Many companies don’t actually do (or receive the results of) background checks until after you’ve been hired. I’ve heard of people being escorted out weeks after starting because they had lied about their criminal record or something and it took that long to find out.
I went through this a few months ago (job offer and confident in background check) and turned in my notice the day after sending the new company the signed offer letter
Sent the HR contact a follow up and immediately got an out of office auto reply. Let the torture continue!
being an interviewer for a panel interview sucks. Interviewing bad candidates sucks way more…
Interviews are almost always a waste of time. They reward a personality type that excels in that environment, which is, to put it bluntly, bullshitters.
Especially really early in your career, you’re right to be fucking terrified during interviews! Your first job will make a huge difference towards expected lifetime earnings, in the millions of dollars. You’d be an idiot not to be scared.
This is circular though because effective bullshitting is a massively useful skill for corporate drones so … that means the interview is actually effective!!!
Come on now. Interviews aren’t great, but done well they are a reasonable tool for use in recruitment. They are also something that can be prepared for, so they reward people who do the work.
Yeah there is a big difference in a generic interview with bullshit questions and a more focused interview that proves you know what you are talking about.
“Rewarding people who do the work” just means game-able. Your candidate selection process should reward people who will be the best hires, not the ones who have the best-honed interviewing skills.
In my opinion they are only a reasonable tool because they are basically the only tool. I think the research shows that almost all techniques to identify good workers have weak correlations.
This is, to some extent, a futile exercise. “Objective” methods of identifying good candidates will often reward people with good technical skills but no social skills. That’s bad! “Subjective” methods of identifying candidates will often reward people with good social skill but not technical skills. That’s bad!
It doesn’t mean interviewing is worthless, because any approach that outperforms mailing offer letters to 10 random people has value. But if you had to fill 10 positions, but far the most effective way is to hire 100 likely candidates and challenge the fuck out of them in their first year and watch how they perform. It won’t be hard then to identify your 10 valuable employees. This seems like an expensive way to do it, but the cost/benefit trade off is actually more appealing than sinking a bunch of money into improving your hiring techniques to try to find the 10 best candidates and hire them. More often that not you’ll end up at the end of year 1 with 2 or, in a GREAT year, 3 viable employees.
Depends on the job. But “willing to put in discretionary effort to prepare” has a good correlation with performance in many roles.
Yeah this is true because you kind of want people that know how to identify an outcome and then be organized about achieving the outcome. A challenge is that some people will crack under the interpersonal pressure of the interview but thrive as an “independent worker” in the role. As you say, its all role dependent. Certainly for a sales role a master bullshiter with good social skills is basically what you want. For other roles, not so much.
This is a good strategy, but I still put it in the working for someone else category.
Yeah, my experience with corporate interviews is strictly as a scientist for scientific positions. The interview I had with a woman who had clearly bullshitted her way up to that point and then couldn’t even remotely explain the undergraduate biology concept she claimed to have taught was certainly something. I kept asking easier questions to try and find something she knew, and it was a bottomless pit of bullshit.
Heh, literally the core of my job is technical people with social skills. Thus far, asking people to tell technical stories about what they’ve done and a story about some sort of story about some sort of technical communication they’ve had to do has worked great (on a small sample size).
Did you keep asking easier questions because you were curious about just how dumb she actually was?
Mostly to kill time, with a side of initially wanting to help her save face. Like, maybe she’s just stuck and can regain her composure if she gets something correct? But it was pretty clear that wasn’t the case after a few iterations.
Hahahahahahha
The biggest problem with hiring is the lack of feedback on most of your decisions
You only get feedback on the candidates you actually hire.
You never find out if the guy you didn’t make an offer to would have been an all-star (or for that matter, if the guy who turned down your offer would have been a bust)
You disagree? Questions like “What are your weaknesses?” vs “How would you go about implementing and developing x process?” is a big difference. Once actually has a decent amount of value in understanding something where the other is just a bullshit question looking for a bullshit response.
