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.
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.”
I’ve been through this a couple times already, when your company is “hiring” and flexes “record profits” but you also see mid-level managers start to disappear and no new people actually start working, you need to understand that it’s the first signs of your whole company is about to get digested by private equity.
It’s the dream of every CEO with a moderately successful company to get the interest of some giant whale of a company who specializes in digesting smaller companies and skimming off just the profitable assets, be it technology or talent or existing clientele. The buyout is usually in the millions, and the private equity company will chew up the remaining employees and company structure like one of those industrial grinders they make youtube channels to watch shred engine blocks and the like.
To get the dark gaze of Sauron to fix upon your company, you have to inflate its value and potential, and that starts with working your numbers to show profit rising and show your need to expand by hiring more people, by creating listings and even whole hiring departments, but not actually do any hiring.
When you come out the other side unemployed, you will then have to wade through about 50% ghost listings from companies who are also trying to do this same thing and won’t return your call or they will make you jump through hoops so they can say they have “new talent in the running” for new openings.
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.
That’s one thing that’s more profoundly frustrating about the whole mess, these giant carnivorous whales have already taken into account that not every meal they digest is going to be profitable, they make enough money from the ones that do turn a profit that they can write off the destruction of entire, functioning companies for no goddamn reason as “the cost of doing business.”
This is not sustainable.
Sometimes the purpose of your acquisition is just to eliminate a competitor.
Yup. Either eliminating a competitor, or getting ahold of some obscure patent that they don’t want to be stuck leasing indefinitely. Or they want to be the ones to lease the patent for exorbitant amounts, and they’re willing to write off a short term loss for longer term profits.
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.
What you’re describing is just the most pessimistic view towards work broadly, it’s going to feel like that no matter what your hiring process looks like.
It’s more accurate to say that if a company makes you go through extended steps and strings you along, it’s more likely they’re flexing for private equity and have no intention of staying in business.
I did hiring, I needed help, and I did multi-step interviews because I really don’t want to waste time with people who don’t want to work. When your job is managing others, you will be the bad guy to everyone who hates working, and you need to weed those people out before they cost you and other people on the team just trying to get through the day.
That said, 7 steps is absurd, but it’s totally reasonable to expect an interview with your direct manager and one or two more with your direct manager’s boss and/or HR.
Also, group-interviews don’t mean they’re treating you like a performer, that’s again the anti-work pessimism, but it is ridiculous if more than three people are interviewing you in a single meeting, depending on what the work entails.
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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.
Really depends on how much money is involved. A junior position, how much is there really to discuss. Someone at the top of their field should take longer because they are interviewing the company.
It’s really hard to get enough info in 1h. I’ve had several morning or afternoon interviews, though that felt comprehensive enough.
At my last job it was just the HR interview and an interview with my prospective boss, but my boss’ idea of an interview was to make me take a lengthy, ridiculous test he designed himself that was mostly questions he could have just asked me, including a bunch of weird lateral thinking questions cribbed from “This Google interview question will stump you” clickbait, plus intentional interruptions during the test to see how I handled the unexpected.
I felt kind of insulted by it but I’m glad I stuck it out, because he turned out to be a great boss, who just happens to have strange ideas about interviewing.
If there are more than 2 interviews, then the hiring process isn’t designed for you.
It’s designed to populate the schedules of other people so they can justify their positions. It’s a problem with increasingly larger portions of the corporate world.
Mine have all been 3. Phone screen, phone interview, and in-person.
They get 2 interviews at most from me if there isn’t a panel or skills interview they told me about in that process. I had a prospective job try to schedule a 3rd general interview once, with no panel/skills in the process, and I asked them what more they needed to deliberate on. I heard them out about their reasoning and told them that it was clear to me they are wasting my time, hung up, and moved on. I’m not going to answer the same dipshit interview questions over and over for the same crap job that’s going to underpay and overwork me then lay me off as soon as it benefits shareholders.
@usamemes
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.
My current company won’t let use talk to potential hires because we haven’t gone through the company training for It. It’s great.
A couple companies ago I was doing the hiring for the team and they pushed for the whole group interview thing, it was a huge waste of time. It’s not just wasting the interviewees time, it’s just another pointless meeting for the employees. It’s indicates the company doesn’t value anyone’s time.
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
