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Do You Tell a Job Candidate How Badly They Did?
skelter asks: "I have been lamenting with friends in the industry about interviewing woes and the candidates that we find. Consider a hypothetical job candidate comes in after some how making it through screening. In the team technical interview they prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that not only is he (or she) not as adequate as he thinks he is, but has demonstrated that he is a danger to any code base. Do you tell them? Quietly step away, usher them out and say nothing? Play with them on the whiteboard the way your cat plays with injured mice? Should you leave them as their own warning to others? Is there any obligation to guide them to gaining real experience? Can you give them any advice or is it all liability?"
If I decide against a candidate, I've arrived at saying nothing beyond "Thank you for your time, we've decided not to extend an offer." Anything else, and I've had people keep bugging me with things like they can change, or give them another chance, or would I...
Second, from an employer's perspective, it may in the narrow self-interest of the company for such a person to go be a drain on its competitors. Where's the rational economic incentive to discourage that?
How about "I don't wish my shareholders to go to hell for owning shares in an evil company". ?
You can have self interest and still not be a dick. You lose very little, while this other person may get helped a lot. Furthermore, maybe the person will actually improve themselves and reapply for the job and you'll have a good employee then. Or, the person will work within the given industry and not bad mouth your company. The more good workers are in the economy the more services can be provided to each other and quality of life of people can improve.
I was hiring a programmer for a project, and had one I liked. I Googled his name, email address, got nothin'. Then I Googled the *newsgroups*. This guy posted on alt.drugs.hard that he had just moved to my city, and was lamenting how hard it was to find good heroin. He had also posted to something like alt.alien.contact, how aliens had been contacting him, and he had picture proof, in the dust patterns on his T.V. He linked to the pic on the web, but it was less than convincing.
So what did I tell him? Nothing. Just that I had hired someone else, and thanks for his time.
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I, like others have posted, typically don't tell the interviewee how they did. The standard line I use for those that inquire is "after the interview, I make an assessment of your skill level and appropriateness for the job, I then give this to the hiring manager (which sometimes is myself) and it's up to them to figure out if those variables meet their criteria". While it would be nice to tell everyone how they did, from a practical standpoint it often leads to bigger troubles (I know this from experience). One other aspect is that this day and age, one has to be very careful about what you tell a candidate, it could be that "you didn't think they were a good fit", which often means that you thought they were a putz, but of course you can't say that (that they were a putz). So I just leave the legaleeze to those that are trained in it (HR).
BTW, I never "toy" with candidates. AAMOF, I try to go out of my way to keep them relaxed and not discouraged if things aren't going well. The point of the interview is to try to assess their abilities and appropriateness for the job, not to make myself feel superiour or have a team of folks that "interview well" but can't code worth a darn. I also don't want to exclude people because they "don't interview well". Some folks just get nervous, and I would hate to pass on someone good just because of that (after all, how many of us know other techies that are awesome at what they do, but have a few issues with their "social graces").
When I was starting out I would have appreciated employers contacting me after an interview and telling me "you're good, but you got to get better at X and Y". I do the same now every time I go through a hiring cycle. I've found that most developers (that's who I hire, obviously) are by and large grateful at you for doing that. There's always going to be the occasional dick that replies with "well fuck you I didn't want to work at your stupid company anyway", but I could really care less.
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First of all: Tell people they haven't got the job, in a letter preferably. Nothing worse then not knowing. If you have critisism, disguise it and make it in regards to other candidates (the successfull applicant showed a much stronger knowledge of xyz). Chances are they know their skill shortcomings but occasionally they won't and you have to be sure that you don't critisize something so heavily it destroys them.
Candidates that aren't quite there yet ("reply hazy, ask again later") may get a little guidance. I have certainly advised flawed but promising on what to study before they apply again (or we call them again) in the future. Candidates of the sort the article poster was asking about ("a danger to any code base") get a polite rejection from the recruiter and that is all.
I am not in the business of career counseling. I don't think that makes me evil.
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I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Please, as a candidate for interviews, I hate it when companies have some sort of super secret policy regarding how well I did in interviews.
This is especially true given us poor college candidates. Understanding the finer points of interview etiquette is not accomplished instantly. (I have been criticized for dressing up too much and for not dressing up enough!)
Also, think about it: Don't you want other companies doing the same thing, so that you get better candidates coming in through your doors as well?
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Even if the candidate doesn't get the job because they weren't qualified, you want them to be excited about the company. It's good PR for *you* and that most certainly is a good reason to treat your candidates respectfully.
Maybe, but offering criticism could just as easily turn into an incident that makes your company look bad. Even if you fully intend to offer kind, thoughtful, constructive criticism, the recipient might not take it well. Then, not only will you be dealing with a PR problem, but possibly a legal problem as well.
