Not only does this disincentivize HR from running fake vacancies or stringing multiple candidates on just to keep their options open, but it also solves the problem of unemployed people job-searching effectively working full-time for free. The fact that companies would have to pay to hire workers would mean they try to make the selection as short and effective as possible.
This concept is why I have a deep respect for DuckDuckGo as a company. When interviewing there for a SRE position, the round 2 and 3 interviews included coding challenges. They paid (IIRC) $75/hr based on the maximum time they wanted candidates to spend on each assignment. I ended up not getting the position, but they’re the only company I made it to the final decision step with that I didn’t feel was wasting my time.
I, too, hate job hunting, but I’m having a hard time seeing where unemployed people have to work full time for free, unless it’s a working interview.
You’re getting into the weeds about the definition of “work.”
Any definition of “work” that excludes calling, writing applications (AKA writing reports), emailing, interviewing (AKA meetings) etc. also excludes many paid positions.
Agreed
Looking for a job now and a single company so far has has taken 6 hours of my time.
Two for the initial requirements for applying, the reading their 5 page information, writing a cover letter, etc.
Then two hours on a screening interview, and the initial interview, though that second one went from 1 hour to 1 hour 45 minutes so it was actually 6 hours 45 minutes
Then two more hours on a technical interview
This is where I’m at now, and i still am looking at two more one hour interviews with higher up, then the CEO herself.
That’ll make over 8 and a half hours IF I get the job.
If I don’t get the job, man, this was a fucking waste…
In principle, jobs should be a mutually beneficial relationship. I give them resources, they pay for that but in reality, the balance 100% tipped to their side
I have to apply for jobs, they dont have to apply for employees
I have to write cover letters and separate letters to tell them how much i love their company and how badly i really want to work there and how much I’ll sacrifice for them
They interview me on their turf, their rules. We don’t get to interview the company. Some companies allow us to ask a few questions, but that’s it.
Shits fucked up
I agree 100%
hear hear. it should include any assesments to.
working full-time for free
Like, working full-time for free to find a job?
For free
Companies should be searching for employees
So then a person could make his living by interviewing for jobs he’s not qualified for and could never get? I guess that probably wouldn’t happen.
I didn’t used to hate the long interview process until I applied for a job that had me fill out like a hundred questions for background information. It was like, “Have you ever been convicted of embezzlement for an amount greater than $500?” No. “Have you ever been convicted of embezzlement for an amount less than $500?” No… “Have you ever been convicted of embezzlement for exactly $500?”
Did you know that if they can guess your crime with enough specificity, legally you have to admit to it? At least that’s what I assume, based on the questionnaire. Like, “Have you ever been convicted of violating the endangered species act while crossing state lines in a class C vehicle on a Sunday?” And I’m like, “No, but you’re so close!”
Anyway, I got the offer, but then they rescinded it when I asked for more money.
So then a person could make his living by interviewing for jobs he’s not qualified for and could never get?
That’s already a flaw of the current system, so no change means no new downside. People receiving unemployment usually have to prove they’re looking for work, but there’s not usually a requirement that you’re applying to things you’re likely to get.
It’s weird. I was applying for an engineering tech job and they asked if I’ve ever knowingly violated the second law of thermodynamics, but wouldn’t tell me if it was a deal breaker if I had. Anyway that place burned to the ground before I heard back on my interview anyway.
Interviews actually cost the company. They have to pay those people interviewing you, and not working for clients at that time. That’s why I don’t see many applications going to interview phase at all. Most applications are just filtered by AI, or some HR and it never goes to the actual hiring manager. And they don’t interview unless they are pretty sure about wanting to hire the candidate. At least the companies without ghost jobs do that.
But HR only interviews are probably different, they might do interviews to justify their job.
OK, but who does it cost more? The person being interviewed is also burning opportunity and time but we assume it’s free because no one is paying them?
Sounds like it wastes both sides’ time and money, but measuring up to determine who is wasting the most time and money doesn’t really help anything other than furthering Whataboutisms.
Ideally, we change to a system that doesn’t do that (nearly as much).
The hiring process has moved further and further from the company and is controlled by a bunch of middle-man companies who found a niche and made an industry out of it. No wonder hiring has become more expensive and riskier for a corp.
They should also be forced to pay a year’s salary to everyone who applied to a ghost job. (That’s a job that’s not real and they have no intention of filling)
I think a way forward is to make the government handle the hiring process. The companies put a fee into escrow, which is paid to the government if no hires are completed or retained.
The government interviews potential hires, anonymizes and DEIs, retains resumes and information from job seekers, creates the infrastructure for reviews to be left by people for a company’s work conditions, and so forth. If a pattern of false jobs emerges, the government can prevent the company from issuing further offers for 3 or 4 months, with a heightened penalty for the escrow thereafter. If people are consistently hired and retained, the escrow penalty is reduced.
Corporations shouldn’t be responsible for hiring, because they are strongly incentivized to do bullshit.
I am not opposing but there is a big risk here.
Essentially there are 2 customers,
The company wants a worker, but the worker a company.
