These "rules" miss the big picture. People react in certain ways for entirely different reasons.
Example: Recruiter mispronounces my name. I don't say anything. This can be because:
1) I'm a coward.
2) I don't care.
3) I care and am not a coward, but think it would be petty to interrupt the conversation to point this out.
4) I'm overly practical and don't care about this kind of details.
5) I think the other person may feel bad if I correct them.
6) I accept that people make sometimes mistakes. Maybe I'll point it out if they do it 3 times or more.
Etc.
Which is it? You'd have to know the person better to know.
Even if the person is just a coward, this could be based on specific traumatic experiences other persons didn't have and which affect only minimally the rest of the personality.
Same applies to thank you emails, coming late to the interview etc. With such subtle situations, you need to know _why_ somebody act the way they did, and without knowing the person, which you usually don't, when interviewing, you just can't.
These are just BS rules with which recruiters try to make their work easier. Similar to Codility & co. tests for software developers. Well, bad news, recruiting is hard. You'll have to take the time to listen to and think about your candidates.
My last name is not pronounced correctly by English speakers (even when they assume the name is French, which it isn't). Only twice has someone interviewing me gotten it correct, and in both cases it turns out they knew a distant relative of mine.
I only bother correcting people when we are going to have a lasting relationship. In an interview? We aren't there yet.
I have no idea how this would even play out for "Bob Anderson."
"When interviewing, I go for lunch with the candidate. I ask the waiter to subtly get their order wrong. A great test of the interviewee's character!"
Or the waiter's character.
"We always leave candidates waiting half an hour before calling them in. How do they cope with delays?"
I cope with delays of longer than 15 minutes by first trying to communicate about the delay and then by leaving. Dear recruiter, what do you think that says about me?
If I find out a recruiter has intentionally done any of these, the interview is over. I'm looking for a good fit. Duplicity, manipulation, lack of integrity... these are not qualities that ingratiate me to anyone.
Some people might say, "Well, yeah, but you can afford to do that. Not everyone can." But I did it when I couldn't afford to do it too. Perhaps not surprisingly, most of my employers have been awesome.
People often 'mispronounce' my first name (can't even pronounce last name). Honestly, I don't care. I don't blame them because they pronounce it from English point of view which is obvious as they are native speakers.
Some people ask me how would I say my name (I am Russian, but live in NZ), I tell them. Some people then try to say it that way, sometimes they 'forget' and fallback to English pronunciation. What's the big deal?
I can't even imagine myself being offeneded by that (Is author a child or what?). Same goes the other way: NZ is a diverse country, we have people from all around the globe here, and I bet I mispronounce every second name/last name.
> I can't even imagine myself being offeneded by that (Is author a child or what?).
"Offended" as in perceiving the speaker to be giving offense; that is, perceiving the speaker to be intentionally not respecting the listener. Being able to pick up on that is quite adult, and the exact opposite of childish.
I agree about the name mispronouncing thing. My first name is very easily mispronounced for most people. Even when they’ve just heard me pronounce it for some reason.
I usually don’t bother correcting people unless they ask— and even if they do I usually tell them it’s truly not a big deal, and they can call me whatever they would like. (I say / word this in a way that makes sure it’s humorous).
Why would you even care how they pronounce your name, unless it's an English name? If they mispronounce Jones then sure that would be a red flag for many reasons, but if it's Nguyen? Can anyone outside Vietnam actually pronounce Nguyen? It's virtually impossible to do without practice if your native language is English. Or take Chinese "Qi" or "Xi", or basically any Polish sound. If your language doesn't have nasal vowels or soft sibilants you simply won't be able to pronounce them.
But some names are indeed impossible to pronounce for none-native speakers. In Flemish we have the name Geert, and I never heard any none-native speaker been able to properly say it. That 'G' sound that we make is not used anywhere else that I know of.
