[deepGem]

I often think it's a lot better to do an overall interview over a full day than to do disjointed rounds of 4-5 interviews over a few months.

Some advantages - Interviewer and the interviewee are at ease. There is no rush to solve a problem. - You can easily spend 90 minutes to 2 hours on System design, Spend 2-3 hours coding and another 2 hours in behaviour/leadership what not. - The interviews can be progressive, meaning you don't make it through the first 2 hours - good bye. - This can be done remotely as well as in person. Of course, in person would be better, hosting expenses etc.

End of the day, decision is made and you can verbally convey an offer/reject.

This calls for a lot of discipline and commitment from the companies and their interview panel, I mean so be it. Dedicate 1 month for hiring and be done, at least for senior positions. Just like you allocate time for your projects, allocate dedicated time for interviewing every 6 months, every quarter whatever.

[the_mar]

Wait how do you think hiring is done right now? What do you mean “dedicate a month to hiring”? Once you are senior enough at a company you end up having to interview multiple people a week, plus all the other meetings, scheduling a full day interview, where someone can actually hang out with you for 2 hours is going to require advance notice. And not many candidates want to wait for a month+ for their interviews.

[irrational]

This is crazy for me to read. We hire senior engineers based on a single hour long group interview. I've never participated in an interview (either as an interviewer or interviewee) that has gone on for more than a single hour. We will interview about 5 candidates over a week's time and then offer the position to one of them (or keep looking if none are suitable).

[zo1]

Same here - You can tell immediately within 10-15 minutes if a person has "the right stuff". Anything above that is just you sucking tiny milliliters of juice out of a carrot hoping that "maybe" they'll work out and you can get "some" productivity out of them down the line or "maybe" they're secretly a really good developer.

Either that, or the amount of time you subject potential hires is just a "signal" of your power and a filter for the needy, desperate and intellectually invested. I guess some companies are looking for that.

[naavis]

> You can tell immediately within 10-15 minutes if a person has "the right stuff"

I do a lot of interviewing for our company, and I used to think this too. But I've been totally wrong a few times. Sometimes someone I've been 100% sure about has been let go after a few months, while some I've been very iffy about have turned out to be excellent coworkers.

[slyn]

I used to be in restaurant management and I recently got a job in entry level IT for the first time in 15+ years for work/life balance.

The best 2-3 hires I ever made as a restaurant manager I knew they would be great within minutes of starting the interview. Other than those outliers I would say a great hiring manager was about twice as likely to have a productive hire as a bad hiring manager. Great hiring managers were batting around 0.600, almost regardless of if it were a relatively “technical” position or not. At some level it was just a crapshoot.

[mehh]

Yup, the danger of the suss them out in 10 mins, is you won’t get diversity (I don’t mean race and all that bandwagon), you’ll miss some exceptional outliers imho.

[throwaway6734]

Agree. It's not entirely a crapshoot but a good bit of the "hire"/"no hire" is vibes based.

[prox]

Isn’t the portfolio they came with a huge indicator? Like did this person do well at X or Y.

Even when fresh out of school one should see what someone is capable of.

[dustymcp]

Not necessarily, chemistry is such a big part of the selection aswell, you might have the criteria's for working somewhere, but do you also fit with culture? Many i have worked with would much prefer a person with less criteria and better culture fit, since with good fit you can easily learn the person what they need, and regardless of codebases most people will need some sort of onboarding for a new position anyway, good culture fit makes this transition much faster.

I would filter out the ones that have the criterias, and then see how they fit with current culture rather than roasting them with tests.

Like you do in any other business setting..

[Roark66]

Well, I participated in one interview that took longer than an hour. It was supposed to be "an initial interview". With another to follow in a week or so.

It turned into: "an initial interview; meet potential future co-workers and manager; have them see me do some actual work they do; meet the company owner(as he happened to be there);meet the accounting person and haggle over proposed pay; meet the HR person and haggle over minor changes in the employment contract;finally sign the contract" all in about ~7h. Coming in I was expecting to spend an hour there, but I was pleased with the outcome. I spent 6 years working there leaving only because of a move to another city.

[laserbeam]

It all depends on how many applicants you get. If you're as big as Google and everyone and their grandmother applies, you can afford to have longer interview rounds for positions where you need to be thorough. Otherwise you spend more effort in bringing people to the interview.

[irrational]

We are a Fortune 100 company that everyone on the planet has heard of. We typically get 500+ applications per position. But we still only do a single hour interview to make a decision.

[smcleod]

Who is doing interviews across months? I haven't heard of them being more than two weeks apart at most.

Do they pay you for your time for those long multi-hour interviews?

[hectormalot]

With remote interviews it’s at least common to see a ‘round’ scattered over multiple days and time slots, rather than a single visit with multiple interviewers in a row.

