[proximitysauce]

In addition to all of the very dystopian examples given in this post, there are other non-technical, super-dystopian things that have been popping up as "trends" in the tech industry.

Ever heard of top-grading? It's the most oppressive interview technique of all time. A series of grueling multi-person interviews. A retrospective of all work experiences since high school. You also have to get multiple prior employers as references. Apparently top-grading is used to weed out "liars". Imagine what kind of place optimizes to find liars; maybe one with a problem with a lot lying? I've heard Twitter uses this technique (or did last year when my friend interviewed with them).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topgrading

[LordFast]

My experience as both a 50+ hiring manager and as a candidate tells me that we are collectively living in an illusion of whacked up expectations.

Yes, it's super hard to hire good people, but most of the time it's because "good enough" isn't good enough anymore, and while we may think our company is a 9 and we deserve 9s, we are probably more of a 4 based on what people are actually working on.

Yes, interviews suck, but that's because we all want to get paid the big bucks so we can afford the prohibitively expensive COL and actually do better economically than our middle-class parents. My background and resume legitimately qualifies me as a 9 on the high end, but really I'm probably just a 4.

Cascading causal relationships thus expand both upwards into the capital markets and downwards into your grocery stores.

If we can all take a chill pill employers+employees and stop 49er'ing around so hard, then I think most everyone can be happily employed.

I don't see us getting there on our own though, since that next door neighbor ain't gonna stop and I'm sure as hell not getting left behind /s.

I hope we can find a bit more maturity in our industry, but I'm not holding my breath.

[Rury]

>we are collectively living in an illusion of whacked up expectations... it's super hard to hire good people, but most of the time it's because "good enough" isn't good enough anymore

So much this. When hiring in this field, people seem to expect candidates to know anything and everything software wise, yet reality is software is more complicated than it ever has been.

The problem isn't alone to this field however, it's fundamental to all fields and the progress of civilization. Discover or invent something new and suddenly everyone else is illiterate about it and must learn it. The build up of knowledge is so immense that we don't expect any one person to know all that there is to know in society, hence why people specialize in what they do. It's why doctors have areas of expertise (feet/skin/teeth/neurology etc), why engineers have areas of expertise (mechanical/electrical/nuclear), why doctors aren't expected to know what engineers know. Why physicists aren't expected to know everything that chemists know, etc...

The software field is just a rapid microcosm of this progressive knowledge problem as software is invented at rapid pace. Yet some reason people seem to expect potential candidates to know everything...

Additionally, IDK how many times I've found people using different lingo to describe the same thing in this field. It's like a bigger version of this: https://hbr.org/2018/07/what-to-do-when-each-department-uses...

[runawaybottle]

This will be a bit of a tangent, but I think that level of specialization in the medical field exists because their jobs are mission critical. You can kill someone if you don’t handle your part right. The advent of the fullstack developer as the norm is because most of us are not doing critical things.

Companies need to be honest about the reality of their product. You’re building a straight forward web app most of the time, you know? You might not need that Stanford CS grad. If companies feel the ‘need’ it, it’s just aggrandizement and a very bad trend for this industry.

[whack]

> we are collectively living in an illusion of whacked up expectations. Yes, it's super hard to hire good people, but most of the time it's because "good enough" isn't good enough anymore, and while we may think our company is a 9 and we deserve 9s, we are probably more of a 4 based on what people are actually working on.

You're essentially implying that companies like FAANG can get by just fine, even if they hired "average" programmers, as opposed to "exceptional" ones. If this were the case, they wouldn't need to pay anyone 250-350k compensation either - they can just hire some average programmer for 70k and call it a day. Or better yet, hire someone in a country with much lower COL, pay them 30k, and everyone walks away happy.

I don't think this is true, for the simple reason that companies are far too greedy to pay people 200k a year, unless they really need to. Do you honestly think that a company like Amazon is going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on someone, if they can get someone else for a fraction of that? Maybe I'm wrong and one day, some startup will grow to be a unicorn while paying their developers sweatshop rates. I'll believe it when I see it.