Ok so practically speaking, if your name is Przybyszewski and you move to a country like China with a very simple phonetic structure, how could they pronounce your name?
Before you answer, keep in mind that even smart dedicated Chinese people that study English for years have a hard time pronouncing a lot of words, the sound systems are simply too different.
>"If someone doesn't send a thank you email, don't hire them".
I recently went through a short job search for programming work in Austin. I made it all the way to the final, on-site interview at three places before landing an offer.
Every time I did not get an offer, I would get an email saying "thank you so much for your time, please reply with your concerns or questions!"
And so, each time, I sent and email asking "what did I do wrong, and what could I improve?" making it very clear I was just looking for a quick, single sentence answer like "more github projects" or "you smell."
I didn't get a single reply. Not one.
After that, I quit playing the ultra polite send-a-thank-you for every single phone call or meeting I was graced with, and sure enough, I got a couple job offers after that.
If anything, the whole experience convinced me that no one maybe outside of sales or filling an executive position really cares about this kind of business etiquette - either in giving it or receiving it.
each time, I sent and email asking "what did I do wrong, and what could I improve?"
There's no upside for the company in giving any substantial answer to questions like this, and significant potential downside.
Among other things it's generally not going to be that you were rejected for the position, it's that someone else was chosen over you. "Rejected" would be "we'd rather leave the position vacant than hire you" and if that's the case there's even more reason to not tell you unless it was for purely technical reasons.
However, if the company is dealing with a recruitment agency it might be useful for the company to let the agency know why a candidate was not suitable, so that they get better candidates in future, and the recruitment agent (who is a "double agent" really) might pass the information on to the candidate (probably not in writing). I've heard of that happening.
Also, in cases where there isn't a position to be filled, but the interviewee is trying to persuade the company to create the position, in those cases the company can be a bit more open in saying why they have decided not to proceed. I've heard of that happening, too.
There is no incentive for a company to spend their time explaining what you did wrong at an interview if they are already sure they don't want to hire you. And if the reason for not choosing you is not very constructive, there's no point at all in sharing it.
Your best bet might be to ask about how you did at the end of the interview. I had some luck with interviewers explaining me a solution to an interview problem that they would consider perfect.
I can't even remember ever asking for feedback from an interview. It's awkward for the employer, especially if they're going through a lot of candidates, and usually if I don't pass an interview I tend to know why. I mean if you're socially intelligent, usually you can tell if you've said something they don't like. Plus I imagine a lot of employers probably have policies against answering that kind of question just for liability reasons, or just to not drag things out.
After that, I quit playing the ultra polite send-a-thank-you for every single phone call or meeting I was graced with, and sure enough, I got a couple job offers after that.
I wouldn't be surprised if deciding not to worry about details with unknowable significance and inconsistent response allowed you to relax a bit more in future interviews.
> I wouldn't be surprised if deciding not to worry about details with unknowable significance and inconsistent response allowed you to relax a bit more in future interviews.
Oh, for sure.
I hadn't interviewed for over a decade, and was super keyed up for the first few this time around. After my attitude changed to more of a "meh, I can take this or leave it" they got a whole lot easier.
Confidence is key and they need to be selling themselves as much or more than you. You don't really need the job. If there is a way to swing disinterested interviewers is another story.
That's some upside down logic, in my opinion. Getting a job isn't a right, so there's no violation of your rights, hence, no grounds to pursue support in a courtroom. What am I not getting?
"If there's no response to this email, I'll consider that a criticism of my personal hygiene. As you know, hygiene is not part of the job, and therefore I would consider rejection on such grounds legally actionable."
If you added this line to every follow up email, that would at least remove the uncertainty about whether or not you would get the offer.
Such and such corporation is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate the candidates based on their race, age, gender, veteran status or smell.
Regards,
A poor HR guy who now has to send these emails to all candidates.
At my current position, part of our hiring process is a "homework" piece where we give you a project that should take around 3 hours and review the result.
