They’re not trying to hire talent. They’re trying to hire people who will do whatever you tell them to do.
Before Amazon was as big as it is today, they approached me for a position. I had three different 1 hour interviews, then I found out they still expected me to fly to Seattle for 3 full days of interviews. I told them I was not interested. Before I knew much about corporate America, my gut told me that was a bad sign. Glad I listened.
During the pandemic, interviews seemed to have endless rounds of ridiculous questions. There needs to be a law that interviewers need to pay you at the position’s rate for anything beyond 2 hours. It would eliminate so much bullshit.
If their hiring process is 7 rounds they’re not hiring talent, they’re hiring people willing to jump through hoops, give up all dignity, and be subservience.
Same with group interviews. It’s not about talent, it’s about who will be the best little lap dog.
I have to disagree with the group interview part. There are definite uses for it, especially when you work on something that absolutely demands collaboration. You can pretty quickly see who will dominate a discussion or try to do everything themselves, and who will give everyone a fair shake. If the company cares about their culture and not just raw talent, they can learn a lot from group interviews. It also helps if youre hiring A LOT of people.
My company hires 100+ college graduates every year. Group interviews are an essential part of the process. I still work with some of the people in my group interview from 15 years ago
“Culture fit” means “are you going to disrupt our little codependent circle-jerk?”
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If it’s more than 2 it doesn’t matter. I already picked up another offer by the time you get around to finding a date.
Beyond 2 interviews, the point is not to test you. It is to make you feel small.
You should know that a lot of companies engage in performative hiring processes. They post jobs and accept applications to create the appearance that they are hiring. It could be to send a message to investors, or competitors, or current employees. If you find yourself in yet another round of group interviews with potential team mates, consider that maybe you’re the show and they are the audience. “Look what we could have instead of you. Look how eager people are to work here, younger, cheaper, more qualified. We are in control of this situation.”
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My small company (~120 employees) got swallowed by a giant whale (rhymes with “Crisco”) of a company like this. Except that everybody in the original small company got laid off six months later, and we had no assets whatsoever except for the “talent”. Crisco even got stuck with the lease for our recently-renovated office and had to buy it out. Our C-suite got large stock awards when we were acquired but they all got dismissed, too. I have no fucking idea why it happened.
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Sometimes the purpose of your acquisition is just to eliminate a competitor.
If the company can’t put the interviews into a single 3-hour visit, that’s a red flag to me. And even three hours is too long, should be an hour max, but whatever, I understand that the bosses all have busy schedules, so what can you do.
It’s really hard to get enough info in 1h. I’ve had several morning or afternoon interviews, though that felt comprehensive enough.
It’s so wild how things have become today. When I got my first “grown-up” job in 2007, I had one interview. The first half was legit interview, while the second half was a tour of the workspace, where I was spoken to as if I was already hired. By the end, I was hired, and I stayed with that job for a few years.
I had just turned 18 and was still in my final year of high school. The application for the job was a packet of physical paperwork (no online applications.) I found it by walking around and looking for “Help wanted” signs in windows.
Goddamn, how things have radically changed. These days, I can’t find anything decent without relying on recruiters on Indeed reaching out to me. I have found jobs through searching myself, but they were shitty. Recruiters reaching out to me years ago started me on a career path I hadn’t originally searched for (but that I enjoy and have stuck with since then), and then found me again last year when I was looking for a better company to work for. It’s nice to be sought out, but I’d like more to be able to see all my options and have a choice in the matter. Oh, and it’d be real nice to not have to rely on a private third-party company to know who’s hiring in the first place.
But the work required to research multiple places on one’s own, put in applications and multiple rounds of interviews… it’s exhausting and prohibitive.
Looking back to how I got that first job, it feels like I squeezed through a rapidly-closing door. Hiring simply doesn’t work that way anymore.
I’m trying to keep things much more like your first job experience than what seems like the average experience nowadays. although it’s not really in my control anymore, and I’m not even sure if I would be included in future interviews or if my manager would handle it entirely.
but anyways when it was my responsibility before I had a manager, as somebody who was most often on the other side of it and who more identifies as an average worker than as management, I tried to be respectful of the applicants.