[fogetti]

I think FAANG has too much money, so they try to solve all problems with money, which could otherwise be solved with better planning, allocating more time, changing the mindset and/or better understanding the problem at hand. That might explain why they pay hire salaries than the rest of the industry.

I don't think that there is necessarily a causal relationship between the salaries and the competence, but that line of thinking is common in those companies.

[gniv]

> be solved with better planning, allocating more time, changing the mindset and/or better understanding the problem at hand

You're describing a good manager, who costs a lot of money, even more than a good SWE.

[scarmig]

You radically overestimate the difficulty of the work performed by the modal SWE at Google. A bright-but-not-exceptional high schooler can do the usual job: writing code and tests and the occasional design doc, and way too much proto to proto work.

[Nextgrid]

> companies are far too greedy to pay people 200k a year, unless they really need to

Maybe the high salary is to compensate for something else (poor work environment, boring job, etc) rather than attract very skilled people?

[jacobsenscott]

It is absurd to think that any more than a small fraction of the 20+ thousand engineers at Google are "exceptional". When you get to those numbers you are just seeking warm bodies to push buttons.

[z3t4]

If you could choose between solving hunger, curing cancer, colonizing other planets, or working for a rent seeking ad buisness, the latter would have to pay a lot more for you to work there.

[arp242]

Just because some companies think they need to pay that much doesn't actually make it the case.

[hogFeast]

Dear God, I wish companies were run like this. Everyone refers to these faceless "companies"...no, you are being hired by employees just like you who almost always overpay for staff. They overestimate their ability to assess talent, HR usually link their own salaries to the people they hire...it is a shitshow.

Look at CEO pay, most CEOs are clueless. They are way overpaid. Google is a perfect example, that business is a cash machine, it could be run by a ham sandwich, and they are paying people $100m+ to run it...lul. Jokes.

Btw, this also shouldn't matter. If your business relies on hiring these 1 in 1000, super-smart individuals (ignoring the fact that it is statistically impossible to actually do this if you are hiring thousands of programmers), you will fail. Every time. You get into a bidding war, and your budget depends on the intelligence of others to not overpay. If you can work out how to turn average employees into good ones, you will print money because no-one wants average employees...supply is infinite, you will never overpay (I know companies that have done this...they usually end up acquiring the companies that hire the "boffins" and fire everyone on day one).

In tech, the opportunities for this are basically limitless. It is pretty easy to teach someone how to code, the main challenge is really all the stuff you learn "on the job"...and guess what? You have a job to teach them. Why doesn't this happen? Try telling a coder he has to help a junior guy out one day a week and stop fucking about with Haskell/burning cash. Try telling HR that you want to hire unremarkable people. Try finding an executive who wants to work somewhere where they hit singles...he has an MBA you know, he swings for the fences every time. You are vastly overestimating, ironically, the intelligence of most people who work in companies (I worked in equity research for a while...Buffett's dictum of a company that could be run by a ham sandwich has much wisdom).

[z3t4]

Actually most software business use that business model. Eg. buy low, sell high. The difference between market rates and wages are their profit.

[hogFeast]

That is true. It occurred to me after that I had seen that in consultancies...that works, it is possible to do this sustainably and with less churn.

[alfiedotwtf]

Recruiter: Hi, would you like a glass of water?

Applicant: 600,000 golf balls

Recruiter: What about a coffee?

Applicant: Because the man hole is round

> I hope we can find a bit more maturity in our industry

Me too

[eyegor]

Having helped non-cs managers hire for technical roles, I feel your pain. Usually I start getting worn down around candidate 5-10 for in person interviews, and stop looking for colleague grade employees and more for "yeah, I could train them". Nowadays I've tried to tailor my interviewing style more in that vein; I ask for their approaches to problems I don't expect them to be able to solve alone, and then try to guide them towards a solution. I judge them based on where the conversation lands on the lecture - coworker spectrum.