I inform people of their lack of talent rather frequently. You are being no friend at all to let someone continue down a path that only causes death and / or destruction. Sometimes... that happens. Many software bugs have indirectly killed people.
I've told friends that they bombed the interview, why they bombed, what areas need improvement, and if they have any hope. Sometimes they don't, so I put it out there bluntly and honestly. There's always time to change a career.
There's a fairytale that says something about accomplishing anything you set your mind to. It's a lie. I will never be an NBA player no matter how hard I try. I will never be able to do matrix multiplication in my head. People need to get rid of this childish notion and recognize their limits. Focus on what you actually have a hope of being good at.
Companies need to be better at telling someone what they're doing wrong or what they need. It took me nearly 18months to find work after getting out of college. I was pretty close to suicide at one point. The always optimistic, never tell you anything bad attitude of the human resources people was probably the worst thing. Negative feedback is far more valuable, and is actually far more comforting than a HR person continually telling you that things are in process, that there are more candidates to consider, then getting a letter dated from a week earlier telling you that the position has been filled.
When companies did tell me what I was lacking, it was always work experience, never education. I was really left wondering how on earth I would ever obtain experience as none of them were willing even to give me an entry level position. Of course, part of that is that an entry level position today is not what an entry level position was a decade ago. The real entry level positions have been farmed out to Asia, and the ones left tend to require 5 years of experience or more because of the glut of people with 20years who are unemployed. I really lucked out, I happened to be at my class reunion when an old teacher of mine happened to wander in, asked me how school had gone, and what I was doing now, and then told me that he was now the CEO of a little software company and that he could use my help.
I've walked out of interviews at places where the technical people displayed the "I am god and you must impress me, pesant" mentality, because I don't want to work in that sort of an environment. I know a lot of other really competent people who have done the same.
I swear I would have walked out in some of these I've had.
Examples:
Nvidia - This is at a career fair. They ask if you have a GPA > 3.5 to start with. If you don't, they put you off immediately and tell you in your face that you're not good enough. If you "pass" that question, they sit you down at the back of their booth and ask you to solve a technical question for an hour - as if you don't already have better things to do or, *gasp* classes to attend. I know people working there, and the only feedback I've heard is that it's a sweat shop over there.
I'd say no thanks rating: 4.5 of 5 (www.nvidia.com)
Xilinx - Interview. Manager constantly interrupting what you have to say. The man was the most impatient man I've met in my life. If you answer a question incorrectly he would say some pretty negative things. One of the employees asked a simple unix command line question. I've been using it for 8-9 years at that time and I was sure I was correct in the question. There are million different ways of doing things, but he wouldn't accept my answer eventhough I went step by step explaining clearly how this crazy 'find' command works. Me not getting that job - my gain.
I'd say no thanks rating: 5 of 5 (www.xilinx.com)
Marvell - The guy was asking technical questions that had no relation to the job technical requirements, responsibilities or my background. Answers had to be exact. Solving these equations over the phone interview. I even asked him in the end if the job would be related to this field, and he admitted that there were no relations. What an idiot.
I'd say no thanks rating: 2 of 5 (www.marvell.com)
Analog Devices - Career fair during year of dot com bust. Had a booth but told everyone who came by they weren't hiring at all. Feedback from students - why bother showing up at all? Next semester - decided it wasn't a good "PR" thing to do, they scheduled interviews with a large number of candidates for on-campus interviews, only to found out they weren't hiring at all. How do I know, you'd say? Like parent post said: the word gets around QUICK. Thank you for wasting our time, Analog devices. They did this for 3 straight years.
I'd say no thanks rating: 5 of 5 (www.analog.com)
Teradyne - Sometimes, alumni from your school returning as people representing their companies would turn you off from applying there too. I recognize these jokers. They're the ones that copied assignments and cheated through tests in some class you took together. Would you want to work with these jokers, or even a company that hires these people? No thanks!
I'd say no thanks rating: 4.5 of 5 (www.teradyne.com)
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Why is it that salaries/wages in the US for even schlock jobs are so much higher than they are in the rest of the world? Is flipping burgers somehow worth more there? It depends on where the job is, and who's paying you to do it. In New York State the minimum wage is $6/hour, and there are probably lots of jobs around the state at that level. I think you're unlikely to find many of them in New York City though, because the cost of living in NYC makes $6/hour look like working for whatever change is in the couch cushions most other places. San Jose may be a similar story, but $14/hour still sounds high. Union schlock jobs can also result in ridiculous pay, depending on the employer and union. In the 80's, I remember General Motors hiring janitors to start at $18/hour. In some American industries, unions are organizations that help improve working conditions by creating parity between labor and employers to insure safety and fair compensation. In others, they're extortion rackets that suck the lifeblood out of companies because there's nothing else for them to justify their dues with.