[johnnyanmac]

Quite the opposite (and sadly, still. American). I'm just so frustrated how I'm 10 years into this career and the interview process feels more random than ever. I can apply to 100 job and interview for 10 that all fall through. Then I can just go to a bar and trip into an opportunity I wasn't fully expecting. What does that say about the interview process?

>No HR doesn't investigate candidates or do background checks before you interview

An HR screen isn't a background check. It's "can you talk about your roles and provlems solved like you actually did it. A good HR screen should make sure they aren't blatantly lying

>that would be very expensive and silly.

Let's both not pretend the interview proces is in any way optimized for any metric. You have often non-tech roles create a description for a tech role (leading to famous blunders like "have and jave script is the same") . You have an increasing amount of rounds of interviews to go through for a job that may not exist or may already be reserved. And more and more of the parts are being outsourced, leading to power quality candidates. All that before throwing a reckless reliance of AI on everything.

The most optimal hiring is to focus on high quality hires brought in as fast as possible. Or not to hire if you don't need to hire. But we're not really running on sensible business practices these days.

[ltbarcly3]

You keep saying 'we'. The companies I have worked for have on average had very streamlined interview processes, with the exception of very large (>2000 engineer) companies. I don't know how to fix hiring for companies that big. I'm sure you have a lot of 'ideas' that are really just pointing out the problems. We all see the problems, but fixing them means either empowering individual managers (many of which would just hire their cronies instantly if allowed to) or inventing new ways to do HR which is obviously nontrivial, especially with incumbent HR morons fighting you.

An HR screen will sometimes remove frauds (not usually because they can't really tell, it removes uncharasmatic frauds only), but it also has a very high probability of removing anyone on the autism spectrum - no matter how qualified. I really don't want people on the autism spectrum removed from my hiring funnel for software engineer. If you ever looked over the shoulder of a recruiter or HR when they do a first pass on resumes you will be horrified at how many of the best candidates they pass over because they have no idea what they are reading, and how many very poor candidates they pass along for very stupid reasons like having 'Yale' for their college (despite it being for History and despite it being the extension school, true story, and this person ended up getting hired despite negative interview feedback and then fired for incompetence a few months later).

[jjav]

> An HR screen isn't a background check. It's "can you talk about your roles and provlems solved like you actually did it. A good HR screen should make sure they aren't blatantly lying

Correct. While not perfect, if you have good HR hiring team they will do a decent job at feeling out the people before they get to you.

> I can apply to 100 job and interview for 10 that all fall through.

Part of the difficulty is that (despite any myths around engineering shortage) there are so many qualified people for every role that it is overwhelming.

I just opened a new job req last week, I have over 1100 resumes in the queue already. And this is a pretty specialized technical role in a specialized department, not a generic "javascript software engineer" role, either.

Obviously I can't read all of them, which makes me sad because someone took the time to send their resume and I feel like I should give them the respect of reading it, but there are simply not enough hours in a week. While HR does the screening, I also go and do a random sampling of the resumes and everyone who has applied seems at least moderately qualified. But of course I can only talk to about 1% of them at best.