[sumanthvepa]

Clearly there was fraud here. But I'm curious about the the interview process.

If the person was a fraud, how did he get through the technical and management interviews? Surely talking to someone for 5 mins would help you figure out if they were technically competent. So apparently the interview process had zero decision value. Why bother interviewing candidates then? They should just check references and get on with it. Or fix your interview process.

[oefrha]

Yeah, I certainly Noticed I Was Confused while reading this story.

[Tenoke]

The interviewee passed the questions, was well liked and the only note of confusion he mentions was 'Sam didn’t have a LinkedIn profile, and when I asked him why he said he turned it off because he got too much recruiter spam'.

For what is worth I also don't have a LinkedIn for the same reason any more..

[mjevans]

I've still never had an account on many social media sites, but that's because I avoid most forms of social media period.

(Technically a couple niche discussion sites might count, this being one of them, but the closest thing I've got to an actual social media account is a Reddit account I mostly used in respect to one sub-forum on that site where content creators I liked had a sort of news aggregator for their content).

[downandout]

Or maybe he had plenty of experience and technical expertise to competently answer all the interview questions, and even to perform the job in question extremely well. Perhaps he would have been a model hire. There are lots of reasons that people exaggerate their experience, and not all of them mean that the candidate is not well-suited for a given job.

I’m not saying it’s a good idea to do what “Sam” did, but you can’t say that their interview process was broken based solely on the fact that the process identified him as a good candidate after he inflated his resume and did some simple LinkedIn manipulation to try to push himself to the top of the resume stack. Their interview process may in fact have identified and vetted the best man for the job, he was just one that happened to be insecure enough about his work experience to exaggerate it.

[jiofih]

“Inflated his resume” and “simple LinkedIn manipulation” are extremely mild ways of describing what he did. He lied about his entire work experience, role at previous job, and got someone else to pretend they were a VP and cover for them on the phone. This is fraud, not ‘inflating your CV’.

That is, if this story is even real.

[jerf]

As I've often said about the DailyWTF stories, if this story isn't real, one just like it has happened hundreds or thousands of times. It's an outlier, yes, but not something I'd even blink at having had happen to someone, somewhere, at some point. I've only done several dozen interviews and I haven't seen anything that extreme, but I've seen enough stuff that I wouldn't find it that shocking.

(Or, somebody did try to snow me to that extreme but failed to get to the point where we even cared about checking references. I don't mean this as any sort of triumphalism, but just by its nature, it's easier to BS your way through a a management interview than a technical interview. I'd say that's less about one necessarily being "harder" and certainly not about one being "better", but that there's a much larger set of distinct things we may talk about in a tech interview. If you really don't know anything technical, you have much greater odds of getting something asked that rats you out.)

[nordsieck]

> If the person was a fraud, how did he get through the technical and management interviews? Surely talking to someone for 5 mins would help you figure out if they were technically competent. So apparently the interview process had zero decision value. Why bother interviewing candidates then? They should just check references and get on with it. Or fix your interview process.

There are many things people evaluate during the interview process. One of them is technical competence. Another is integrity.

From the story, it doesn't appear OP's interview process is broken.

[jiofih]

How does it not appear to be broken, when they approved the guy as a Director even though he had nearly zero experience as a manager?

[nordsieck]

> How does it not appear to be broken, when they approved the guy as a Director even though he had nearly zero experience as a manager?

There are diminishing marginal returns on better screening. Most people are pretty honest, and of those people who aren't honest, most of those people will mess up their deception; this means that a pretty basic level of screening brings a lot of value while only letting through a few bad apples.

One could intensify the screening to avoid more bad apples, but that costs money and increases the false positive rate. At some point, it's better to just hire people and fire them when it doesn't work out.

[woodrowbarlow]

you give two examples, and the interview process in the article failed spectacularly on both counts.