| Many of these exotic/novelty interview processes are completely disrespectful of the candidates' time as well. In the past few months I've undertaken a few pretty "rigorous" application processes. A couple of Bay Area startups (I don't live in the Bay Area), and a bunch of other companies both locally and for remote working possibilities. Startups seem to be the worst when it comes to turning the hiring process into a huge time sink for the candidate. At its worst was one of the Bay Area startups. They outline a 7- or 8-phase interview process. There are independent programming exercises, pair programming over Skype, phone interviews, then at the end they have the candidate in for "cultural fit evaluation" which turned into a six-hour interview gauntlet after flying across the country that morning. Another bit of inconsideration of my time and my actual job where I work to make money was a company that wanted me to come in in the middle of the afternoon on a workday for 2 hours to "meet the team". I told them I did not feel comfortable leaving the office at 1:30 and go AWOL/take a half day of vacation so I could interview at another place. I wound up backing out of the interview process because of their unwillingness to pick another meeting time, even over lunch. Then finally tomorrow I am meeting with a company, and they told me yesterday afternoon that they'd like me to prepare a presentation on something I'm passionate about (they liked Jeff Atwood's blog post[1] I guess). This actually I don't mind at all, and think it's a great idea... but I need more than a couple of days' notice. I work 8-10 hours a day, commute a couple more, and by the time I get home I've got 3 hours to spend with my kid, relax, eat dinner, etc. In that 3 hours I also need to prepare a talk on a topic I'm passionate about. To me that last one is emblematic of these interview processes: good ideas, but not structured with much consideration toward respecting the time of the candidate. I get that hiring the right person is crucial for small teams, no doubt, but I'm getting tired enough of jumping through hoops that I'm not really interested in doing it anymore, even for a great job where I know I can make an awesome contribution. 1 http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/03/how-to-hire-a-progr... |
I was once given this requirement for a scientific computing-type position at an industrial research lab. Most of their applicants were PhD-types, for whom giving an hour-long presentation on their last six years of research was par for the course. For me, it meant I had to scramble to put together a PowerPoint of my undergrad curriculum and research opportunities.