[javajosh]

Interesting. I'm curious: roughly how often did the candidate promise they'd take your feedback constructively, calmly and then argue with you anyway?

(I'd hope it would be close to 0, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was much higher.)

[jldl805]

I'm a recruiter and candidates argue 95% of the time. Maybe higher. I only give feedback in very, very selective situations and even then I almost always regret it due to the response. Most people are not calm, rational, dispassionate receptors of critical feedback... especially when there is money and ego at stake.

[p0sixlang]

Who do you recruit for? I'm soon to be a new grad, looking for a job, and if you reject me.. you could literally berate me for things I didn't actually do and I wouldn't find it appropriate or productive to argue with you about it. Let's set up an interview, you can record my reaction to the rejection and send it to those who argue for reference on how not to be a moron.

[jldl805]

I don't recruit new grads so it would never happen. Similar to OP's post, it's almost always a situation where it's painfully obvious to everyone else involved why the person isn't getting hired, but it would be awkward or a waste of time to try to tell the person.

It's also virtually always social skill related... if you weren't up to the task technically, you wouldn't have been asked to interview. The in person interview is normally to decide "do I want to see this person 40+ hours a week for the next 5 years" rather than "can they do the job."

Lots of exceptions obviously but mostly true across the board.

[macksd]

For what it's worth, that's definitely not my experience. I've interviewed or phone-screened at least 200 people over the last few years, and yes, there's been a handful of rejections where the major concern was social skills: abrasive, over-confident, poor communication or lacking the appearance of motivation. But I've had far more people who simply couldn't perform well enough on the technical problem or who had obviously over-stated their qualifications and knowledge on their resume. I actually distinctly remember several interviews lately where I really liked the candidate as a person and had a very enjoyable chat with them, but I just didn't think they would do the job well.

There are a lot of flaws in the way interviews are done in our industry that make it more subjective than it should be, but I still wouldn't consider the latter set of problems to be social skill related.

[jldl805]

The only thing this tells me is you have an error in your hiring process that is leading you to interviewing people in person that cannot do the job. This should never happen.

[macksd]

Do you know of a way to screen out people who inflate their expertise on a resume or who fail to demonstrate competency in those areas during an interview, without actually interviewing them? Because if you do I'd love to hear it. But I thought that was the point of interviewing them. I don't expect recruiters and HR people who focus exclusively on hiring to have more than a shallow knowledge of what we're hiring for. I definitely don't encounter those more qualified to evaluate qualifications on LinkedIn, that's for sure. And LeetCode isn't nearly that good at eliminating crappy candidates. Plenty of people do it and then seem to lack those same skills when they show up.

That's why we have discussions like this: https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/.

If validating their technical qualifications is not the point of the interview, are you really only interviewing candidates to see if people like their social skills? That sounds legally shady for most cases, and honestly for extreme cases where there's a valid concern that IS the kind of thing I'd expect to be filtered out by an introductory call with a manager or something.

[inopinatus]

Nope, hiring processes should bias for type 1 (false positive) errors at ingress, and bias for type 2 (false negative) on the decision side.

Otherwise we miss interviewing people who can do the job, and in my experience, some of the most interesting people; but this means, one may sometimes be interviewing people that cannot do the job.

Since these are human-mediated processes, there is no accurate single-stage filter, and anyone claiming to operate an unbiased hiring process is either a fool or a liar. A hiring funnel (and really, any decision process) that recognises the inevitability of biases, and is phased accordingly, leads to more optimal outcomes.

[oblio]

Or just need to blow off steam: accept defeat AND also rant :-))