Paying for someone’s time is… tricky. If a company doesn’t pay, and the candidate is willing to do the interviews, it is a signal that both are expecting positive financial outcomes overall (ie both sides foresee fit).

The moment you start paying for people to interview, that signal gets weaker. Likely compensated by stricter resume filters. Its a disadvantage for people with uncommon profiles or less experience. (And an advantage for those that have more experience and some big names on their CV)

[hsbauauvhabzb]

But without paying companies will only get the candidates desperate enough to sit through all the interview rounds.

[3np]

Opposite IME. Interviews go both ways. Senior people will be pickier while the more desperate and junior are the ones who will accept an offer from a company without properly assessing what they're entering.

[fpig]

You want to attract candidates that have a high probability of being hired.

If vJ is the perceived value of getting the job, pJ the perceived probability of getting the job, vI the value of the literal payment for going through the interview process, and vT the perceived value of one's time (and any other cost if it exists, such as travel) required to go through the process, we can represent the expected value of going through the interview process as:

  EV = pJ * vJ + vI - vT

If we assume vJ >> vI and vJ >> vT (which I think is reasonable if you want the job), we can observe that the importance of vI and vT mostly depends on pJ.

I also assume that the candidate would choose where and whether to apply based on EV for their various options.

One one end, if your pJ is close to 1 (you're highly qualified for the job and will likely get it), the result is dominated by pJ * vJ which is ~= vJ; vI and vT matter little. This means that if you will probably get the job, it doesn't really matter much whether the interview is paid (and it also doesn't matter as much how much time it takes). For top candidates, the difference in pJ * vJ for different companies should be the dominant factor, i.e. they will apply for the best jobs.

On the other end, if your pJ is close to 0 (you're applying on a long shot), then vI and vT become much more significant factors. If your chance to get the job is really low, then the interview being paid makes it significantly more attractive, and it also matters more how much time it takes. The companies that pay for interviews, and companies that are easy to apply and interview for are likely the ones with the highest EV for the poorer candidates.

Basically the worse of a candidate you are for the job, the more important it is for the interview to be paid, because with a low enough probability of getting the job, this payment becomes a big factor in the expected value of doing the interview.

Of course it's not as simple as that, because people are not machines chasing pure financial interest and have feelings about how you treat them. Also, a highly qualified candidate is more likely to have a job that is closer to the one they're applying for, while an unqualified candidate might have a much worse job, making vJ higher for the less qualified candidate. But it is likely that the relative difference in pJ is much greater between a qualified and unqualified candidate than the relative difference in vJ. The candidate's own perception of the probability of being hired (pJ) might also be unrealistic in either direction, and I'm assuming it is a good predictor of the true probability of being hired. But I think in general the rule should hold, paid interviews would decrease the quality of the candidate pool.

[hsbauauvhabzb]

An employer may consider you too verbose.

[brunooliv]

Why do you expect employers would pay you? I mean, what if you don't pass it, or even worse, what if the company offers you a job that you decline near the end? Where would the money go? Receiving a salary is not the thing you can expect when you're not doing the work... I mean cmon.. Plus the real salaries upon landing the job will be the top of the crop, so, I think expecting payment for interviewing is... Quite the entitlement.

I mean, would you pay money to a handyman if he'd show up near your roof and showed you how he uses his tools and how he WILL EVENTUALLY work, but, not really fixing it?

[cdogl]

It's not uncommon for tradespersons to charge to come out and quote.

Having said that, I think paying people to interview for 6-figure salary jobs (AUD) is a non-starter to me. If a company is stretching your interviews out to the extent it's a waste of time, that's a signal that it's not a place you want to work.

[krisoft]

> would you pay money to a handyman if he'd show up near your roof and showed you how he uses his tools and how he WILL EVENTUALLY work, but, not really fixing it?

If that was my idea not the handyman’s? Yes. I would expect them to charge for their time.

[notahacker]

It's the interviewee's decision to attend, or not.

I don't think many handymen offered a chance for a two year, full-time building gig would say "sure, wire me $100 for the consultation and I'll come over", and if they did they'd be smart enough to realise they were politely turning down the job.

Frankly, "too preoccupied with the idea of getting paid for a single day of producing no output to take into account the potential to earn $xx,xxx more over the course of the year", sounds like an excellent way for employers to filter out candidates who have low interest in or confidence of getting the job or poor decision-making ability...

[brunooliv]

I think this hits the nail in the head for the argument I was trying to make: if you as a candidate feel the process is too long or daunting for you, you don't have to attend. It's that simple. Why would you expect compensation if people will do it for free or because they just want to take a shot at the job? To me it truly feels like entitlement... And of course the vast majority of us, myself included, can apply to "lesser known" companies, be done with interviews in a couple of days and it'll all also be good... Obviously compensation will come according to the effort... Demanding money for providing just a signal is useless

[jodrellblank]

The company wants a day of your life, jumping through hoops to please them, providing “signal” for them, competing for the chance of them abusing you to extract value from you, and they want it for free.

