No, it's all about everyone. If I hire a person and fire them in less than a year, that's almost always because of a performance problem that's impacting the team or the org. If you're the one being fired, you probably left a job or didn't take some other job to work with us and now you're going to be unemployed. Additionally, as a hiring manager, I too am a human who wants to enjoy my job and have positive experiences and firing people sucks. It always sucks. It takes a toll on you.
Filtering early is best for everyone. If that means more rounds of interviews to be sure, that's what I'm going to do. I do my best to schedule around candidates and I'm forthcoming about the process during the first call but we try hard to be thorough because we want this to work well for everyone. Would you rather be hired and then fired quickly because we didn't realize there was a misalignment? I wouldn't.
> Would you rather be hired and then fired quickly because we didn't realize there was a misalignment? I wouldn't.
The fact that your knee jerk reaction to a misalignment is firing someone rather than mentoring them and aligning them with the org speaks volumes about your management style… And managers wonder why they have such a hard time hiring or retaining people right now…
You've had some bad jobs, haven't you? Want to talk about it? We don't abuse anyone on a visa because we're fully remote and don't do visas. We target the high side of comp in the person's country. We specifically hire senior people because we're small and building. Developing talent is great but the time to do that is expensive and until you've hit a certain scale, it's detrimental to launching a startup. Look around the industry and look at the success stories. Then look at what their early hiring looks like. If you can find a startup that succeeded by hiring new grads and junior engineering first, I'd love to read about it.
> If you can find a startup that succeeded by hiring new grads and junior engineering first, I'd love to read about it.
Mentoring is not something that's only done for new grads and juniors.
Wherever there are skilled people in the company interested in learning more about the systems around them and how to work with them well, it's generally a good idea to figure out some way to mentor/grow them. Whether officially, nor unofficially.
For non-technical roles it's likely a good idea to do the same in ways that suit there as well.
I used "misalignment" as a kind way to say "because we realized we don't want to work with you." But you're chasing a different thread anyway. We're talking about quick hiring and firing being better than thoroughly vetting a candidate. If we want to talk about how to hire junior engineering talents specifical, we can do that.
I definitely spend less time per person, trying to find juniors. You have to because t
What you're looking for is different. My only goal for hiring junior engineers is to find out if they know enough to not drown and if I think they're willing and able to learn fast. That takes less time and the risk is generally less because my expectations are lower and so is the compensation.
It's been a while since I hired junior people though. The roles I take are always in early phase startups and I don't have budget for people who need on-the-job training.
I agree that bad hires should be avoided and that filtering early is best for everyone. The question is whether a stretched out interview process is the most effective way to filter out misalignments.
Interviews may be the best tool available while searching for unknown talent, but that does not mean they are a good tool. The process is artificial, no matter how much effort is put into framing it otherwise. Even the most honest interviewee will have difficulty behaving as they would in a normal working environment, while many are more than willing to be actors playing a part. Likewise, interviewers are interacting with the interviewee in an unnatural way and are making judgements about the interviewee in a fashion different from making a judgement of a colleague.
Even if one could somehow get beyond that artificiality, what sort of impression does it leave the candidate with? There is a world of a difference between working for a company that is careful and one that is bureaucratic, one that is focussed upon making sound decisions and one that simply follows process. It can also leave the impression that key decision makers are difficult to access, making it more difficult to get the actual meat of the work done.
As for competing for the best employees, a drawn out process doesn't benefit anyone and is the least detrimental to companies that offer a genuine competitive advantage. Keep in mind, that candidate may already be part way through the interview process at another company (or even offered a position) by the time an they are offered the first interview at your company. While both parties form impressions of the other during the interview, the candidate will gain more insight about the company's functioning in how they handle the hiring process than the other way around.
Hired and fired quickly is better because when I have to dedicate weeks or a month of unpaid, uncompensated time to your process then I'm the one losing. You are already getting paid for putting in the work of interviewing me. If your team is stretched so thin that you need to put your time at a premium, that's a problem with your process not having enough throughput.
How many people do you reject to fill one position? How many are "filtered" at later stages to fill one position?
If it's taking months, then they're doing it badly. Our hiring process is five rounds but it never takes more than a couple weeks, including the negotiation phase. Our data shows that we need something like 14 resumes to get one candidate worth interviewing. Of those, it takes 4-6 candidates for one hire. Hiring and firing fast means we also have to invest in onboarding, training and allowing people to settle in. During that time, we've filled the current position and we're no longer interviewing candidates. Once someone is fired, we have to go through the whole mess again. That would be the most wasteful model for everyone involved. By my math, that's a minimum of two months of time on a single person (I think six weeks to fully productive is reasonable) just to go back to searching again. And that's just the US and ignores the two week notice (or more) for each candidate.
I hire in APAC too. Indian engineers are giving 60-90 day notices now and that's contractual. Two candidates, using your model, could easily take up a year. (Hiring in APAC take a long time already.)
I can only assume you've had some bad experiences lately but your personal bias has created a really bad mental model for you that would be a net negative for everyone.
Sure it is. If a company's hiring process for a single candidate takes multiple months, that's bad. The candidate experience is critically important. We have five stages of our interview process, two of them involve speaking with multiple engineers. The whole process takes less than a month, as long as the candidate has time. In general, it's 2-2.5 weeks and that involves coordinating calls with engineers in the Americas, Europe and APAC.
If it takes longer, it's always an issue with coordinating with the candidate schedule. (this is my experience with my hiring process)
Fine. I'm mixing replies. A single month is still unreasonable. That's a bad candidate experience. That changes nothing about the number of people who interview you though, just how quickly.
Well due to real world constraints of scheduling even with people who's sole job is to interview candidates the speed at which you interview is most likely going to be a function of how many people need to interview you.
This is a lie that everyone tells themselves to make them feel secure and safe.
The best interview is working with the person. Do a few basic interviews for competency, give them a 2 week - month long 1099 contract and put them on guard rails for the contract duration.
Their daily work isn't just about whether they can jump through time-based hoops or answer basic questions. No one is going to know whether it is a mutual match until the person gets into the codebase and start working.
Plenty of great engineers have "performance problems" not because they are bad engineers but because of problems an interview will never expose or detect like a bad teammate or lead match causing disagreements, a bad codebase, poor planning that only builds tech debt, bad business plan, disagreement on business direction, etc.
The idea that an interview can filter good or bad engineers is laughable. The most you can determine from an interview, regardless of how many flaming hoops and balls the candidate bounces off their nose, is whether they know how to code and _probably_ know what you need them to know.
> The most you can determine from an interview, regardless of how many flaming hoops and balls the candidate bounces off their nose, is whether they know how to code
When I interview I don't even mention code or technical stuff (that is for someone else to ask) and I am able to learn quite a bit about a person and if they would be a good fit. Just because you can't doesn't mean other people can't.
A week for a single candidate interviewing with a US only company is entirely reasonable. I don't think two is bad either. I would not stay engaged with a company that took a month, the same way I don't stay engaged with a candidate that can't find time to schedule three or four calls in less than six weeks (I am more forgiving with candidates than I would be with companies).
Filtering early is best for everyone. If that means more rounds of interviews to be sure, that's what I'm going to do. I do my best to schedule around candidates and I'm forthcoming about the process during the first call but we try hard to be thorough because we want this to work well for everyone. Would you rather be hired and then fired quickly because we didn't realize there was a misalignment? I wouldn't.