Surprisingly (to me), I was able to get permission to share feedback with candidates we reject. I only do this when people ask, but I take the time to summarize & sanitize the feedback from our internal reviewers and try to phrase everything very neutrally ("we thought that your decision to do X was not the best way to approach this" as opposed to "X was a terrible idea").
That said, I don't think I'd be able to get permission to give feedback on the interview parts of the process. That's a bit more subjective and it's _really_ easy for any sort of feedback there to become lawsuit fodder.
Replying to everyone here telling me "duh why would they"- I get that, and really, I'm not surprised.
The problem I have is that a lot of these rejection letters are worded in a very touchy-feely way where they actually write some version of, "if you have any questions don't hesitate to message back!"
That is what bothers me.
Like, if you're not going to answer my questions, just say so upfront.
(side note: I don't just say "why didn't I get the job" - I follow the advice of the countless "how to ask why you didn't get the job" articles out there that tell you to frame it in terms of questions they can safely answer like, "was someone more qualified than me" or "would it have helped if I had more experience with...", etc.)
Yes, there's no way to win as the hiring entity, you just open yourself up to discrimination lawsuits. So it's better to do the inhuman thing and say nothing!
That's right. The other reason to not give feedback is the rejectee will inevitably start arguing with you about it, demand more detail, try to reopen negotiations, tell you how unfair/wrong you are, etc.
I've tried it both ways. Not giving feedback works much, much better.
Yes so if you’re gonna ask this question ask over phone not email! I’ve successfully gotten feedback by doing this. Not in super detail but very good general feedback.
At my last job, my manager “tricked” me during the interview. Apparently, he wanted to see how I dealt with criticism. At least that is how the recruiter justified it when I expressed my dissatisfaction with the experience and my hesitation about working for that person.
That manager ended up being all about power trips and it made for a very toxic culture in his team and in interactions with others outside of the team. I left after less than a year despite not having a job lined up.
The only bright side is having found a position at a place that is the complete opposite.
There are very few rules in getting hired. A few are:
1. First class people hire first class people.
2. Second class people hire third class people.
3. People like to hire people similar to themselves.
4. Not getting a job does not really say anything about you, but the guy they hired says a lot about the company.
PS:
5. Most companies, when offered unexperienced talent and an experienced idiot, will hire the experienced idiot. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM and he had the experience on his resume.
I don't really like the idea of A/B/C players. In my opinion context is king. Let's say you're a very creative person, you might struggle at a big shop where the hard problems are mostly solved and maintenance and teamwork are the main things which are valued. On the other hand, you might be excellent at a small company that's finding its way. Or vice versa -- some people really need the structure a more established company can offer. You even see this in CXX level positions. A person might be an excellent CEO for a company that's just starting, and a terrible CEO for a multibillion dollar established business. So a first class player in one context can easily be a third class person in another.
On 5 - nowadays I’d probably look to get rid of someone who suggested IBM in most companies... that’s a decision made on a golf course that engineers quit over.
From what I've seen and experienced most people doing the hiring are clueless. What's worse is most of them are insane. That is, they keep doing the same but expect different results.
Personally, I still shocked - and am mindful of the red flag - when they don't realize I'm interviewing them as much as they are interviewing me.
I'm a software engineer that's been involved in hiring decisions in the past.
When we make a bad hire we do a post-mortem just like we would for a critical production bug. We adjust the interview process or evaluation criteria every time a bad hire is made.
We also give the same interview for every role. We spend 80% of the time asking the same questions, and leave 20% of the time for the free flow conversation and interviewee questions.
I've seen that kind of thing too. What I've never seen, and what the article is focused on, is a serious correction for failures to hire. It seems like most companies would rather slowly strangle their hiring pipeline than tell people "your dealbreakers are dumb and you're no longer allowed to use them".
Aren't you afraid that you focus too much on avoiding the bad ones, and not on trying to hire the top ones?
