After all, you would never continue to try to win the affection of a guy/girl who wouldn't at least give you a first date? Why do the same for a company that can't bother to give you some of their time?
I understand an aversion to legal risk, but IMHO this is going to an extreme that hurts all of us.
I consider it lucky if I even get an email or voicemail saying they've decided to pass. Honestly, most of the time, I don't even get that.
If you're a recruiter, or interviewing someone for a position, it's my opinion that you should be able to give the candidate feedback on what they did right, and what they did wrong, so that they can improve themselves for their next interview.
So often, as a candidate, I've been left to guess at what I did wrong, or why things didn't turn out well. Sometimes, you can figure it out. Other times, it's not very clear what it is you did or answered wrong. Maybe you have a nervous tic or other habit that you are totally unconscious of that nobody has pointed out - and that put them off? Or maybe you need to work on your delivery, or who knows what?
I can understand why companies don't do it; I can see it from their side. I'm sure they (well, their recruiters) can see it from the candidate's side as well. I wish there were a way around this impasse.
I tend to wonder if it has become this way, in part, due to candidates getting honest feedback, and then they in turn went off the rails against the employer or employees? Pure speculation, but it wouldn't surprise me to find out this was the case for some of this.
When I get rejected, the response is usually "You are not a good match to our company culture". What I would appreciate would be "Your lack of experience in managing remote teams is a gap for us."
I feel that quality to the pool of candidates will increase once this feedback loop problem is fixed.
The last time I was asked for a reference I was contacted by a hiring manager who said they were about to make an offer and just needed a couple references. It was a previous employee who had been a particularly low performer. My response was "Company policy prevents me from providing any references. However, (pregnant pause) you should always be very careful and selective in your hiring process." The hiring manager asking for the reference was baffled. She must have been new and had not yet learned the code. Later I bumped into her at some industry event and she thanked me profusely because my non-reference prompted her to do more digging and she learned just how bad that candidate was.
Moral of the story: learn the code (strikes me as kinda funny on HN where the usual advice is learn to code)
Next time before you do something like that I suggest you communicate with your companies lawyer and ask his opinion on the matter before you get your company sued and yourself fired. Especially if you are going to discuss the matter on the public internet.
Odds are incredibly good that its trivial to discern your actual identity and that you have done the same thing repeatedly. Its entirely possible that someone could be working out right now why they weren't hired and whom they should sue.
you basically said dont hire that person to someone. because of your bad experience with that ex-colleague ?. you are denying that person a chance. how come ?
what are you going to do next time someone calls for reference ? the same ?
immature, questionable, discriminating practices...
I disagree. If you had a bad experience with an employee and you're asked to validate the quality of that candidate why should you lie or omit that info?
When you're looking for a job do you also feel that it's wrong to ask current and former employees for references?
Furthermore, it seems you're oblivious to how many candidates outright lie about their CV and working experience.
You need info to make good informed decisions. Otherwise you have no alternative other than to fell for con jobs.
Not everyone's great to work with, I'm sure you have had a few co-workers you would rather not work with again, right?
references in form of background check - worked years a, b, c, on projects x, y,z - yes, sure.
references about performance, likability, etc - why ? how are you going to judge that ? are the references legit ? are you going to get references on the reference giving people ? are you gonna research the excompanies culture to judge tbe referential credibility ?
you're just fooling yourself giving any meaning to this, you could be as well tossing a coin.
What even is your rant about? Managers especially can easily tell your performance, how you get along with everyone, etc. That's the whole fucking POINT of a reference.
In the US it's illegal? It's discrimation yes but isn't that the whole point of a recruitment process?
You can get sued for anything - it need not be illegal to be sued for it.
They can't tell the person that the employee was fired, or anything like that.
But as noted - there are ways used to get around such things (that is, the laws of our country). Those laws exist because people were wrongly discriminated against by using such "references".
But if you have a reference to someone you worked with, and they are no longer employed by that company - then I'm pretty sure they can answer anything they wanted too (unless there's some kind of NDA they are still under after leaving the company). Because they don't represent the employer any longer, and are a personal reference - things become more casual.
There are a couple of main things. Usually when I have this issue it's because the candidate seems really keen to do things or have things that we just don't offer. For example, "Every piece of code must be a micro service". Some of our code works that way but lots doesn't and we aren't going to change it. Another example might be a very junior person saying, "I want to be the scrum master". Well, we don't do scrum master in our team and even if we did, we would be unlikely to pick that person.
