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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And candidates spend no time preparing??

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

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