Ask HN: What Do You Hate About the Hiring Process?

[BrandonWatson]

For the past 2 years I have been running free and paid mock interviews with hundreds of candidates who are primarily targeting tech companies - free content on YT under InterviewAt if interested. The follow-up meetings after the mocks with candidates have been amazing pseudo customer discovery sessions.

I've spent the last handful of months thinking deeply about how companies are running their processes and how candidates are preparing for their interviews, and I have come to the conclusion that there has to be a better way for everyone involved.

I've begun building software to address a part of the problem I think I can impact immediately, but would love to hear from people here on HN for the following prompt:

What do you hate / wish was better about the process of *preparing for* or *being in* a job interview.

I think there are 3 relevant personas, and user story format is totally fine: - As a job candidate, I hate... - As an interviewer, I hate... - As a hiring manager, I hate...

[ikeserbestian]

As a job candidate I hate from:

- Interviewer who don’t know anything about the job but churning cool buzzwords plus assesing the wrong things because of lacking basic communication skills and psychological information,

- Interviewer who cares about pseudoscientific/metaphsycial garbage; horoscopes, feng or something shuis, “we are a family” like discourses, religious views, gender bias, alpha or any Latin letter personality, etc. ,

- Interviewer who cares about presentable(ness) about appearence and impression,

- Interviewer who don’t have much time, one of the classics,

- Interviewer who don’t answer your questions about job definition, title, income, work hours, planning, etc. because of the company policies,

- The best; interviewer (or department or company) who really busy for a cold mail about rejection with a few realistic explanation.

[jollyllama]

Playing buzzword bingo with recruiters who are just trying to check boxes for technologies and years of experience, recruiters who have zero experience of how one buzzword relates to another.

[BrandonWatson]

Do you mind if I ask a follow up? Do you feel that the breakdown with recruiters is because there is not an easy way to present as "suitable" for a role?

At the risk of leading to an answer, do you think that this is related to the information density constraints of a resume and linkedin profile, and the additional risk that a recruiter cannot do much to parse a GitHub repo?

Also, when these recruiters are reaching out to you, what is your experience of split between external firm vs internal FTE at target company?

[jollyllama]

>Do you feel that the breakdown with recruiters is because there is not an easy way to present as "suitable" for a role?

Well, I think in a perfect world, every recruiter would be someone who had worked a little bit with the technologies for which they were hiring. Essentially, they'd be ex-engineers who could understand the relationships between different pieces of technology, just as programming languages, servers, and cloud systems.

>do you think that this is related to the information density constraints of a resume and linkedin profile, and the additional risk that a recruiter cannot do much to parse a GitHub repo?

Yes, I think that's related.

>when these recruiters are reaching out to you, what is your experience of split between external firm vs internal FTE at target company?

About 70% external vs 30% internal when I advertise as "looking for work" on LinkedIn. There's degrees of "external", of course.

[BrandonWatson]

This is very helpful - thanks for taking some time to respond.

[tommy_mcclung]

As a hiring manager, I hate the subjective nature of the feedback process and collecting input from the interviewers. I wish there were a more data driven approach to this part of the process. Sitting in a room listening to everyone's opinions post interview is a lot of noise. We currently have a set of feedback forms/processes we use but it's still lacking.

[BrandonWatson]

Do you mind if I ask follow up question? Are the feedback/forms internally developed or part of an ATS?

Are you having these forms filled out post interview, and discussed in the room/driving the meeting?

[tommy_mcclung]

Internally developed, although we just started using an ATS and they had some of this included. Filled out post interview and then we have a person dedicated to running the follow-up meeting. Amazon style bar raiser.