[ElProlactin]

> Google, McKinsey, and other companies have responded by reintroducing in-person interviews for some candidates, a meaningful step backward in efficiency (due to travel time and costs) that signals how seriously they are treating this problem.

Maybe the relentless pursuit of "efficiency" at all costs has broken the world?

I remember when I applied for my first job. I got dressed up and my mom drove me to the interview because I didn't have a driver's license or car at the time. It wasn't "efficient" for me and I suppose it wasn't "efficient" for the company but much to my surprise, I got an offer and that was my first "tech job"...before tech jobs were cool.

It's very strange that the authors talk about how "making a bad hire is terribly expensive" but then call out "travel time and costs". Well, if B < A for each role filled, is it really so bad?

And yeah, I get that huge companies like Google and Facebook hire from around the world and not everyone is located in close proximity to Mountain View and Palo Alto, but that speaks more to the oligopolistic world we're living in than anything else.

If a small number of companies weren't distorting the labor markets, this might matter less.

[Aurornis]

> It's very strange that the authors talk about how "making a bad hire is terribly expensive" but then call out "travel time and costs". Well, if B < A for each role filled, is it really so bad?

The cost of a bad hire they're referring to includes things like opportunity cost of not having a good hire in that position, damage they've done to the product (codebase, design, etc.), and second-order effects like demoralizing the rest of the team.

The actual hiring costs of a bad hire are a rounding error compared to the damage they can do.

Have you ever been on a team that was great until they hired one wrong person who made every work week a miserable slog? Attrition goes up as the good employees start to leave. The codebase starts accumulating a lot of tech debt. Even after they're gone it can take a long time to recover.

This is why it's so important to be able to fire fast, but that's another topic rife with difficulties.

[ElProlactin]

But that's the point.

If the cost of a bad hire is huge (which I agree it is), why is the hiring process optimized, in part, around reducing the travel costs? It would seem that these costs are modest in comparison.

[tracerbulletx]

In the not too distant past (like 10 years ago) flying people to a final in person round was standard practice.

[Aurornis]

In my anecdotal experience talking to people applying for jobs right now, this practice has come back in full force. You can expect final round interviews to be on-site unless otherwise specified. The days of getting hired entirely remotely are over.

A friends' company has even ended remote hiring altogether after auditing their remote hires and discovering a lot of connections from countries they didn't expect.

There's even a growing scam where people get recruited to lend their identities and bank accounts to someone else to get the job. Then they're asked to install some software on the company laptop and leave it open and powered on during the workday so someone can operate it remotely. Remote work is wild right now.

[DonsDiscountGas]

Standard and expensive (in terms of time and money) for both the company and the applicant

[Aurornis]

FYI companies should be reimbursing travel expenses for this travel. As a candidate it's worth clarifying to confirm so you don't get some oddball startup trying to force candidates to pay their own travel, but every big company travel interview will be expenses paid down to your travel to/from the airport and the meals you eat along the way.

The time commitment is real, but on-site travel is almost always reserved for the last round on-site. Often as a final pass verification, or when the company is down to a couple of final candidates. Companies aren't flying every applicant out for all of the interviews. If you get to that point, you're close to the job.

[wiseowise]

Well, maybe some things should be expensive.

[ElProlactin]

If the cost of hiring the wrong person is huge, the cost (in terms of time and money) of conducting on-site interviews is almost certainly lower.

Also, in terms of the costs to the applicants, this touches on the oligopolistic nature of so many industries today, which has resulted in high concentrations of the most desirable jobs in places with the highest costs of living.

Basically, unless you already have a FAANG job or are independently wealthy, it's not easy to up and move to Silicon Valley, Seattle, etc. and job hunt.

[AznHisoka]

Maybe companies should say “Wanna apply for a job? Come to our office during these hours for a pre-screening and to drop off your resume” you can’t email or apply online anymore

[jmyeet]

I have what I think is a good analogy for this problem.

In the Olden Days [tm], jobs were advertised through recruiters, physical media (eg the paper) and connections. You had to review applications and conduct interviews. The cost of applying was relatively high, your reach was relatively low and the investment per applicant was relatively high. So imagine that there were enough jobs for everyone in a simplified model. 10 people applied for 10 jobs. It's not the same 10 people for each job. But there was a decent ROI on effort. It kinda just worked.

Fast forward to now and the cost of applying is essentially zero in terms of registering interest and submitting a CV. And you apply for a lot more jobs so instead of 10 applicants for 10 jobs, you have 200 applicants for 200 jobs. Still the same applicant to job ratio but way more inefficient for everyone involved. Applicants can't put in the same effort for 200 applications that they did for 10 and employers can't review 200 applications the same way they did 10.

So what happens? Employers, who have the power in this relationship, put up roadblocks in the name of efficiency. Now you have to survive ATS before ever going in front of a human. That ATS uses inscrutable logic that may filter you out for not including enough keywords or some other specious reason. You now have hiring assignments.

The net effect is that an applicant puts in 200 applications, get automatically filtered out from 180 of them and then has to do upwards of 20 take home assignments.

Plus there are more and more layers added. More rounds of interviews. Phone screens. Remote interviews then on-site interviews. All of this wastes time and, like you allude to, I don't think it's effective. But it's a natural response to the illusion of choice.

Let me give an online dating analogy. In years gone by, you'd rely on meeting people in person. Now, less so. And speaking in a strictly heteronormative sense, how it tends to go is that women on average have hundreds of choices and men have on average far fewer. A gender imbalance plays into this.

So what does a woman in this scenario do? They start adding filters to just make the numbers more manageable. Height, salary, location, same interests and so on. So the net effect is that that a lot of people are indepndently applying filters and filtering down to a pool with a lot of crossover. Conventionally attractive men, for example, will tend have far more options.

So I think the same happens with hiring. If you're a Big Tech company, you start adding filters. Did this person go to a top school? What internships did they have? Do these things matter for on-the-job performance? Barely (IMHO). But what you'll probably find is that a handful of people have a ton of options while others struggle. And it's simply the product of employers trying to make their applicant pool manageable but they're all doing it in very similar ways.

And I honestly don't know what the solution is.

[coffeefirst]

Absolutely. It turns out friction is important in the right places.

[SpicyLemonZest]

It's just how you have to structure a large organization to spend responsibly. You assign a budget to each function, you tell people to do the best they can within the budget, and if they come back and say "actually I'd like to spend even more money" you ask them to generate an explanation for why that's in the best interests of the business. And generating that explanation is kinda the whole purpose of the source article: the Harvard Business Review exists for managers and executives to discuss amongst each other as arguments for why their proposals and budget requests should be approved.