You cannot do a postmortem for failing to hire top talent, because you will never know.
What I want to say is that a bad hire is probably less important than missing out on a top candidate. Because you can always fire as soon as you find out. The other error cannot be corrected.
The problem is that there is no feedback for when we fail to hire top talent.
How would I know that during a round of interviews I failed to give an offer to Top Talent? What can I do if someone I think is Top Talent gets another offer we cannot match?
Sure, I can try my best to work against those very costly situations, but I never know how good someone is going to be until they are hired, so I don't have enough data to determine if I'm failing to hire the best.
I can, and we do, determine which candidates we hired that we really like and talk to them about why they choose the company and try to appeal to and find more candidates like them.
This is all expressions of power. It won't be overcome until interviewees get leverage and express it. By the structure of the thing they never get leverage, so it will continue because it can.
The leverage interviewers have is that they know if the candidate can't find a job, that at some point the candidate won't be able to afford rent/mortgage, food, clothing etc. That's a desperate position for a candidate to be in and it puts employers in a position of absolute power. With that type of game it's inevitable that you will see anti-social interview techniques. It would be a sign of high character if an interviewer didn't power trip over a candidate. The changes that would alter that dynamic is either that society should find it acceptable for people to live out of a tent and ask for donations from strangers or guarantee basic needs to all its members. Both of which are socially and politically untenable because it would disrupt the power structure of those well regarded and politically connected business that benefit. So I expect zero change on this issue in perpetuity.
The third option is a tight job market. This is undermined by mass immigration, criticism of which is fought by the establishment even harder than basic income.
FWIW, the author (exec managing editor of Insider) of the "thank you email" blog post shared it on Twitter, and has received a large and largely negative response:
The goal of a job interview for me used to be twofold:
Can the candidate do the job?
Would I want to work with the candidate?
Unfortunately, I have got the second one wrong as often as not in the past, so now I just try to find anything that would mean that I wouldn't want to work with the candidate, in other words, are there any red flags?
I can't say they are typical, but we've had two candidates become somewhat agitated when challenged about their experience, e.g. you said you were a developer for 2 years at company X but it seems that you mostly did support. This resulted in a tirade about job titles.
Another red flag for me is when candidates are asked about their level of expertise on a scale of 1 to 10 on a technology and they reply with anything above 7.
Statistically there are people that are going to be able to claim 8 or above out 10 on any technology, they just probably can command a higher salary that the company I work wishes to offer (we put salary ranges on our job ads), which means that they are exaggerating, can't judge their skills (either because of self delusion or because they just think the technology doesn't have that much more to offer) or worse lying.
The thing is we were asking this to be able to tailor the questions that we would ask. No point in asking somebody who says their skill level in sql is 2 about pivot tables.
The expertise scale level question is bogus. You'll get people with low expertise who believe their level is high because they think that's all there is to know about a technology (advanced beginners), while experienced people would rate themselves lower because they realize how much they don't know yet. And also there will be those who correctly estimate their level as average. Everybody's scale is different. You can't reliably distinguish those groups.
This type of thing is a red flag and allows you to weed out companies that would be bad places to work.
Of course its a problem if you are actually running low on money and need to find a job soon because that might tempt you to try to work there even though you can tell some of them may be jerks.
While in general I agree, I understand the motivation behind these questions. Most jobs require more than just technical skills. They require and ability to think laterally, be independent, work on a team, etc. etc. Questions such as "tell me about a time when" are a reasonable way to assess some of these traits but also are not direct and have their own issues.
As long as interviews are consistent and polite I think it's reasonable to push candidates in non traditional ways to understand if they have the soft skills required for a role.
And then you have the famous Liar’s Poker interview question:
> Investment bankers had a technique known as the stress interview. If you were invited to Lehman’s New York offices, your first interview might begin with the interviewer asking you to open the window. You were on the forty-third floor overlooking Water Street. The window was sealed shut. That was, of course, the point. The interviewer just wanted to see whether your inability to comply with his request led you to yank, pull, and sweat until finally you melted into a puddle of foiled ambition. Or, as one sad applicant was rumored to have done, threw a chair through the window.
