Job Search: Interview Disasters Revealed By Employers | Hacker News Reader

Job Search: Interview Disasters Revealed By Employers

roachpost.com

16 pointseroach27 comments

  --  Candidate wore a business suit with flip flops.

God, who cares?

  --  Dressing inappropriately - 57 percent

If dropping your dress code expectations will increase your potential hire pool by over 50%, that is a serious competitive advantage over more stodgy companies.

Yeah. Either (1) this company actually requires suits in the workplace or (2) the company failed to tell its candidates that they could dress more casually. Or, sadly (3) the company enjoys making candidates dress up in suits as a way of showing who has the power.

When I worked at a Jeans & T-shirt sort of place, I always told candidates that they too could dress casually. Many found the idea scary and dressed up a bit anyway.

It's not about the suit, it's about the message. As an employer you want to hire people who make an effort, and want to avoid people who can't be bothered to. Dressing well for an interview is so obvious it's actually a pretty good way of sorting candidates.

This may apply less for programmers and high-end technical positions, but this is the exception not the rule.

If you hire people that make a relevant effort, and don't punish people for failing to make an irrelevant effort, won't that give you a competitive advantage?

Shouldn't we hire people who know what actually matters, and what doesn't matter, and prioritize?

If they can't bother to do something as simple as dress nice for something as formal as an interview, I don't want to have anything to do with the candidate.

You don't want to hire me. And I don't want to work for you.

You should be glad that I'm willing to signal in such a way that we find that out quickly, instead of pretending I think more like you and possibly getting hired even though I'd be a bad fit working for you.

Why are you even interviewing candidates that you don't want to have anything to do with? Why don't you just filter those candidates out at some earlier point in the hiring process?

What you're overlooking is that attention is a limited resource. Someone who pays attention to how they dress has thereby paid less attention than they might have to something substantive.

So not only don't we care how people dress at YC interviews, dressing up is actually a (minor) red flag. We'd rather you spent that effort on something else.

I'm not much for dressing up, but I feel like this is asking why someone was meditating when they could have spent that time thinking about stuff.

Some people use clothing as a means of mental preparation for entering a non-casual situation. I agree there's some empty ceremony to wearing a business suit, but I don't think that's all there is to it.

In certain domains this applies (and indeed, given the blog's background it's on the mark). But in large segments of the job market I still think it's important to dress reasonably well.

Even if attention is a limited resource, the interview usually is a place where first impressions matter, so I'd say budgeting some attention towards looks is not misguided at all.

You're right that dressing well matters in large segments of the job market. But I'd argue that this is a pretty good heuristic for deciding which segments of the job market to avoid.

That is true. However there still remain the entry-level interviews. When most of what you sell is potential every detail under your control matters.

Attention is a limited resource, but some people have more of it than others. Paying attention to how you dress is a signal that you're generally attentive, just as driving a nice car is a way to show that you have lots of money--even though you spent a bunch of it on a car.

I'd be more likely to hire the flip-flop guy, especially if he also played Dungeons & Dragons.

Look at it in the reverse. Dressing appropriately dramatically increases your chance of being hired.

Do you really want to hire the kind of person who can't figure out how to avoid this disadvantage?

It dramatically increases your chances of being hired by the wrong people. I don't think it could possibly dramatically increase your chances of being hired somewhere really awesome. (Because if hiring decisions were affected by dress that much, you wouldn't have really awesome coworkers).

Dressing up can be a signal that someone is desperate for work. And failure to dress up can indicate confidence and other options.

The point is it can be a positive or negative sign, depending on various things.

We're going through panel interviews right now, and a lot of that article is rubbish, as others have pointed out. But I want to tease out the "don't be negative" because it's got the reasons wrong.

"Also, no matter how tempting it is, don't say negative things about a previous employer, regardless of how the job ended - hiring managers may fear that you will say the same things about their organization."

That's not why you don't say negative things. You don't say negative things because it means you blame other people or you're a negative person. You say, "I don't like my current job because they don't listen to me," and all I hear is that you don't have very good ideas, you're very bad at explaining those ideas, or your disconnected from the people you work with. And on top of that, you don't understand how to solve interpersonal problems. None of that make me super excited about you.

Instead try realizing that you might bear some of the blame for the things you don't like, and realize the other party might have good justification. So instead: "I find myself getting excited about very different opportunities than my current coworkers. They have a real passion for solving the immediate problem whereas I'm far more interested in solving the underlying cause. So while I appreciate their desire to provide a quick solution, and have even learned when that can be appropriate, I'm really looking for an environment that emphasizes long-term thinking while still making sure customer needs are met as quickly as possible."

Pretty clear BigCo corporate bias in these results, as this would likely be a positive in SF/Bay:

-- Candidate used Dungeons and Dragons as an example of teamwork.

The meeting for drinks also cracked me up, as Linden ended many a job interview with drinks at the end of the day!

I wish there was a way to link to my younger acquaintances just this part:

    --  Dressing inappropriately - 57 percent
    --  Appearing disinterested - 55 percent
    --  Speaking negatively about a current or previous employer - 52 percent
    --  Appearing arrogant - 51 percent
    --  Answering a cell phone or texting during the interview - 46 percent
    --  Not providing specific answers - 34 percent
    --  Not asking good questions - 34 percent

Edit: This and not re-reading the CV 3 times before sending it.

This is an excellent summary of the kind of things a company should worry about only if they can't actually measure performance.

Though "appearing disinterested" should still be a huge turn-off.

Funny, the most common thing I've seen in candidates getting rejected promptly is not being able to answer basic questions about things they've listed on their resume. Example: listing Java and not understanding what an interface is.

The author made a point about researching the company before the interview. I always thought this was common sense (why are you applying with this company anyways?), but apparently it isn't.

I am curious how many of these became "disasters" for the interviewer because the interviewee had already reached a point where they considered the interviewer/company/etc. a disaster (no longer wished to work there).

-- Candidate used Dungeons and Dragons as an example of teamwork.

That's a negative? WTF? There's a hell of a lot more interesting in the way of teamwork, management, etc. in role-playing games (especially MMORPGs) than in most corporations.

On the flip-side, I once had an interviewer ask me to solve a problem where several hurdles/criteria were introduced randomly based on rolling a 20-sided die.

That's pretty awesome. What kind of company was it?

And at this late stage the realization comes that reciting poetry in interviews was the silent assassin of my career! Just the other day I was asked to explain a concurrent design and I just couldn't help but recite the immortal words of Halyna Krouk:

    Two couplets and a refrain
                                              a carousel
                                                             of non-stop passing
    at each turn one more door closes before us
    with a rusty whinny
    legless horses tear into the prairie –
    racing
    two couplets and a refrain
                                              eyes gaping
    two couplets and a refrain
                   catching up from hind to front
    reach out to me
                                              throw me the lasso of a glance
    who made us so hopelessly distant
    who conceived us such irreparable losers
    on this overplayed record
                                              – two couplets and a refrain –
               where even love leaves only scratches

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