Basically, "You aren't a good match to our company culture" is saying "I really think you would be very unhappy here based on your responses". Again, I try to explain if I can but I also don't want to get into an argument. If I'm getting "no go" feelings and they aren't reciprocated, this seems doubly like a problem.
My advice, if you are getting this response a lot, is to consider how you are responding to questions. You may be projecting an inflexible attitude. Don't wait until the end of the interview to ask questions about how things work. Try to make sure to fit it in at every place you can. How are they doing their development? What are the people like? How do they resolve disputes? How do they decide on their tech stack? etc, etc.
However, also think critically about the place you are applying into. If you think, "Oh this is an awesome place" and they think "This guy isn't a good fit", That's a pretty bit mismatch. Did you listen well enough to their explanations? Are you sure that it works the way you think it does? However, if you are thinking, "Oh well, this place is OK. There are problems, but I can fix them", maybe there is a mismatch between what you think is a problem and what they think is a problem.
And while you might be thinking that "not a good match" is corporate speak for "you can't balance a B-tree", my experience is that it really means exactly what it says. As much as my ego takes a hit when I experience it myself, in retrospect every time I've gotten that response it's because it was true. I would have hated that job.
Sorry for the rambling nature of this reply. I should be working, but I hope it was helpful.
I have been on both sides of the hiring table, and while the engineer in me wants to give constructive feedback so that the rejected candidate can better themselves for their next interview, the corporate management in me is telling to do something else.
It has been a conflicting point of view in my head ever since I got involve in hiring.
b) if its a repeating thing consider asking someone (a friend, a forum, a senior dev) for review of one of these "exercises". this could show you what youre not seeing. or could show you your code is just fine or perfect and it's about the company not knowing what they want. so either you will learn something or you will boost your self confidence.
a series of "rejections" can put one's self-confidence to a test, remember good times will come again.
It's sort of a selfish way of interviewing; to write good code for these projects, it can take me upwards of 8 hours. An engineer where I live (NYC) can fairly easily make $50/hour (usually more), so they effectively expect me to give $350-450 of time for this company where there's a fairly high likelihood that they'll tell me to buzz off. I typically write in a very functional lispy style (even when I did JavaScript), and while the overall understanding of FP has improved in the last couple years, a lot of the interviewers would simply not understand what I was writing, and ask me to write it "more object oriented".
Big corporations like Google can get away with that, but for a small startup I really don't think it's worth it to do them (not to mention that I had a friend who did one of these assignments, and they ended up using his code in production without paying him).
The good data science take-home assignments I've done suggest a 2-3 hour limit and they were correctly scoped for that limit, although technically there's no incentive for the candidate to stick to that limit.
The worst take home I did suspiciously did not have an expected time limit (but was due in 48 hours after issuing). It was extremely broadly scoped, and as a result it took 16 hours; even after a couple years as a data scientist now and familiar with time-saving tricks, it would still take 8 hours minimum if you weren't already familiar with the company's data.
16 hours is kind of insane and you have my sympathies. My record is around 10 hours.
Which is a good way for you to weed out companies where the developers are low to average intelligence.
Not understanding basic functional programming concepts, in 2019? Seriously?
It's fine when I'm in a "my job is to get a job" situation, but I haven't been in that situation very much.
As a result, I only start these kinds of projects when I have a clear understanding of the company; and when my personal ramp-up will be very small. Otherwise, I just walk away. My free time is limited.
Or do-able, but they end up requiring 2-4x the "just a couple of hours" they asked for to be done reasonably well.
After which at some point one starts asking one's self: "Do I need this industry actually?"
If there is a big company that hires a lot of people and this is managed by many HR stuff, it is much cheaper and safer not to give any response than go through every rejection response to double check if something seemingly innocent cannot be interpreted as "discriminatory practice", rightly or not.
Legal doesn't have 'interview experience - net promoter score' or any other interview quality metrics as one of their KPIs, so they're happy to mandate the nuclear option because it gets work off their plate.
If you explicitly flout standard and as a result get sued for violating one of the related hiring/discrimination laws, your investors may have a good case to sue you personally because you didn't act in the best interest of the company by opening your company up to that extra risk for no tangible benefit.
>Sorry I want to write an extension to emacs so I'm solving your problem in elisp.
I saw several candidates solve the problem in scheme and every one of them was beautiful.