bobb3456

I agree with everything you've said except for the bit about puzzles -- I've never found any correlation between the results from burn-the-ropes/odd-shaped manhole cover-type questions and strong programming skills. I've had at least one candidate who did superbly on the puzzlers (had clearly not seen them before)- best performance we'd seen-and could not program his way out of a wet paper bag. We stopped the puzzlers shortly thereafter. Brain teasers are a waste of time.

Telling the candidate anything specifically negative invites argument and misinterpretation. In practice, the better companies always use the "other qualified candidates" letter. The worse ones tell you nothing.

Doomed to fail. If the company doesn't hire the person, that person considers me responsible. That opens me to potential legal liability. Why expose your employees to that risk?

The biggest problem I see in hiring people is that good resumes get filtered out by HR departments because the resumes don't have the precise keywords. Fix that by hiring smarter HR people.