successfully poached an employed coder, hired someone who is willing to drop work at the moment he gets a better offer.

The other HR stupidity is, that its much easier to get a raise, if you switch jobs often, then if you stay in a job long enough to be productive.

The result are projects broken by HR causing to much fluctuation.

crdoconnor3• 11 years ago

This is standard corporate CYA behavior.

I think this quote from Keynes sums it up best:

"A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional and orthodox way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him. It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances, and to confess a conventional respectability, which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men."

The Ivy league is a conventional and orthodox disaster. Nobody can blame you for hiring them, their credentials were impeccable!

That previously unemployed guy, on the other hand...

Ollinson• 11 years ago

I wonder if there are actual educational benefits to attending an ivy league school beyond the commonly mentioned networking.

Given a competent A student is there knowledge you will gain from the finance department at say Harvard that you wouldn't see at state university?

A better example might be what's the measurable difference between an engineering degree at a low tier school versus MIT?

mooreds2• 11 years ago

I don't think she was saying that hiring unemployed people is a poor choice, just that if you require a number of on site interviews, your hiring process requires so much of the candidate's time you are selecting out people who may not have that time available. Some employed folks may make the time, but others won't.

Note that the process she suggests (one phone screen, one on site and a decision) is good for unemployed applicants as well.

Quick hiring decisions are good for all parties involved, as long as they are thorough.

JoeAltmaier3• 11 years ago

Oh she's not implying it; she's saying loud and clear "Never hire unemployed people! They suck. They lost their job probably because they were laid off as the bottom 10% Their last employer didn't want them and neither do you!"

Its terribly difficult to get hired when unemployed because of this bias.

notahacker• 11 years ago

A HR who only poaches employed people, is doing a bad job, and hiding his laziness under an evil prejudice.

But the reverse is also true. HR managers that devise a recruitment process so arduous only the unemployed (and possibly then only the involuntary unemployed) will consider participating in it is doing a bad job. There are good unemployed candidates, but there are more good employed candidates, and most of the good unemployed candidates also have better options than your 6-8 interview process, which also screams of bureaucracy, indecisiveness and pedantry further down the line.

hibikir• 11 years ago

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

One local employer, always looking for people, and not a bad place to work, has 3% of people pass the on-site interview, and it's not especially onerous: It shows you have general programming competency. Everything their exercise asks is something you'll use on the job. But most people that apply fail, because there is a local glut of people that know less than a proper entry level candidate, but ask for senior level salary. Those people tend to be the first to get laid off, and the ones that stay unemployed the longest.

There are great unemployed people out there sometimes: A SF startup that is 95% remote laid off 60% of their staff three weeks ago, and anyone would be fortunate to get that unemployed talent when they can. HR has to shift through a lot of unemployed people that you probably don't want to hire to find a great programmer, and a great programmer probably already has a network that gets them snapped up in days.

It's absolutely not fair to the good programmers that end up being unemployed for one reason or another, but given my experience interviewing, it's not hard to see why someone unemployed and without a good network gets passed up far more often than they deserve.

DanBC2• 11 years ago

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

How can you say that? All being emoyed means is that you got through the interview process and haven't annoyed anyone with the power to fire you. That hire may well be incompetent and looking to move out before they get fired.

vonmoltke3• 11 years ago

One local employer, always looking for people, and not a bad place to work, has 3% of people pass the on-site interview, and it's not especially onerous: It shows you have general programming competency.

How many people who apply get an on-site interview? Has this company considered if their prescreening process is broken and is actually filtering out mos of the people who could pass the on-site interviews?

eli_gottlieb2• 11 years ago

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

I think I have to call Base Rate Neglect Fallacy here. Being already-employed may be evidence that someone is competent, but without knowing the strength of that evidence (ie: how many incompetents get hired anyway) and the base rate of competence/incompetence among all job-seekers, employed or not, we can't really say much about whether it's a good practice to poach rather than hire from the general pool.

throw_away• 11 years ago

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

Decade4• 11 years ago

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

For coders, a major offender is the variety of TrueAbility/Codility/HackerRank/custom code challenges. FizzBuzz is fine. You want to filter out people who just can't code. Beyond that, timed challenges don't tell the recruiter anything about how a person interacts with others, or maintains code, or researches solutions for new problems.

And then, after I successfully complete the code challenge, investing time that I really can't afford, they just look at my resume and delete my application, anyway.

pan69• 11 years ago

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

pbhjpbhj• 11 years ago

Was there actually a [further] job available or was it a ruse to have you do a days unpaid work?

krampian• 11 years ago

> I'll invoice you for the privilege

I would have no hesitation on actually bringing this up. Charge him your regular rate and refund him 50% off your fee if he later hires you.

ilitirit• 11 years ago

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

At one of my last interviews I was told I don't look like I want the job enough because I was dressed casually. I was very confused. I reminded them that they requested an interview with me several times, even after I told them I was not on the market, and that I had actually taken time of work for the interview. I only showed up because they practically begged me. I was so annoyed at some of the questions. "What value can you add to this company?" No sir, how can YOU make it worth MY while to join you, considering that I have to leave a position that I'm perfectly comfortable with? After finally understanding that I was happy with my current job, one of the interviewers asked me "So why are you here wasting our time?" I was infuriated.

The whole experience left a bitter taste in my mouth. I don't think I would ever consider interviewing at that company again.

pjmorris• 11 years ago

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

You can tell a lot about a company from your very first interactions with them. I'd steer clear of anything more elaborate than what she described, they are probably guessing about how to hire, and that mean's they're probably guessing about how to run a business. That kind of risk can be entertaining and instructive, but might not be great for your career.

JoeAltmaier3• 11 years ago

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

marcosdumay• 11 years ago

Or, an even shorter TLDR: Decide!

How much does it cost to have 7 people interview a candidate anyway? Even without considering that the best candidates will run away, how can companies justify that?

eli_gottlieb2• 11 years ago

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

bhayden• 11 years ago

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

vitalinos• 11 years ago

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

How not to interview someone who already has a job (2011)

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