> Why would people want to work in such a homogeneous culture? Why would they want to work for someone who couldn't even be bothered to search the web for "How to pronounce Nguyen"?
Hilariously, I did a search for "How to pronounce $my_last_name" and each result I checked mispronounced it the same way English speakers always mispronounce it.
Yeah seriously. Almost every single American mispronounces my name even after I say it multiple times. Hell, they mispronounce common, one syllable American names like "Lou" more than half the time. When I tell them my name is like another name they can pronounce except without the "o" at the end, they still can't pronounce it despite being able to pronounce my name with an "o" at the end. After three decades of this, I've given up trying to correct people, trying to go with the Americanized pronunciation, or even using my full name at all. It's pointless. Americans are simply incapable of pronouncing anything even remotely foreign even if I enunciate it for them. I don't even bother with my last name. However they say it is fine because it's always wrong. I would recommend people adopt very simple American nicknames if they move here like many Chinese do, even if the name seems like it would be easy to pronounce. There's just no hope in getting people to pronounce your name right. Or accept the American wrong pronunciation and go with that. I've used all these strategies at some point in my life so now I have three names.
Germans pronouncing my American first name is the same way. It's a boring common Old Testament name. German has all the phonemes they need to say it too, even if the vowel is off a bit.
It's just something that happens, and I don't blame them for it after so long. I get the feeling that Anglicizing or Deutchifying names is universal.
British people usually have no problem with my name. I guess my issue is that people don't even make an effort. It's one thing to Americanize the name when you've never heard it pronounced correctly, it's another to continue pronouncing it that way after you've heard the correct pronunciation. But yeah, I've given up on this long ago.
> Hilariously, I did a search for "How to pronounce $my_last_name" and each result I checked mispronounced it the same way English speakers always mispronounce it.
Probably because they insist upon using dictionary respelling schemes instead of IPA, so they can't even notate the phonemes English speakers have trouble with. Of course, trying to learn how to pronounce a phoneme your native language doesn't have without one-on-one instruction is a doomed endeavor for most people, and I daresay you likely mispronounce any number of English words, given how idiosyncratically large the English phonological inventory is.
The "thank you" emails seems to be a tradition/expectation of the classic corporate culture where the employer has a extreme amount of candidates for each opening and each candidate must please the interviewer at all cost. (e.g. a extreme imbalance in power between employer/candidate).
Quite contrary to the "startup" culture where there is a limited amount of candidates for each opening and where it's acknowledged that candidates might get multiple offers (e.g. a more balanced employer/candidate power)
That only really applies to coders. Most jobs are social, so you'll want to hire people that are more or less normal. In many work places they even want people that are pleasant to spend time with!
Some people have great coding skills, but are right assholes or otherwise seriously toxic. You definitely need to look for more than just "great coding skills" if you want to hire great employees.
Sure, but I don't think "making a good impression in an interview" has a very strong correlation with whether someone is a "right asshole or otherwise seriously toxic." Plenty of decent people don't interview well, and plenty of assholes can put on 'interview face' to get a job.
Most assholes are thinly veiled in an interview. Decent people are nervous, and that’s okay - it’s usually pretty clear. Assholes are trying /hard/ not to come off as such, so when the interviewer inevitably challenges them on a piece of code or their background, they usually end up showing their true colors, at least in my experience.
That’s funny because the last bit of feedback I received on an interview that was supposed to be a “preemptive yes” is that I was “a bit nervous” and they wanted to interview more candidates before making a decision. Sometimes you just can’t win.
There is probably no fool-proof method to weed out these people – just as there is no fool-proof method to weed out non-great programmers – but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.
