My rule for interviews is the company has to spend equal human time or I decline.

This means no 8 hour tests, no talking to computers, no special little projects for me to evaluate me.

You get equal face time and no more than 45 minutes of me doing anything by myself (that's the max leeway).

If you want me to do anything else either I'm getting paid short term contractor rates or making you make a sizable donation to charity.

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andy99 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

I have a background selling projects with long sales cycles, and I think partly from that, I have no problem putting in lots of work for a company that I think is making a good faith effort to get to know me, for an appropriate job that will provide a high expected return on my efforts.

The problem with AI interviews (and much of the hiring automation in general) is that (a) it's not good faith, it scales so that all the candidates can be made to do work that nobody ever looks at. If I'm on a short list of two people for a Director level position, I'd happily spend 8 hours making a presentation to give. If I'm one of a thousand and haven't even had an indication that I've passed some basic screening, not so much. And (b), all this stuff usually applies to junior positions where the same payoff isn't there. I've worked for months with customers to get consulting contracts before, and obviously price accordingly so it nets out to be worth it. Doesn't work if you're putting in all the free work for a low probability chance at an entry level job.

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jghn 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I agree with the philosophy although I'll note you're not taking one thing into account. And that is how much human time is spent *reviewing* whatever special little project they assign to you. If the answer is zero, then you're exactly right.

However, speaking just for myself as an interviewer, I will generally spend a couple of hours per-candidate reviewing any work samples, etc that are asked of a candidate. If we've asked them to invest their time in such a thing, it only makes sense to respect their time by investing my own.

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colechristensen 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

That's what the leeway is for. Two hours per candidate seems like quite a lot of time and is nothing like any of the interviews I have been involved in on either side of the table.

	▲	jghn 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		I would agree that it's not typical. However I firmly believe that it is imperative for interviewers to treat the candidate as the more valuable commodity. As such, I will spend a fair amount of time per-candidate as I know they themselves are investing a good bit of their own time & energy.

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AnimalMuppet 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's interesting. My expectation was that, if I did a four-hour assignment, they were going to spend 5 minutes evaluating it.

I wonder if you are typical, or if typical is closer to my 5 minute impression?

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aplummer 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

I spend a lot longer than candidates do on themselves if they have open source (or if an internal transfer, internal) code I can review.

50% that I’m terrified of bad hires, 50% I recognize the opportunity and gravity from their side so try to respect that.

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at-fates-hands 6 days ago | parent [-]

>> if they have open source (or if an internal transfer, internal) code I can review.

I give you a lot of credit for doing this. When I was still in development, I had a pretty robust github page, a sizable portfolio of stuff I had built and other side projects I was working on with various other platforms like Salesforce.

Not once did an interviewer review any of that. I would find myself referring to my github page several times over during the interview. I got so frustrated with interviewers asking me how to do simple things in interviews, I finally walked out of several and told them if they had just taken five minutes and looked at any of my github projects, they would've saved themselves a lot of time asking stupid questions about basic stuff.

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sgerenser 6 days ago | parent [-]

Unfortunately, most people’s GitHub accounts are just a smattering of forked repos with maybe one or two (or no) commits done by them. Unless you look closely, it would be easy to be fooled by the average candidates github that is essentially meaningless.

	▲	RugnirViking 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		then don't hire most people? idk, I really can't imagine hiring someone that not only had such a github profile, but saw fit to send it to the interviewer look for repos that aren't forked, especially one that doesn't have all or most of its code committed in a single commit (i.e. forked with extra steps)

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jghn 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

My observation has been that the 5 minute angle is far more common. But it's also not like I'm the only person out there like myself on this topic.

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erikerikson 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

And yet, I can't recall receiving a counter submission of feedback and summary of the review for the work I've submitted, whether I got the job or not.

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Aurornis 6 days ago | parent [-]

I gave feedback like this when I first started doing interviews

I had to stop very quickly when I realized how many candidates take it as an invitation to argue, accuse me of being wrong, or see it as an invite to redo the problem and resubmit.

I also had one case where someone tried to go on a rampage against me and the company because they though our rejection was unfair (the candidate wasn’t even top 5 among the applicants)

	▲	erikerikson 6 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Thank you, I appreciate that you made the effort. Many companies won't allow it due to legal risk, not to mention the social risks you report and related. Our solving and counter-solving leads us into fairly dysfunctional places.
	▲	bartread 6 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I’ve had people come back at me after giving feedback, which I always do give for anyone I’ve spoken to. They argue, they ask for a second chance, etc. I simply tell them my decision is final and stop responding to further communication attempts. I have no problem doing that. But that’s a minority: most people just appreciate getting some feedback, and not being ghosted. And if they’ve taken an hour out of their day to speak to me, providing a short piece of (ideally actionable) feedback, or at least that explains where their experience or skills didn’t match up to other applicants, is the least I can do. It’s also an opportunity to provide encouragement on positive aspects of the interview, even if those weren’t enough to carry the day. You have to understand that even - perhaps especially - unsuccessful applicants will talk about their experience of your hiring process. Unless you work somewhere that people really want to work, and where they’ll be willing to wade through shit to do it (cough, Google, cough - perhaps Google of yore anyway), you want to be doing everything you can to ensure that even unsuccessful applicants are treated well and have as positive an experience as possible. It won’t always work out but, in my experience, the extra effort is worthwhile.