[Frost1x]

What qualifies as a 'colleague grade' peer? Do they need to know your specific set of technology choices and be able to solve problems specific to your business during an interview that has essentially developed as a skill by those working with your group for a long period?

Technology is so diverse anymore and so dependent on specific sets of technologies a business chose mixed with internal work tailored around a specific business and its processes/problems that I think it's completely unreasonable to expect someone to walk in and solve the specific types of problems under the specific constraints any arbitrary group is faced with--especially in the span of an interview.

All these factors mix to make very unique problem spaces. Factor in that positions evolve by folks who formerly filled a role and that their specific set of skills are likely unique. You should be expecting to train people from the start to some reasonable degree unless the role is doing incredibly vanilla work (in which case I find it hard to believe there aren't qualified candidates).

[itronitron]

Probably, I think 'colleague grade' peer refers to candidates that have worked on the same problems with the same technologies and arrived at the same solutions as the people working at the company.

I agree that there is definitely a bit/lot of tunnel-vision that happens within companies where they don't realize how much cumulative knowledge is just specific to the particular evolutionary path of their development team.

IMHO, so much of success is based on ability to learn that it would be better for candidates to be evaluated on their ability to acquire new skills or integrate new knowledge.

[BlueTemplar]

These days, we are surrounded by so much complexity that I'm getting quite often the experience of having to delve for a week into a subject so that I can start to appreciate which solutions are the most appropriate ones for the problem at hand. (And then a few years later I realize that quite a lot of that was still wrong, but at least I picked among the best solutions rather than the worst - see also the "getting on the latest fad" kind of mistakes...)

[totony]

A past employer of mine was developing their interview process and began introducing a hardish CS basics form to fill out. My answer was the same as yours "it feels like you're hiring for theoretical geniuses, but really most of the work is web dev/bugfixes/feature adding" i.e. you have to mold your interview process around the skills that are actually needed

[Benjammer]

Yet, the people who pass the grueling gauntlet will still be dumped on a fringe feature team with a first- or second-time engineering manager within 2 years of your age, and a PM that's fresh out of college (or worse, just finished MBA) who is spending 100% of their time learning how to use Jira instead of how to build product.

[octoboto]

This new trend of hiring PMs straight out of college seems like insanity to me

[runawaybottle]

Oh this trend. I sit next to a recruiter at a large company that literally vets college grads all day for PM and scrum master positions. Like people with zero experience dealing with deadlines, requirements, resource management, time management, release cycle experience.

Oh, and I’ll just leave off ‘software development’ experience from that list too, since they also all come from non coding backgrounds.

What’s the rationale behind this one, anyone got anything? I’m stumped.

[VHRanger]

MBAs ruining another industry

[mattrp]

That’s what I don’t get - they spend so much time hiring for these narrow skill sets and then the guy next to you takes longer than five minutes to figure out Jira.

[Aeolun]

Generally I don’t think it’s the engineering team that delays the project.

[courtf]

Not sure if they were using this exact method, but I did interview at a place that had a long, grueling process (series of interviews, coding challenge, etc). They also asked for every employer back to high school, as well as contact info for supervisor for all of those jobs, which of course was ridiculous. I did enjoy seeing them taken aback when I provided that information and, despite being in my early 30s, having 20+ jobs listed that included things like "fruit picker," "janitor" and "waiter at gay bar". I blew away the algorithmic coding challenge, mostly because it was a take-home test (I have flubbed some white-boarding ones pretty badly).

The company was almost entirely men, many with quite obvious and malignant ego issues. Their method for making technical decisions was to get all ~20 of them into a conference room and argue about how things should be done, with the loudest, most forceful arguments tending to win. The entire time I worked there, the socially dominant clique was primarily concerned with moving their stack into Kubernetes, despite having almost no traffic that I could discern. I wouldn't say I was impressed overall, people who didn't fit the mold had little chance of making career progress, and I personally felt I had more experience and could code circles around the majority of them.

