There exists a continuum of hiring practices which place more or less burden upon candidates. I would encourage HNers with input into their company hiring practices to choose less burdensome approaches over more burdensome approaches, particularly when less burdensome approaches also yield additional signal about ability.
A thing you can expect to be asked in 2016: you can expect to be asked to have an on-site interview in a city you do not live in. (How many people will be asked to do this for the SFBA or NYC? Literally jumbo jets full, this week.) For some candidates, this will involve more than 16 hours on planes, a (minimally) overnight stay in a business hotel, and six solid hours of interviews in the course of an 8~10 hour day. This requires minimally 2~3 days of these candidates' lives.
Most companies keep "conversion rate between onsites and job offers" very close to their vest. To put it mildly: it is not guaranteed that if you're flown out you will get an offer.
If you are hypothetically designing your interview process, and you replace the onsite with even an excessively long project, that's a win. The project can be written at the candidate's own pace and schedules conveniently around their other obligations. They do not have to arrange child care, take off time from work, or make tradeoffs like "Do I do the project or do I attend a friend's wedding?"
If you fly across an ocean and start bombing an interview, that's a terrible result for everyone. If you happen to be doing a project and discover "Oh, wait a minute, I've really miscalibrated here: this is far above my level of expertise with $FOO and honestly if this is the character of the work then I'm not sure I want to do it", then you have an easy option: simply close the window and, maybe, send a two-sentence email to the person who you were talking to.
Smart use of projects as a filtering mechanism can minimize costs to candidates and the company of administering high-cost testing (e.g. onsites, long projects, etc) to candidates who will ultimately not be successful at receiving offers and/or defer the high-cost assessments until the anticipated chance of receiving an offer is "very high."
>For some candidates, this will involve more than 16 hours on planes, a (minimally) overnight stay in a business hotel, and six solid hours of interviews in the course of an 8~10 hour day. This requires minimally 2~3 days of these candidates' lives.
... To put it mildly: it is not guaranteed that if you're flown out you will get an offer.
..., and you replace the onsite with even an excessively long project, that's a win. The project can be written at the candidate's own pace and schedules conveniently around their other obligations. They do not have to arrange child care, take off time from work, or make tradeoffs like "Do I do the project or do I attend a friend's wedding?"
All true but my observation is that the companies that put candidates through multi-day-out-of-town interview processes can afford to miss out on the candidates that can't do it. Tellingly, the type of companies like Google and Microsoft that put a lot of burden on candidates hire heavily from a pipeline of fresh college graduates. Not surprisingly, a lot of 22-year olds don't have existing jobs or kids they have to juggle to commit to intensive interview processes. Sure, they also interview older middle-aged candidates but the benchmark tolerance for hoop-jumping is set by the 22-year olds therefore you won't get sympathy from employers about disrupting your life to stay in the running. For those companies, even if they are flying you out, you're still in the "evaluation" stage and could be 50/50 accept/reject.
Contrast that with boutique consulting firms that hire from the 30+ age bracket (often by poaching other consulting firms' employees.) A lot of their candidates already have existing (lucrative) jobs. Most of their evaluation is
done on multiple phone interviews. If the company decides to fly you to their headquarters to interview, you basically have the job unless you unzip your pants and urinate on the interviewer's desk. The onsite interview is not a technical screening but a personality sanity check. At that stage, you're 90/10 accept/reject.
When many valley companies look for senior people (and they do), they still use the same mechanisms to hire those 30 somethings out of consulting firms. And that's when they have a 1/4 on site to offer ratio(es, that's an actual ratio of senior engineers that pass the phone screening.
In one case I know, the interviewing + travel took two work days and two nights. That's thousands of dollars for a consultant! Add to that the grand or so of travel expenses for the company, interviewer time and overall, every senior hire costs applicants + company well over ten thousand dollars, past paying the recruiting team.
Compare that to a company that does the whole process over Hangouts/ScreenHero. The waste is amazing.
>Sure, they also interview older middle-aged candidates but the benchmark tolerance for hoop-jumping is set by the 22-year olds therefore you won't get sympathy from employers about disrupting your life to stay in the running.
So basically they find a legal way to discriminate against older candidates?
If I had some process that fit male candidates far better than female candidates, with no clear benefit compared to other processes that had less of a biased fit, would that be a problem?
> All true but my observation is that the companies that put candidates through multi-day-out-of-town interview processes can afford to miss out on the candidates that can't do it.
All companies can afford to waste less money than they need too.
Perfect, I've done +-4 onsite interviews and only got accepted in one of them. I get really nervous in on site interviews being judged by usually two people at the same time while I try to solve something.
One company in Amsterdam, just last week, I went through a four step process, the last one being the onsite interview. I did really well in the first two, but then in third I went with a wrong approach to the problem and couldn't get my mind in the right position again. The person judging me just kept putting pressure. I got really nervous and couldn't do any more interviews that day... my mind really got completely blocked for the rest of the day.
That happens and, really, the company spent so much time of me (and me on them) for everything to be decided on that? feels wrong..
There exists a continuum of hiring practices which place more or less burden upon candidates. I would encourage HNers with input into their company hiring practices to choose less burdensome approaches over more burdensome approaches, particularly when less burdensome approaches also yield additional signal about ability.
A thing you can expect to be asked in 2016: you can expect to be asked to have an on-site interview in a city you do not live in. (How many people will be asked to do this for the SFBA or NYC? Literally jumbo jets full, this week.) For some candidates, this will involve more than 16 hours on planes, a (minimally) overnight stay in a business hotel, and six solid hours of interviews in the course of an 8~10 hour day. This requires minimally 2~3 days of these candidates' lives.
Most companies keep "conversion rate between onsites and job offers" very close to their vest. To put it mildly: it is not guaranteed that if you're flown out you will get an offer.
If you are hypothetically designing your interview process, and you replace the onsite with even an excessively long project, that's a win. The project can be written at the candidate's own pace and schedules conveniently around their other obligations. They do not have to arrange child care, take off time from work, or make tradeoffs like "Do I do the project or do I attend a friend's wedding?"
If you fly across an ocean and start bombing an interview, that's a terrible result for everyone. If you happen to be doing a project and discover "Oh, wait a minute, I've really miscalibrated here: this is far above my level of expertise with $FOO and honestly if this is the character of the work then I'm not sure I want to do it", then you have an easy option: simply close the window and, maybe, send a two-sentence email to the person who you were talking to.
Smart use of projects as a filtering mechanism can minimize costs to candidates and the company of administering high-cost testing (e.g. onsites, long projects, etc) to candidates who will ultimately not be successful at receiving offers and/or defer the high-cost assessments until the anticipated chance of receiving an offer is "very high."