[jasode]

>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.

[hibikir]

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.

[Lawtonfogle]

>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?

[JoeAltmaier]

Any process will fit some candidates better than others.

[Lawtonfogle]

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?

[JoeAltmaier]

We all get old. Its actually pretty fair.

[sarciszewski]

> 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.