[ChrisMarshallNY]

Does “in-person” mean flying in the candidate, and performing the interview on-site?

Does “100% of their loops” mean everything after the initial contact?

I suspect smaller companies could find this challenging.

I’m old enough to remember when independent recruiters acted almost like “talent agents,” with large payouts.

This encouraged them to curate a “personal brand,” and they would often do a lot of the vetting, themselves.

I believe that executive recruiters still operate that way, but engineering recruiters seem to have sharply declined, since those days.

[MOARDONGZPLZ]

In person means everything past the initial tech / recruiter screen, which is a very low bar just to see if we think it’s worth flying them out. The alternative is you will hire people and you can’t know if they fraudulently interviewed using things like the tools above, or even if the person who interviewed is the same person who applied and will show up on day one.

For smaller companies in particular the above can be catastrophic, so I recommend they adapt to changing times.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I agree that in-person is much better. I’m also no fan of LeetCode tests. I won’t get into all the reasons, but I feel they actively harm the process.

I was a manager for over 25 years, and did lots of interviews, with no technical testing. It was all in-person, with the company covering the expense of the interview. I think some of our best hires, came from independent recruiters (headhunters).

I feel that I never made a mistake, technically, but I believe that a couple of my hires didn’t end up integrating well with the team.

Remote work is now a part of the landscape. It’s actually not new. I worked for a long time, in the 1990s, with a Boston-based contractor, who I have never met, in person. We paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars, over many years, and he did outstanding work.

We got him through an old-fashioned recruiter. A good “old school” recruiter could save a company a lot of up-front time, by doing their own vetting and networking. They would demand a fairly significant “finders fee,” but in my experience, it was worth it.

[MOARDONGZPLZ]

I didn’t say anything about leetcode, and I didn’t say anything about remote work.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

No you didn’t. I hadn’t assumed that you did.

But remote work, as a standard part of the landscape, these days, means that Things Have Changed. In the 1990s, arrangements like the one I made, were extremely rare (in fact, I got chewed out for it, many years into the relationship, when Legal started flexing their muscles).

Leetcode testing has also become part of the landscape, and has become so ubiquitous, that it’s almost worthless, as a useful coefficient. Gaming employment testing is a pretty good-sized industry.

I merely mentioned them, because they are now so endemic to the hiring process.