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Comment by supportlocal4h | Hacker News Reader

I'll point out just one side effect. A highly qualified candidate interviews with three companies. One does two interviews in a week and extends an offer. The others take two weeks to get back to the candidate, then do two interviews and a take home, then two more rounds of interview. Meanwhile, the first offer is on the clock.

The only reason not to accept the first offer is because one of the other companies is that much better to work for. So the companies with the most onerous processes lose out on the best candidates or have to offer double the compensation to keep them in the maze.

The reality is that most companies can do fine with average employees. Bad hiring practices that lower the talent or increase costs don't kill them.

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That's just it. They are willing to lose the occasional great hire in order to avoid the risk of a bad hire.

Sure, that's the reasoning, but I've yet to see any evidence that it actually does reduce bad hires

> I've yet to see any evidence that it actually does reduce bad hires

And the OP's own point "responsibility is diluted so if there's a bad hire you can blame the process rather than one manager" would be needless if the process actually did avoid bad hires.

A good general rule is that most things can be explained by people trying to avoid responsibility for making a mistake.

It's not a reasoning I would agree with either. The core of my original comment is "avoid responsibility": people don't want to be held responsible for a bad hire (or a discrimination lawsuit), so adding multiple rounds to the process shares that responsibility among as many other people as possible. By cargo-culting from FAANG you can also use the "nobody got fired for buying IBM" argument and this dilutes responsibility further.

So does that actually reduce bad hires (or increase good to excellent hires)? Probably not, but that's not really the purpose of all this theatre. The purpose is that if there's a bad hire, do I, personally, get the blame?

> to avoid the risk of a bad hire

But the silly thing it, the convoluted interviews don't avoid the risk of a bad hire because they test for the wrong things.

The analogy I use is that it's like a hospital trying to hire a heart surgeon by extensively grilling candidates on trick questions about organic chemistry. I mean sure, the surgeons probably took that class a few decades ago prior to medical school. So they end up with surgeons that are wizards in organic chemistry but might well not know how to use a scalpel or know where the heart is.

I actually ran into this. I was considering two companies, both about equivalent in terms of being "places I would want to work for", but one was quick to turn around with an offer and the other dragged their feet. I went with the company that made the offer. The other company I never heard from again, despite their engineering director totally assuring me "we get back to every candidate".

I think this actually works in their favor. If a candidate invests a week into you, they can only match that commitment a few times with other companies, and they might not actually get offers everywhere. Then you don't have to negotiate offers as hard, and they are more likely to accept your offer.

If candidates can get an offer after only a half day, they may as well have a dozen options, and you only have a 1/N chance of getting picked.

So your premise is that a company should draw out their interviewing process so that the top 60% of candidates will accept offers elsewhere and they can lowball the 40% that stick it out? And you justify this because they would only have a 10% chance of landing any of the good candidates?

Let me guess, are you an actual hiring manager?

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