[pavlov]

Employing someone is renting their labor.

How do you find an apartment rental in a large city with thousands of options?

You can’t expect to visit them all. And you certainly can’t come up with increasingly bizarre torture tests for landlords to pass (“I might rent from you if you can answer enough trick questions about tenant law within 15 minutes”).

To find the apartment, you probably sample enough of the options to form a picture of what’s available, and then make a decision knowing that you didn’t have perfect information but you had to move ahead. The same applies to hiring.

[bix6]

Except landlords have almost all the power, just like the job gatekeepers. A landlord gets to choose who rents their property so they aren’t under any obligation to answer your questions, they’ll just find a renter who doesn’t ask questions. When you have all the power it inevitably gets abused which is exactly what we’ve been seeing in rental with things like real page.

[pavlov]

That’s kind of my implicit point. Employers don’t want to think of themselves as renters. It’s offensive to their unquestioned self-image as being the ones who hold the cards and deign to interview candidates.

But if you can give up on those worthless power games, you can have a hiring process that’s better for both parties.