If you have a skill that might be relevant to the company you're applying to, wouldn't it be in your best interest to emphasize that? Sure, recruiters are often quite clueless, but that's just how it is, so we have to increase our chances given the circumstances.
You don't always know what skills are appropriate -- that's part of the purpose of the interview, for you to learn what the job, team, and company are like.
It's almost not worth complaining about because of the ubiquitous of it, but I absolutely hate and make a point of never doing this if I'm interviewing someone:
1) Puzzle questions not related to the work they'd be doing. It's ok to have a somewhat puzzling geometry puzzle if they're doing, say, 3d work, but for a web dev? Etc. etc.
2) Coding on a white board. Can't you just setup a laptop in a conference room? Or have them bring in a laptop and show some of their work? Nobody ever codes on a white board!! Plus seeing them use a computer tells me way more. Can they type? That's important. I know some really good coders that can't type well, but it's more the exception than the rule. Do they know their tools well? Those things are all actually relevant to the work.
Also here's the other thing: there's essentially no cost or barrier to writing code (IE, you're not using up precious materials or something), so I don't understand why employers want to PROJECT how someone MIGHT write code via puzzles and white board writing when they can literally just pair up and watch the person solve an actual real world problem on an actual computer, with google and stack overflow like they'd actually have access to, and then they don't need to project anything, because they know what it looks like when the person actually writes real world code! Spending a grand on a cheap laptop for this with a few software/IDE licenses is a lot cheaper than making a bad hire.
I write code on a whiteboard, when discussing how to solve a problem with colleagues. Almost exactly like in an interview. Do people really not do this?
I have literally never done this in a job outside of interviews, and I haven't had anyone else do it either. They might draw class diagrams or concepts, but writing code by hand is error prone and pretty pointless.
Regardless, most modern offices have a projector or a TV in conference rooms. I just don't understand why you'd use a white board when you can easily project a text editor. The problem with writing code in handwriting is you can't move it, so you have to do it all linearly. If you need to introduce a variable or a new scope it gets messy incredibly quickly. When I code I almost am never thinking linearly, and I'm constantly adding things above and below, and doing that on a white board is a NIGHTMARE.
I don't ever do this, and none of the teams I've worked on have ever used whiteboarding. Even pair programming is more common.
Morevover, testing a candidate on whiteboard is like expecting all your candidates to be good with Emacs, even though that says zilch about their coding skills. Whiteboarding is just a tool like any other, and you(the interviewer) are limiting your talent pool by expecting everyone to not only be comfortable whiteboarding but to approach whiteboarding just like you do.
I have frequently done whiteboarding, which is different from coding on a whiteboard.
Working through approaches to solving a problem at a high level, or workshopping a schedule for a feature. That sort of thing.
It’s also a decent skill to test someone on if your team uses it and the role requires it. But coding on a whiteboard is pointless, don’t do this to people please.
I've written code on whiteboards before, especially if I'm discussing an invasive code change with a coworker. It helps as a reminder of conclusions that were reached as the work progresses. One nice thing, maybe the killer feature, of whiteboarding for this use is that there are no distractions.
One must learn that there are very few "rules" to anything in life. You must be skeptical that a person sharing their "rules" has a major experiential, interest driven ruleset they are trying to project onto every other ___domain.
super trendy SF "hot" company with increasing investment.. word is that they are going through engineers left and right.. they do all the recruitment, get super-high octane output from the hires, and then dump them at the first error or problem.. no end of candidates for this company, is the second part, due to positioning and mission.. The ones that stay tend to be "pleasers" who will take this kind of treatment and perform.. rumors only ymmv
> "When interviewing, I go for lunch with the candidate. I ask the waiter to subtly get their order wrong. A great test of the interviewee's character!"
I'll silently pass such a company because I cannot stand working with psychopass.
> "We always leave candidates waiting half an hour before calling them in. How do they cope with delays?"