[BlueTemplar]

So there are companies corresponding to that "tech bro" cliché ?

[runawaybottle]

Lol, the Kubernetes part.

[samkater]

Also other trends that, thankfully in my experience, have not yet made their way to tech. I suspect it is only a matter of time, though...

A lot of non-technical positions I have seen and heard about (including non entry-level positions) require a video of the candidate to describe themselves and why they would be a good fit for the position. That just sounds awful to me.

[bobbytran]

One company said I had to make a video of myself..and then the final interview would be singing a song of my choice in front of the entire company through video conferencing.

This was for a software engineer position. I didn't even bother going on the interview. I feel like the purpose was to see what they could get you to do.

[itronitron]

I want to interview at this company just so I can rick-roll them during the song singing part.

[Aeolun]

And force them to listen to the entire song.

[cableshaft]

You should have gone to the interview and chosen this as your song to sing (the company song from the Postal movie): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnb7WdHEPao

[runawaybottle]

Wait, so, you did’t find them having you sing a song to be a light hearted suggestion that would warm you to their apparently super fun culture?

[tmpz22]

You'd think this would be a massive liability seeing the candidate's race, sex, attractiveness, etc. Unless that was the intention so that they could optimize for specific demographics they want to hire for - even if it is illegal.

[agumonkey]

Is it that different from a cover letter ?

[samkater]

For some people maybe not. A video would be far more stressful for me. I'm sure my voice would be up an octave (along with my blood pressure) trying to get the recording just right. Speaking aloud is also not my forte.

One benefit of a cover letter is it is easier to re-use the base story and update the details as appropriate. Unless you want to spend time editing (which depending on your skill impacts the quality) you have to re-record the whole thing.

[agumonkey]

I find motivation letters to be stressful too and an emotional rape 99% of the time (I just want a job). Hence my question, a video would be just a tiny step lower in happiness compared to a letter.

[Aeolun]

Nah, when I write something wrong in a letter. I just backspace and fix it there and then.

The one time I recorded a video I had to redo it like 10 times and I eventually just submitted it because I was tired of the shit.

[BlueTemplar]

I was taught that the CV was to be re-used, but the cover letter written from scratch each time after researching the company?

[Aeolun]

I have found that 0% of my cover letters have made any difference. Every company that required a cover letter has so far rejected me.

[steve_taylor]

Yes. It’s a tool to filter candidates based on race and appearance.

[agumonkey]

oh yeah, I was totally naive.

[bllguo]

well adding the visual element just introduces another source of bias.. and even if we set that aside, depending on the position it may be selecting for an irrelevant skill

cover letters are terrible anyway. the signal to noise ratio there must be comical.

[agumonkey]

what are better recruitment ideas replacing cover letters ? (honest question)

[Psychlist]

What worked for me, after my boss just put up a stock ad and got hundreds of replies then decided that they couldn't cope and handed the problem to me. First spam all the applicants and say terribly sorry there's been a transition in the team and now I am in charge. Enclose copy of new ad, in email emphasise that I have tier CV and want ~100 words explaining what they understand about the job:

- ask for a very specific thing in the cover letter. In our case, which version of the specific IDE they were familiar with. - specify that we care about relevant skills, and having the legal right to work here. nothing else.

Of the 50-odd responses who survived a 10 seconds each filter (ie, did you answer the question), I skimmed the CVs and picked 10 I liked and 10 more I thought would be ok. I did this via a 5-bucket sort - as I read each email I dragged it into a numbered folder. Then I created folder 1a,1b and put 10 in each. Sure, that's about an hours work but it's easier than doing an online test and trying to make it non-gameable.

Interviews were a five minute chat then we dumped them in front of a computer with our development setup on it, and a series of programming tasks. Starting from "this button. Make it so when the user clicks it a dialog pops up saying 'click'" and going up to "there is a memory leak in this ~100 line command line program. Find it and fix it". They were asked to talk me though what they were doing, and while most problems followed each other from the same based, they started with a "perfect" solution to the previous ones at each step so that we didn't deviate too far.

