They’re not trying to hire talent. They’re trying to hire people who will do whatever you tell them to do.
Before Amazon was as big as it is today, they approached me for a position. I had three different 1 hour interviews, then I found out they still expected me to fly to Seattle for 3 full days of interviews. I told them I was not interested. Before I knew much about corporate America, my gut told me that was a bad sign. Glad I listened.
During the pandemic, interviews seemed to have endless rounds of ridiculous questions. There needs to be a law that interviewers need to pay you at the position’s rate for anything beyond 2 hours. It would eliminate so much bullshit.
You should know that a lot of companies engage in performative hiring processes. They post jobs and accept applications to create the appearance that they are hiring. It could be to send a message to investors, or competitors, or current employees. If you find yourself in yet another round of group interviews with potential team mates, consider that maybe you’re the show and they are the audience. “Look what we could have instead of you. Look how eager people are to work here, younger, cheaper, more qualified. We are in control of this situation.”
I’ve been through this a couple times already, when your company is “hiring” and flexes “record profits” but you also see mid-level managers start to disappear and no new people actually start working, you need to understand that it’s the first signs of your whole company is about to get digested by private equity.
It’s the dream of every CEO with a moderately successful company to get the interest of some giant whale of a company who specializes in digesting smaller companies and skimming off just the profitable assets, be it technology or talent or existing clientele. The buyout is usually in the millions, and the private equity company will chew up the remaining employees and company structure like one of those industrial grinders they make youtube channels to watch shred engine blocks and the like.
To get the dark gaze of Sauron to fix upon your company, you have to inflate its value and potential, and that starts with working your numbers to show profit rising and show your need to expand by hiring more people, by creating listings and even whole hiring departments, but not actually do any hiring.
When you come out the other side unemployed, you will then have to wade through about 50% ghost listings from companies who are also trying to do this same thing and won’t return your call or they will make you jump through hoops so they can say they have “new talent in the running” for new openings.
My small company (~120 employees) got swallowed by a giant whale (rhymes with “Crisco”) of a company like this. Except that everybody in the original small company got laid off six months later, and we had no assets whatsoever except for the “talent”. Crisco even got stuck with the lease for our recently-renovated office and had to buy it out. Our C-suite got large stock awards when we were acquired but they all got dismissed, too. I have no fucking idea why it happened.
That’s one thing that’s more profoundly frustrating about the whole mess, these giant carnivorous whales have already taken into account that not every meal they digest is going to be profitable, they make enough money from the ones that do turn a profit that they can write off the destruction of entire, functioning companies for no goddamn reason as “the cost of doing business.”
This is not sustainable.
Sometimes the purpose of your acquisition is just to eliminate a competitor.
If it’s more than 2 it doesn’t matter. I already picked up another offer by the time you get around to finding a date.
Beyond 2 interviews, the point is not to test you. It is to make you feel small.
Right this is the first time I’ve had to do 3 interviews for a job. Fuck. Before that it was either you were hired or told you’ll hear back. Not this having to meet everybody and their mom by the third fuckin
dateinterview, not only that but what if they don’t get you? You wasted time and gas they ain’t gonna pay for.3 is a lot, though not the most egregious. My worst experience was five interviews ranging from HR to the fucking CEO only for them to low ball me at the end of it.
I did not take the job.
It’s so wild how things have become today. When I got my first “grown-up” job in 2007, I had one interview. The first half was legit interview, while the second half was a tour of the workspace, where I was spoken to as if I was already hired. By the end, I was hired, and I stayed with that job for a few years.
I had just turned 18 and was still in my final year of high school. The application for the job was a packet of physical paperwork (no online applications.) I found it by walking around and looking for “Help wanted” signs in windows.
Goddamn, how things have radically changed. These days, I can’t find anything decent without relying on recruiters on Indeed reaching out to me. I have found jobs through searching myself, but they were shitty. Recruiters reaching out to me years ago started me on a career path I hadn’t originally searched for (but that I enjoy and have stuck with since then), and then found me again last year when I was looking for a better company to work for. It’s nice to be sought out, but I’d like more to be able to see all my options and have a choice in the matter. Oh, and it’d be real nice to not have to rely on a private third-party company to know who’s hiring in the first place.
But the work required to research multiple places on one’s own, put in applications and multiple rounds of interviews… it’s exhausting and prohibitive.
Looking back to how I got that first job, it feels like I squeezed through a rapidly-closing door. Hiring simply doesn’t work that way anymore.
I used to do hiring and it has been a solved problem for at least half a century now through trial periods.
I really don’t understand these multi-round interviews - what can you possible learn from them? It’s 2 short interviews -> 2-4 week well paid contract -> employment or not. Works every single time unless you are so disorganized that you simply can’t implement this then lack of talen is really the least of your worries.
We do 2 rounds + optional initial phone screen if we can’t do initial vetting based on recruiter reputation or other info.
So if you don’t get the other info and the applicant doesn’t want to do the phone screening do they even have a chance at getting the job?
If not, then it’s not optional is it?
Optional on our end. We skip it 90% of the time.
Phone screen is basically a 10 minute check if a candidate has any idea about stuff in their resume or is it complete BS and they are not worth getting one of the senior employees to interview them.
Didn’t really address my point there, but thank you for explaining what a phone screening is.
OK, let me address your point then:
Phone screening is skipped for most candidates, but for the few that we do want to screen it is mandatory to continue. Since this post is from potential employee perspective I should have used “extra” instead of “optional”.
- For about 90% of candidates our interview process has two rounds: skill evaluation by a senior employee or employees (e.g. a technical interview for software devs) that doubles as “vibe check” followed by 2nd round with a manager that is more focused on culture fit, making sure both sides have matching expectation and ends with compensation negotiation.
- For about 10% of candidates who don’t come with a recommendation from a current employee or from someone in our network, or from one of the recruiters we trust and doesn’t have something else backing claims in their resume there is a quick phone screening before all that - just to filter out resumes that are full of BS.
- VP and up recruitment is more complex, but that is to be expected and I doubt anyone has a problem with that.
We manage to get a candidate from first round to offer/rejection in less than a week most of the time (2 if there is a screen) and have both high long term employee retention and very low percentage of hires who don’t work out.
I suspect that as company grows (we’re closing on 100 employees) and recruitment moves further and further away from “the trenches” and people doing the hiring are less and less capable of judging candidate competence managers start adding more rounds hoping they will filter out the ones that don’t meet the requirements.
the few that we do want to screen it is mandatory to continue.
Thankyou.