That is a traditional technique for fraud. Getting them tired and lose the decision making ability. If not, the company are horrible at time-keeping. Not worth it.
I'm more than happy to send a thank you email... in response to one. Responding in kind is reasonable enough - social pleasantries exchanged between those who want them, skipped for the busy who would rather get down to business.
If that disqualifies me from some jobs, that's a feature. Uneven expectations here comes across as demanding respect while showing none, which speaks poorly of the work environment. Hard pass.
In everyday life people understand that there are individuals they won't get on with. Not everyone is going to be your friend. You don't want to be everyone's friend (if you do, that's an ephemeral state that will likely bite you eventually).
When it comes to careers I often see expressed on here the attitude that somehow if the interview process were better; if the interviewer were different; etc; then it'd all be different, they'd get the job and live happily ever after.
Realistically? You'd end up working with a bunch of people who at best make questionable business decisions; at worst are completely opposed to your personality and make work a hellish place to be.
Maybe I'm missing something entirely and this is intended to be some bizarre sort of humour.
> When it comes to careers I often see expressed on here the attitude that somehow if the interview process were better; if the interviewer were different; etc; then it'd all be different, they'd get the job and live happily ever after.
I agree that you shouldn't hire people who may not be the right fit and whom you have reason to believe may not succeed or thrive on your team. However, it seems apparent that most people (and I would include myself) may not really be good judges of that. There may be things that are "Red Flags" or "something's off" to us, simply because of the way we were brought up (cultural differences), the way we speak etc. I guess what I'm saying is that in an increasingly diverse world, the markers of success that we look for (or conversely the markers of failure) may not be accurate and we thus miss out on candidates who might actually be a great fit.
Personally, I used to judge interviewees pretty hard on the things I thought weren't appropriate, or things I considered unprofessional. But then I realized that isn't really my job as a technical interviewer. As long as the folks demonstrate the technical skills and a thirst for learning, that's good enough for me.
Which isn't to say there aren't red flags. Lying for instance; pathological liars will totally wreck your organization.
> "The whole team thought you were great. You were probably the strongest candidate overall, but we were looking for someone with experience in XYZ."
That happened to me. I suspect the experience requirement somehow changed during the interview process. So at the end of the multi-week interview process they realized they were looking for something different than what was listed on the position requirements. I'm not very upset about it. The time was wasted, sure. But I made some connections that may help later.
I always send a thank you letter to anyone who interviews me. This includes the person from HR, their hiring manager, and anybody else who was in the room whose email I can get.
It is definitely about attitude and if you can convey yourself from the perspective that they'd be lucky to have you, only serious issues needing fixing will do you in.
I think one mistake from the author is the believe that somehow, an interview process is supposed to be fair.
It's not. Nature is not fair. School is not fair. Dating is not fair. And so on. We try to build fair societies, but right now, they are not.
And interview processes are really, really unfair. Being disappointed they are not and writing a rant about how to them more fair is very naive.
Interviews are most of the time social evaluations packed with negotiation. Very often, even the ones that pretend to be technical interviews.
Why ? Because humans are imperfect and limited. Most interviewers are just not capable of an effective recruitment process, no matter how they believe they are, not to mention a fair one.
So the advice to send here is not "make your recruitment process better". People that are able to will, and don't need this article to do so. People that can won't, and the article won't change their mind.
No, the advice is to the people looking for a job: don't take it personally, randomness takes big role in the process. But if you want to maximize your chances, you need to work on your social skills. Especially the ones that make them feel good about the interview, and value you.
You need technical skills to be good at your job. To be able to apply at high skill ones, to network with people with alike skills, to have fun, to negociate money.
"Don't do that. A job interview is a structured process designed to let you consistently evaluate multiple candidates. If you are asking each candidate different questions, that's not a fair test."
if this is the thing you're responding to, you're misunderstanding the post entirely. "fair test" here is not about morals, it's about results. if i want to evaluate 2 candidates, i want the test to be as "fair" as possible so that i have the most relevant, fine grained information as possible. i want to render the candidates commensurable so i can make a better decision for my own purposes.