Yes, entitlement is possibly a good description there. It’s far too one-sided. If they had to pay they’d suddenly find ways to get “signal” much more efficiently and effectively.

[web3-is-a-scam]

You’ve never had to pay a small fee to get a quote on “trade work” done? It’s really common.

[krisoft]

It sounds like we are in agreement?

[3np]

No but I also certainly won't expect the handyman to spend a day unpaid at my house talking trade before I decide if I really want their services or not.

[smcleod]

I didn't say that. I asked the question.

However, if a for-profit company wanted me to spend essentially a full day of my time off work so that I can go and interview to make them more money than they'd be paying me - yeah that doesn't sound right at all unless you're straight out of school.

I know what you're saying with your handyman argument but that is a false equivalency.

[argiopetech]

If I asked the handyman to build me a dog house to demonstrate his roofing ability, I'd expect to pay for his time.

[blackbear_]

I've had an interview in February, one in March, two in April, and will have one in June, all with the same company. Unpaid, of course. I also think it's insane, but when you're just graduated and unemployed, what else can you do?

[smcleod]

Oh wow, that sounds pretty stressful I'm sorry to hear that - I hope you got hired in the end though?

[reciprocity]

That is absurd.

[deepGem]

Pretty much all my interviews except in Meta. This is in India though. Meta was the most organized but even that interview went over 2 weeks. My Walmart interview lasted 2+ months. Round1 week1, round 2 week 3 etc etc.

This is for Staff+ level positions.

EDIT: Just to state, companies do give enough time to prepare for the interview. I am only talking about the interviewing duration, not the prep time.

[smcleod]

Super interesting! Thank you for sharing.

The culture is so different here in Australia and New Zealand.

I've done a lot of interviewing of candidates over the last 12~ years or so - here are some generalisations based on my experience and that of my peers for tech roles:

- 95% of the time it's 2-3 interviews / meetings. I have seen a single interview be enough when the person is already known to the team and the interview went well confirming and clarifying existing knowledge of the person.

- The first is usually a call with people and culture / the internal recruiter - high level intro and general culture fit. These tend to be between 15-30 minutes. You should usually know if you're being offered another interview by the end of the call - or within a few days at most and have the next (main) interview setup for the next week or two at most.

- Then if the role is for a developer / programmer or design / UX the candidate is usually sent a coding (or design) test which can be done remotely and will usually take 30-120 minutes but this obviously varies depending on the test, role, and persons abilities.

- Second is often a technical and team fit interview with two people in or working closely with the team / department you're hiring for. These are usually around 45-90 minutes. You should usually hear back about this within a day or two, and if another interview is required you would hopefully have that booked in for some time in the next week or two.

- A third is often done if the team/tech lead wasn't in a previous session - or if the interviewers can't agree or get a good feel for the candidate.

[thaumasiotes]

> The interviews can be progressive, meaning you don't make it through the first 2 hours - good bye.

Is that knowledge available in real time? When I interviewed at Google last year, the next thing I heard back from the recruiter was that I'd passed the interviews and should expect a job offer. She wished me congratulations. A couple weeks later, she informed me that my interview scores were too low to get a job offer. It remains unclear to me why there would be separate thresholds for "passing" and "eligible for hire".

[vineyardmike]

So a lot of companies have “hiring committee” (incl google) that are required to approve a person write the job offer. The interviewers rate the candidates, and offer notes/transcripts, but don’t have the final say. The HC meets periodically, so there’s a delay between interview and offer letter.

What probably happened was that the recruiter looked at your profile, read the comments, and expected you to pass the HC (and told you the next day)… but you didn’t in the end.

Now last year Google implemented a hiring freeze, so you could have fell into that. I would believe that for easier-to-fill roles, during the hiring freeze they suddenly had a glut of candidates who “passed” with no job to give them, so the suddenly “failed” and we’re sent away.

[thaumasiotes]

> Now last year Google implemented a hiring freeze, so you could have fell into that.

I think this was earlier than the freeze. It was certainly earlier than any awareness of a freezing job market made it onto HN; the email from the recruiter promising to give me good news on a phone call tomorrow -- a rare example of a Google recruiter putting something in writing -- arrived on January 12 of last year. There was a very long lag between that call, described in my earlier comment and presumably taking place on Jan 13, and the followup telling me I'd been rejected on March 2. I undersold that by describing it as "a couple weeks".

On the other hand, according to my memory I was informed that I should see a job offer by the end of February - I noted at the time (to myself) that the schedule was surprisingly long - and in the light of your comment, that and the timing of my eventual rejection do tend to support the idea that the hiring committee's next scheduled meeting was at the end of February.