The way I ran interviews was simple - tell me your experience, tell me how you approach problems, and come on site to walk around the shop and talk about the machines or parts that we have on the floor. generally I think I know halfway through the phone interview if I’m going to hire this person or not, but we still do the in-person one to confirm it. and prior to that we had one short HR screening call. so a total of three steps in the interview process, roughly 5, 30-60, and 30-60 minutes each (the better the applicant was, the longer the interview would go, because it was less about figuring out if they would be hired and more about just chatting about things that we were both interested in related to the work). I’m not the best at reading people, but if anything ran over 30 minutes I would always stop and explicitly say “hey we’ve covered everything that we came here to do, so there is no need to continue talking unless you want to, the interview itself is over”. The thing is, by that point, people have already shown whether or not they have a good approach to problems and are able to effectively talk about how things work.
so the obvious next question is “did we hire anybody who did not want to continue talking after the 30 minutes was up and I asked them this question?” — and the answer to that is yes, we did. and one of them is one of our best employees.
I can also say, from my experience on this side of the hiring process (even though I’m not external facing)… holy shit we get so many shitty applicants, or applicants that look good on paper but are completely shit in the first interview. One of the examples I always bring up is the guy who “did the calculations”. whenever I asked him what exactly they did to determine that something was the appropriate solution for something, his response was that “we did the calculations”. not him specifically, but “we”. I think that interview was like 14 minutes long because I hadn’t dealt with that before and I was really trying to give him a chance to give actual answers to things. and then soon after that, we got a guy who said even less, and the interview literally ended before 4 minutes was up.
I find it weird that the US seems to have more interview rounds than most countries, despite it being the place where it’s easiest to fire people for not meeting expectations.
They’re two sides of the same coin.
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Right this is the first time I’ve had to do 3 interviews for a job. Fuck. Before that it was either you were hired or told you’ll hear back. Not this having to meet everybody and their mom by the third fuckin
dateinterview, not only that but what if they don’t get you? You wasted time and gas they ain’t gonna pay for.3 is a lot, though not the most egregious. My worst experience was five interviews ranging from HR to the fucking CEO only for them to low ball me at the end of it.
I did not take the job.
Alot of it comes from every layer of management adding on shit. So HR wants a “Culture” interview, The org mandates a specific system design interview. Project manager wants to interview the high level candidate for leadership skills, then ontop of that the team itself wants a panel aswell as an interview for specific domain experience. Usually my company tries to group it all into one or two days
I used to do hiring and it has been a solved problem for at least half a century now through trial periods.
I really don’t understand these multi-round interviews - what can you possible learn from them? It’s 2 short interviews -> 2-4 week well paid contract -> employment or not. Works every single time unless you are so disorganized that you simply can’t implement this then lack of talen is really the least of your worries.
Ubuntu: 14 stages
Ubuntu 24.04
What the actual fuck
True story. They strung the applicant along for like 4 months of homework and appointments. They asked for 20-year-old hich-school transcripts!
Then they ghosted for a month before lobbing an “another direction” fuckoff-o-gram.
Fucking piece of work.
This bullshit should be considered some form of torture, holy shit
We do 2 rounds + optional initial phone screen if we can’t do initial vetting based on recruiter reputation or other info.
So if you don’t get the other info and the applicant doesn’t want to do the phone screening do they even have a chance at getting the job?
If not, then it’s not optional is it?
Optional on our end. We skip it 90% of the time.
Phone screen is basically a 10 minute check if a candidate has any idea about stuff in their resume or is it complete BS and they are not worth getting one of the senior employees to interview them.
Didn’t really address my point there, but thank you for explaining what a phone screening is.
OK, let me address your point then:
Phone screening is skipped for most candidates, but for the few that we do want to screen it is mandatory to continue. Since this post is from potential employee perspective I should have used “extra” instead of “optional”.
- For about 90% of candidates our interview process has two rounds: skill evaluation by a senior employee or employees (e.g. a technical interview for software devs) that doubles as “vibe check” followed by 2nd round with a manager that is more focused on culture fit, making sure both sides have matching expectation and ends with compensation negotiation.
- For about 10% of candidates who don’t come with a recommendation from a current employee or from someone in our network, or from one of the recruiters we trust and doesn’t have something else backing claims in their resume there is a quick phone screening before all that - just to filter out resumes that are full of BS.
- VP and up recruitment is more complex, but that is to be expected and I doubt anyone has a problem with that.
We manage to get a candidate from first round to offer/rejection in less than a week most of the time (2 if there is a screen) and have both high long term employee retention and very low percentage of hires who don’t work out.
I suspect that as company grows (we’re closing on 100 employees) and recruitment moves further and further away from “the trenches” and people doing the hiring are less and less capable of judging candidate competence managers start adding more rounds hoping they will filter out the ones that don’t meet the requirements.
the few that we do want to screen it is mandatory to continue.
Thankyou.
@usamemes