I was pleasantly surprised at how effective the "brown M&Ms" question was, and how predictive the series of programming tasks was.

https://www.insider.com/van-halen-brown-m-ms-contract-2016-9

[agumonkey]

very interesting thanks a lot

[bllguo]

I wish I had answers. I don't - I just know that cover letters aren't it.

I've been on both sides of hiring at this point. On the applicant side, I have never seen any indication that anyone has ever read my cover letters. Writing them is a chore. And though my sample size is very limited, I have never had success with bespoke cover letters/cold emails/etc.; the time has always been better spent on reaching more people.

On the hiring side, I've read a few cover letters. Nothing has ever stood out. I read it over once and that's that. Honestly I feel like it can only hurt you. What kind of powerful, moving statement could you possibly write that would persuade someone to give you a chance when you otherwise had none? I'm sure it's happened, but to force people to write these things at the cost of millions of man-hours, just to cover this absurdly rare and mythical case? And on the other side, there are so many things you could do in a cover letter that would give a _negative_ impression. Maybe the tone is inappropriate, or there are inadvertent grammatical errors, or it's written poorly, and on and on and on. Just more exposed surface area for the naturally critical interviewer's mind to attack.

[mattrp]

I have a pretty long resume at this point (23 years now in the workforce)... I use the cover letter to try to summarize a few takeaways using very short sentences. It seems like if you don’t hit at least one positive talking point within the first 5 seconds of reading they will never bother reading the rest of the resume. I once actually did step into recruiting at a startup I worked at once. We had about 25,000 emails come in for 20 positions and the recruiting team was going insane trying to sort them. I wrote a few quick filters to draw out interesting resumes but I ended up reading nearly half the resumes... over a weekend. I get that reading resumes is tedious but I just have so little sympathy for these people who have so little attention to detail / ability to structure their work passing judgement on my ability to conjure some algo.

[agumonkey]

Often I think all these (cover letters are not the only artefact) are just postural items to see who's gonna make the effort no matter what use it has. A kind of faith leap.

[roland35]

I have seen some companies askna few "short answer" style questions as part of the application, which I liked!

[Aperocky]

Been through that one time, I should do more of those and just sing Merry Christmas for fun, ideal for wasting time and potentially lighten up the day of the other person who had to watch/listen to these nonsense.

[ros65536]

I've had that exact thing happen to me once, and it was for a developer internship position no less. This type of stuff might be coming, at least where I am currently.

[jpindar]

Great way to weed out older developers, since there's a good chance that some of the companies they've worked for have gone out of business or been acquired, and some of their references have died.

[geomark]

Yeah. Every one of my past employers has been acquired and my old organizations picked apart and my old managers ended up who knows where.

[justinclift]

Agrees. There's no chance I have contact details for people from even the first 10-15 years of my career. That was a long time ago. ;)

[bitexploder]

A few words on top grading. We are use a top grading like process, and are pretty flexible on the references part of it. It is just a long conversation. I think it is a structured and simple way to talk about a person and where they have been. Yes, it is comprehensive, but it works well. We hire almost all candidates that have made it to the top grading stage of our hiring process. We don’t use it to find liars and don’t think of it like that. What it really is good at is finding patterns of behavior in someone’s life and work history. It’s not full of campy dumb mental problem questions. You just talk about yourself and your work history and how you relate to previous colleagues and managers. And it’s done consistently to make it a little more comparable from one person to the next. The reference checks are one of the most useful and valuable parts of the whole process (we are flexible here, we are a small company). I can see how this process could get morphed into something less friendly, but at the end of the day it’s a huge time investment for us and the candidate so we don’t embark upon it lightly. I haven’t found a better interviewing technique that takes the pain out of it for the employee and the employer. Our team all appreciated the process and we take their feedback seriously. We don’t follow all of the steps in top grading religiously, but the interviewing process is really good. We also read a lot of other books on building a hiring process and settled on top grading as the most consistent and logical. The few people we didn’t hire threw up major red flags in their interview process in terms of how they would fit in at the company and the work we do. How else should a company hire people? For a small business we try to de-risk the hiring process as much as possible because mishiring is /extremely/ painful. We have grown from 3-20 people organically. Each hire we made was and is very important to our growth and stability.