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Aurornis 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In my experience, candidates who demand equivalent face time always underestimate how much time is spent selecting candidates, reviewing resumes, scheduling interviews, preparing the interview structure, reviewing interviews, advocating for candidates to progress, getting their offers approved, dealing with HR, and the countless other things that go into getting someone from the application phase to being hired.

If you reduce an interview to “face time” and start trying to keep score on that metric you’re not seeing the full picture.

Though to be honest, whenever a candidate vocally removes themselves from the candidate pipeline for something like this (which is very rare) it feels like we dodged a bullet.

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antonymoose 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don’t know if I would throw out “equal time” as my metric, but it’s not far off. There is always going to be some asymmetry in the interview process, especially in early stages, but there should be some balance to it, an ebb and flow.

Companies asking me to spend 2 or 4 or 8 or 16 hours on a take home quiz before I’ve so much as had a 15 minute screen with HR or the hiring manager go straight into the trash. I’m not putting in serious effort when you’ve put in effectively none.

Hate to be a snarky guy, but the more a company demands up front the more they tend to be a bullshit shop anyway. I have had some random no-name sub-contracting shop in the Federal space cold-call and ask me to submit to a take home assignment with a 16 hour estimated completion time. No surprise, they folded several years after I declined. No one worth a damn put up with their shit.

Recently, I had a recruiter tell me I needed to submit to an hours long coding challenge before any contact with the company. When I respectfully declined to proceed without at least a 15 minute phone screen, I got a reply that, as it turns out, they already had a pending offer out. Had I not held some standards with this employer I would have completely wasted my time.

	▲	Aurornis 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Companies asking me to spend 2 or 4 or 8 or 16 hours on a take home quiz before I’ve so much as had a 15 minute screen with HR or the hiring manager go straight into the trash. Companies handing you 16 hour assignments without a phone screen should indeed go straight into the trash. I've spent a few years volunteering on and off in an interview prep help mentoring program. For as much as everyone likes to talk about these "16 hour take-home without ever talking to the company" these extreme scenarios almost never come up for discussion. Everyone comes into the prep group thinking that's how their job search is going to look. A few people apply to small, scammy companies who try to do these things but you have to be blind to miss the warning signs. For the most part, all of the take-homes that people either share directly or talk about are nowhere near the 10-40 hour take-homes that everyone on the internet likes to complain about. I've seen a couple people share them, but it's not normal at all.

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colechristensen 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I have been the hiring manager several times, I know full well the amount of time it takes, and the overhead from "selecting candidates, reviewing resumes, scheduling interviews, preparing the interview structure, reviewing interviews, advocating for candidates to progress, getting their offers approved, dealing with HR, and the countless other things" as a hiring manager is not that much time, and that's your business not the candidate's.

I respect the candidates I put through the process and consider large amounts of time required for each candidate to be discriminatory and disrespectful.

>Though to be honest, whenever a candidate vocally removes themselves from the candidate pipeline for something like this (which is very rare) it feels like we dodged a bullet.

If you want an underfoot character with no respect for their own worth then yes... you both dodged bullets.

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ryandrake 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The candidate also has their share of non-face time: Grinding leetcode and filling out HTML forms that are asking for the same information contained on their resume.

	▲	atrettel 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Your comment made me wonder how much time I've spent in face-to-face interviews over the last year of job hunting. It comes out to 7 percent of all of the time that I spend applying to jobs. For every minute that I spend in an interview, I spend roughly 14 minutes preparing for it in some way (or applying to a different job). Perhaps I can get more efficient with my time, but as you said, the process is naturally inefficient as it stands already.

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garciasn 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm a hiring manager. I don't make people do offline stuff. I do EVERYTHING IN MY POWER to make certain they are not doing more than a phone screen w/HR (absolutely mandated by the company or I wouldn't allow it) and meet with the team. For Senior Managers+, I do require one extra interview with other teams because they'll be interfacing. So, max investment is 2.25h. If we cannot make a decision from that investment, we have failed as evaluators.

Being that I have lost exactly 3 folks over my 15y as a leader and only one of those due to performance (within 6 months of starting as a leader) I think anyone should be able to do this.

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suddenlybananas 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You're including the time spent on all candidates, not just on each individual candidate. If you divided the time you spent by the total number of candidates, you're spending much less time than job-seekers.

Not only that, job-seekers often need to spend a ton of time on /all/ of their applications not just yours.

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nosianu 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And candidates spend no time preparing??

I feel your comment is a bit one-sided, no?

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DoctorOetker 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

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doug_durham 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What you are saying resonates deeply with me. I flipped the logic with a thought experiment. As a job seeker you send your resume to the black hole of a company's recruiting department. That's your only input which can be frustrating because it is difficult to express your abilities in static text. What if instead the company offered you the opportunity to spend 30 minutes with an automated system where you could provide more information and demonstrate your skills. That sounds very appealing. That said there are certainly too many companies that will abuse the technology to further dehumanize the recruiting process.

	▲	colechristensen 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		>the opportunity to spend 30 minutes with an automated system where you could provide more information and demonstrate your skills. I'm positive that a system like this would be flooded with awful candidates of the "I have 12 certifications but can't keep up in a basic technical discussion" type.

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jijijijij 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I think it’s fair, if tests etc. are unconditionally compensated (paid) for the time spent. Some companies do that.