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.”
If their hiring process is 7 rounds they’re not hiring talent, they’re hiring people willing to jump through hoops, give up all dignity, and be subservience.
Same with group interviews. It’s not about talent, it’s about who will be the best little lap dog.
I have to disagree with the group interview part. There are definite uses for it, especially when you work on something that absolutely demands collaboration. You can pretty quickly see who will dominate a discussion or try to do everything themselves, and who will give everyone a fair shake. If the company cares about their culture and not just raw talent, they can learn a lot from group interviews. It also helps if youre hiring A LOT of people.
My company hires 100+ college graduates every year. Group interviews are an essential part of the process. I still work with some of the people in my group interview from 15 years ago
“Culture fit” means “are you going to disrupt our little codependent circle-jerk?”
@usamemes
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.
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.
I find it weird that the US seems to have more interview rounds than most countries, despite it being the place where it’s easiest to fire people for not meeting expectations.
At my last job it was just the HR interview and an interview with my prospective boss, but my boss’ idea of an interview was to make me take a lengthy, ridiculous test he designed himself that was mostly questions he could have just asked me, including a bunch of weird lateral thinking questions cribbed from “This Google interview question will stump you” clickbait, plus intentional interruptions during the test to see how I handled the unexpected.
I felt kind of insulted by it but I’m glad I stuck it out, because he turned out to be a great boss, who just happens to have strange ideas about interviewing.
If the company can’t put the interviews into a single 3-hour visit, that’s a red flag to me. And even three hours is too long, should be an hour max, but whatever, I understand that the bosses all have busy schedules, so what can you do.
Really depends on how much money is involved. A junior position, how much is there really to discuss. Someone at the top of their field should take longer because they are interviewing the company.
It’s really hard to get enough info in 1h. I’ve had several morning or afternoon interviews, though that felt comprehensive enough.
If there are more than 2 interviews, then the hiring process isn’t designed for you.
It’s designed to populate the schedules of other people so they can justify their positions. It’s a problem with increasingly larger portions of the corporate world.
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.
Mine have all been 3. Phone screen, phone interview, and in-person.
They get 2 interviews at most from me if there isn’t a panel or skills interview they told me about in that process. I had a prospective job try to schedule a 3rd general interview once, with no panel/skills in the process, and I asked them what more they needed to deliberate on. I heard them out about their reasoning and told them that it was clear to me they are wasting my time, hung up, and moved on. I’m not going to answer the same dipshit interview questions over and over for the same crap job that’s going to underpay and overwork me.
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.My current company won’t let use talk to potential hires because we haven’t gone through the company training for It. It’s great.
A couple companies ago I was doing the hiring for the team and they pushed for the whole group interview thing, it was a huge waste of time. It’s not just wasting the interviewees time, it’s just another pointless meeting for the employees. It’s indicates the company doesn’t value anyone’s time.
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.
Alot of it comes from every layer of management adding on shit. So HR wants a “Culture” interview, The org mandates a specific system design interview. Project manager wants to interview the high level candidate for leadership skills, then ontop of that the team itself wants a panel aswell as an interview for specific domain experience. Usually my company tries to group it all into one or two days
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.