Edit: just wanted to say I am a partner/founder at my company and we deeply give a shit about what we do and who we work with. Our turnover across 7 years is very, very low. We strive for a good work life harmony with everyone that works with us. You have to have some process to fit people into a company and that means you gotta talk to people and get to know them. The goal is to eliminate interviewer bias as much as humanly possible after the technical screening. So it goes. Not everyone can be pleased and I would defend our hiring practices as very reasonable and humanistic in an otherwise crazy tech interviewing system at the FAANGs of the world.

[Psychlist]

What you do sounds like a reasonable interpretation of top grading. It's also what I'm used to, largely.

Where it gets tricky is with people like who are older and have "done interesting things". I did short contracts for more then a decade and interspersed them with cycle touring. So my full work history is a thing of joy and beauty, but asking me to go through it and re-locate one person from each company, contact them, and get a reference... you've just asked me to do 100 hours work at the very least. Even leaving out the non-technical jobs only halves the number. When a major bank wanted a list of every place I've lived for the last ten years they eventually decided that "no fixed address" was acceptable.

But I expect that if I applied to you and said "here's the last ten" you would be happy with that. And FWIW I have a number of quite enthusiastic referees available on request.

[bitexploder]

We just want two references and a warm introduction to them. We pick what we think is the most relevant recent experience and negotiate from there, being sensitive to availability etc. Doing it for every job and asking the candidate to do it is kind of lazy in our opinion. It’s just a logistical chore to set up a meeting. All we need is the intro for context :)

[DenisM]

So, do you actually ask the candidate to arrange calls with ex-managers and conduct these calls for all previous jobs? What does it mean that you are "flexible"?

[bitexploder]

We generally ask for two references and a warm introduction to each reference. We take it from there. We aim for more recent references. Doing it for all previous jobs is overkill and time consuming. The feedback is generally candid and useful. In some cases (limited work history) we only follow up on one reference. In others the best reference is also the current employer so that obviously can be tricky. The spirit of it is indeed to validate the interview process but also to gain a different perspective.

[proximitysauce]

I think it's important to understand that you're asking candidates to burn "social capital" by arranging those introductions. I've worked for pretty high end people (successful founders, ceos...). I'm not going to call in any favors from them for a job interview. Most senior people feel the same way. Don't ask your candidates to expend their own personal or social capital.

[ghaff]

It feels like even a fairly benign implementation of interviewing references wouldn't scale very well. It's something I might impose on a couple of people I knew well once for a special opportunity but expecting them to repeatedly do this for a bunch of companies using this process seems unreasonable.

And as others have said, while I could provide references going back quite a few years, it definitely wouldn't be every job since high school--even every professional job.

[bitexploder]

We tend to only ask for two references and it is negotiable. References from the distant past aren’t useful because our goal isn’t to “find liars” as some people suggested. It’s to get an unbiased perspective from someone other than the candidate. FAANG interview system takes way more man hours per candidate than our system.

[bitexploder]

I think this makes it overly difficult to fully vet candidates. Like I wrote before, we have had long discussions with our current team about our hiring system and the feedback is overwhelmingly positive. We try to take care in the whole process and honestly, if someone feels what we are asking is too much, they don’t have to complete the interview. We explain the steps up front before anyone commits any time or “social capital” to our process.

[proximitysauce]

If only people who agree to it make it through, then I'm not surprised the feedback is positive. What you're missing is all of the senior people who would never do this (which is a lot of them).

I'll also add that it's not hard to vet candidates. I've hired dozens and dozens of great people and never ask for references. Interviewing is a skill all managers should develop and excel at.

[ramraj07]

To someone wanting to learn what this method means (the good parts), what resources would you recommend?