In a current hiring process if your not a fit for the company well thats end of story… but not with a centralised third system who is hiring for many different companies where they can hire you for another company instead were you are a better fit.
Sounds good on paper for now but.
The government needs you to work to pay taxes. The job of the government worker is to make sure the open positions are filled. Neither requires you or the employer to be long term happy with the deal.
Over time they will drown in crap positions that are technically legit employment but that no one actually wants and the government will get pressured to fill those positions.
So when you walk in, and you don’t instantaneously manage to sell yourself as one of the prime few worthy of the actual decent jobs everyone wants, they will try to push you in all the shitty ones till you stop coming back.
Then there is also you can’t really ban someone from employing someone directly.
I guess there is a selection bias on internet comments, but as someone that has been on the interviewer side several times now, I have to say: the interview process is not even remotely cheap for companies. At least the companies I worked for take them seriously and the time investment of senior professionals is huge, which is not cheap at all.
On top of that, there is always pressure for hiring quick, so I don’t know which companies you guys are interviewing, but I don’t know any company that just likes “fooling around”.
Maybe you are not choosing the correct companies on your applications? or maybe you are applying to meat grinder companies such as Meta or Amazon?
As interviewer you would be surprised how many people apply to “senior embedded C developer” without much idea of how to even program, even with theoretical experience on the CV.
This is a 2 sided problem, and I understand it might look one sided sometimes, but it is a very complex problem to solve. Believe me, no one wants to be “hiring manager”, but also, no one wants to deal with a bad team member.
Paying interviewes directly would not help at all, as it would create a new level of mistrust for people trying to gamify the process. And this will end up being paid by honest job seekers and interviewers.
Just a side note: I live in EU, not the corporate American dystopia, so my argument might not apply to the USA. For example, an error on hiring here becomes a huge problem lasting months, in USA I believe you can just fire people at will without prior notice, so you can be more reckless with the interviews.
Senior embedded C developer here in the US. I can speak first hand experience at people applying to be on my team that have reasonable sounding experience and then collapse under interview questions.
Everything else you said applies here too, legally we don’t have repercussions for firing someone quickly (once had a team member for two months), but a healthy org will try very hard to get hiring right because it can cause pretty bad morale to see a revolving door and there is a massive brain and resource drain having to constantly be training new people.
Is this c/unpopularopinion?
Had an interview at a company. They asked me to do a coding challenge. Solve it without AI. The task was written in AI and requirements all over the place. Took me 6hrs+. I sent it and they wanted to see me in person. Took half a day off to make to the interview. Meeting went well. They call me and tell me my assignment was not what they expected.
There should be a hefty fine for this behavoiur.
Kinda reminds me of a course that I took from Google, regarding IT. To earn my certification, I had to complete assorted challenges…but the assignments had broken links, or not compatible with my browser (Firefox). Sure, I am supposedly certified, but I was doing weird workarounds to earn it, which sometimes allowed me to skip parts of the online testing.
It is stupid, and I refuse to believe that I am actually qualified to be “Google IT Support”.
What did they mean by not what they expected? Like they didn’t expect you to solve it, or didn’t expect the AI to give you an assignment?
They mean they are lying to the applicant’s face, gaslighting them.
What they did was the equivalent of contracting out a coder to engineer some software for them, without paying them for it.
The job market itself is a fraud, a scam.
Saying ‘its not what we expected’ is simply what they are legally required to do in order to be able to frame the entire thing such that they can’t be sued for getting useful labor while giving no compensation.
Its a framing device, frame it as a job interview. Its ‘oh your test performance was not satisfactory’, written on some kind of document somewhere. The actual point is to get free software engineering services.
Its a scam.
Think about if you tried to do this with physical, mechanical engineering or architecture: here, draw up some plans for this device or this part of a building… oh, we’re sorry, that’s not satisfactory… but anything you submitted during the job interview, thats the intellectual property of the company now.
You can also scam the job market itself by simply coordinating with a market research firm, have a set of companies issue an array of ‘job openings’ that are not real job openings, what they actually are is a way to do a survey of the job market itself.
Its all a complete fucking joke at this point.
Also, a metric companies report on, and then those reports get amalgamated into broad economic data… is just literally ‘how many job openings did we post’.
So, if you wanna look like you are a growing company, for extremely little cost… just post fake job openings, that you’ll never hire for.
Have 1/3 or so of all job openings by all companies look like this, idiot ‘economists’ who can’t figure out what is actually going on, look at the aggregate numbers and conclude the economy is growing 1/3 faster than it is.
And there’s also the classic ‘we want to do an internal promotion, but for legal reasons we need to pretend its a competetive search through the whole job market, so here’s a bunch of fake job openings where everyone other than our internal person will be unsatisfactory’.
Recruiters and HR know all this shit, they do it regularly, and they’re usually not very keen to tell you about it.
They’re all scum, as low and contemptible as a scammy car loan/lease salesman, or a ‘date the rate marry the home’ used house salesman.
That would disincentivize HR from shortlisting candidates though.