"life's not fair" in this context sounds like some kind of systems pessimism. it sounds like you're saying "stuff doesn't work." but of course it does. of course asking this question and not that question gives me more relevant hiring information. it's totally insane to think otherwise.
There are lots of issues with traditional hiring approaches - would recommend looking into Performance-Based Hiring if you are a hiring manager looking to improve your process and outcomes
Maybe it's just me but I don't understand this article, it doesn't seem to be related to getting a job, seems more like some random musings on hiring?
As to saying thank you, that's not sycophantic, it's common courtesy. It's not that hard.
Anyway, what's with the hangup on names lately in the "tech" community? Every other podcast I listen to people keep excusing themselves for "mispronouncing" peoples' names. Newsflash: unless your name is English, people are guaranteed to mispronounce your name. You know they don't speak your language, so how could you expect them to pronounce your name in your language? I have never ever had a foreigner pronounce my name correctly in my language, and it doesn't bother me at all. I would be extremely surprised if they did, and my name is just outside of the comfort-zone of English orthography.
Could someone from the easily offended camp please explain your reasoning to me?
Exactly, if you care about how people with other native languages pronounce your name, I feel that it's up to you to help them do that. Either by coming up with a more reasonable version of it or choosing some local name, like many Chinese do.
When I lived in China I certainly didn't expect anyone to even come close to pronouncing my name in proper Swedish. That would have been absurd. My name is Gustaf and that simply can't be rendered in Chinese, so how would they be able to do it, even if they wanted to? Most people at my school ended up calling me Difdif.
Yeah, but if others are just bulldozing through a pronunciation, they haven't actually given you the chance to help them with it.
When exchanging the usual pleasantries, it's often the interviewer who is the first one to attempt the name, not the interviewee.
If I were to answer my phone every time, "Hi, this Nguyen, my last name is pronounced pronounced S-- E--- O--- whatever", it would come off as a little odd. And possibly as annoyance or haughtiness on my part.
All this goes to show that the "rules of politeness", themselves, are part of the secret hiring process.
It would come off as odd because it IS odd. The normal thing is to expect foreigners to butcher your name and don’t give it another thought. What does it actually matter?
And even if they ask, how would an interviewer be able to actually pronounce all these names? They would have to be polyglot geniuses.
Interviewer: So hello Mr Bezwzględny, how do you pronounce your name?
Interviewee: Bezwzględny
Interviewer in perfect Polish: Ok Mr Bezwzględny, can you tell me a bit about your background?
So far I've been able to accurately pronounce every name I've heard. For backstory I speak two languages natively so listening for phonetics is something I do well.
But this precise problem, and that of spelling the name correctly, is why I was named Daniel. Same spelling in English as in Spanish, everyone has some idea of how to pronounce it...etc.
Example: Recruiter mispronounces my name. I don't say anything. This can be because:
1) I'm a coward. 2) I don't care. 3) I care and am not a coward, but think it would be petty to interrupt the conversation to point this out. 4) I'm overly practical and don't care about this kind of details. 5) I think the other person may feel bad if I correct them. 6) I accept that people make sometimes mistakes. Maybe I'll point it out if they do it 3 times or more. Etc.
Which is it? You'd have to know the person better to know.
Even if the person is just a coward, this could be based on specific traumatic experiences other persons didn't have and which affect only minimally the rest of the personality.
Same applies to thank you emails, coming late to the interview etc. With such subtle situations, you need to know _why_ somebody act the way they did, and without knowing the person, which you usually don't, when interviewing, you just can't.
These are just BS rules with which recruiters try to make their work easier. Similar to Codility & co. tests for software developers. Well, bad news, recruiting is hard. You'll have to take the time to listen to and think about your candidates.