[bitexploder]

We used their website/web app for a while but didn’t get enough value out of it. We had a hiring consultant / coach teach us about top grading after going through many other books.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/915182.Topgrading Is the best book on it. I would just say to use common sense when reading it and think about how you would feel in the interviewees shoes. There is also top grading for sales which has some good stuff in it too. We don’t collect detailed salary info (legal minefield anyway these days). We usually just do one interview and not multiple. There are decent videos in YouTube. They try to sell you on their website and branded materials, but it’s pretty simple for a small company to keep it light and in text documents or whatever you prefer.

[sibeliuss]

Top grading seems like a much more humane way to hire than obscure algorithm tests, even if it is more involved.

Thanks for dropping in the defense here, I've never heard of this process.

[bitexploder]

No problem. Ultimately I think the hiring process and what it becomes at large companies will reflect their values, for better or worse. They often start off with good intentions, but unchecked hiring processes can become very cynical and, well, Dystopian, as the parent article points out.

[jp_sc]

So... are you hiring right now?

[bitexploder]

Generally, yes. https://carvesystems.com/careers — we are an information security consultancy. Our tech interview is a take home test similar to a CTF. It can be somewhat time consuming for someone with minimal infosec experience. Just check that page out and shoot us an email (and mention you are from HN, and I can chat further with you if you are interested).

[paulie_a]

Personally I'd call off the interview and let them know they need to rethink their hiring practices. If that's how they interview the company probably is horrible to work for anyways.

[AnimalMuppet]

> If that's how they interview the company probably is horrible to work for anyways.

If the hiring process seems designed to find the very best people who are willing to put up with being abused, yeah, it seems pretty likely that it's a horrible place to work.

[AtlasBarfed]

Yes. What's amazing, these incredibly bright people that are being subjected to torture.... Wait, wouldn't the incredibly bright tell you to take your process and shove it?

Very large online retailer is 100% this.

[AnimalMuppet]

The incredibly secure would tell you to take your process and shove it. I'm not sure to what degree "bright" and "secure" correlate. I suspect that they may do so eventually, but I think many bright young people are still insecure with respect to jobs and employment.

[Aeolun]

I’m very much enjoying interviews now that I’m secure :D it’s amazing how straightforward you can be if you don’t really need a job.

[ghaff]

Heh. Someone was recruiting me a few weeks back. The company/position looked somewhat interesting but, as we talked, it turned out that what they were looking for wasn't quite my core skill set though I could probably have done it. At the end of the day, it was much easier just to say not a good match at this time so both of us could move on. If I were really looking for something, I suppose I would have felt the need to pitch myself more for the position and have them say no.

[bobsil1]

I called BS with a recruiter on an interviewer who was being a dick. But that was the one who made the offer :)

[hkiely]

I believe this is becoming more common.

[paulie_a]

Hopefully more candidates tell the company "pass" just as easily as the company does to candidates

[agumonkey]

So many people suggest me to lie. So many do. When you don't (anxious, imposter, doubtful or else), recruiter hasn't shiny eyes so you fail.

It's a recipee for fake.

[KungFuJohnny]

They lie to you. Why should you feel bad about lying to them?

[agumonkey]

That was another reason indeed.

For science I tried an blatant lie, and it was the most horrendous experience I ever felt regarding work. I was gutted and never want to do it again. But factually, I don't think it mattered to them, it was just smalltalk to them. Although I'm not 100% sure they didn't see through.

Oh and ironically, some recruiters casted doubt on very factual and true parts of my resume.

I mean what stupid game is this.

[blarghhh]

Twitter uses what they call top grading, but really isn't, it's just a 1 hour reverse chronological set of questions through the most relevant/recent of your work history, asking the same set of defined questions for each role you had. Really just a structured way to understand your history in a consistent way. It basically the same as asking someone about their work history, but in a structured way.

  It is absolutely definitely not the actual top grading of multi hours of interviews , phoning references etc.