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.
Edit: From the business POV:
- Businesses would have a limited budget for hiring so would limit process to 10 applicants and would have to pick those randomly. Less time spent on interviewing but also might miss the ideal candidate. Although the difference would fall sharply with larger pools.
- And 000s of people now stuck wo any appls at all (although better than writing fake, futile appls), and no money. Not enough jobs on the market would translate into not enough paying applications for them to be able to substitute unemployment benefits.
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.
That probably helps them waste less of their own time too. When bringing someone in to interview actually costs money, you’re mote careful about it, doing more to vet people in the earlier stages. Less “let’s bring them in and see.”
I agree 100%
hear hear. it should include any assesments to.
Is this c/unpopularopinion?
Maybe as a compromise, the first interview (up to 1 hour) can be free, but if the interview goes for more than 1 hour or if there’s more than one interview, it has to be paid.
Love it.
Unfortunately, then there would be professional candidates who just never accept a job.Daily Mail reader?
Then there would be professional candidates who
just never accept a jobstart getting blacklisted really quickly from a means of income that’s vastly more difficult, less fulfilling, less stable, and less efficient than just having a stable job.*FTFY
Ah, so you are thinking there would be a centralized system to track applicants* (perhaps the same one that handles payment) - this sounds feasible, the infrastructure mostly already exists (in the US) in state unemployment departments.
*(without it centralized, each company only sees a person once and doesn’t know if they accepted another offer or whatnot)
The rest of your points are also good, I don’t actually think it would be a big issue, I just had the knee jerk reaction to think about how any good idea would fail these days.
You could probably do a professional interviewer job for something like restaurant work in a major metropolitan area (but restaurants probably won’t do this and would just start hiring through referral or from resumes instead), but most industries are small enough that companies would talk. I haven’t worked in my previous field for five years, but checking now, I still know people at all of the major companies for it. If I were to apply at any of them, someone would see that I’d worked at companies X and Y, then they’d ask all of the people at their company who’d previously worked at company X or Y, to see if anyone knew me. If I were to try to be a vocational applicant like this, I’d develop a reputation pretty quickly.
Companies would just get even more suspicious about long resume gaps or people trying out a new field.
Yeah, that makes sense.
A half dozen applicant tracking systems handle 90% of the jobs that require interviews.
Wouldn’t limiting the interview pay to be below minimum wage/below the hourly salary of the job alleviate this?
Ok, the money goes to a local college, using companies inability to find candidate to fund producing better candidates seems fitting.
Maybe calculated as 1.5 days labor for the posted salary or median compensation for that job, whichever is greater.
There’s no way that would be a viable career.
- You’d have to reliably get interviews, which is hard enough as it is.
- It’s a lot of work to do sustainably—more work than many jobs imo.
- You get none of the other benefits of accepting the job.
- Eventually you would run out of companies for which you were qualified, and you’d probably stop getting interviews.
Your argument sounds similar to anti-welfare arguments. Sure, some people may abuse the system, but it wouldn’t pay that well, and the positives to society would greatly outweigh any abuse.
Exactly, for every one person who abuses the rule to get 10 hours of labor paid to them in exchange for doing no work, you’ll have 999 people that are actually using the system as intended.
Are you really the kind of person that’ll fuck over 999 people just to make sure that one person doesn’t get ahead in a sneaky way?
But think of the shareholders. Who’s helping them out?
Are you really the kind of person that’ll fuck over 999 people just to make sure that one person doesn’t get ahead in a sneaky way?
Are you sure you want to see people’s actual answers to this?
Not to mention, some companies right now are abusing interview candidates to get free work with “trial project” type assignments, or “How would you fix this problem, if you were hired?” type of free consultations. If some candidates abused the companies in return, I’d call that fair play.
I agree with all of that actually. I’m just used to trying to find the failure mode of anything that sounds good lately.
Yeah if it could be enforced I think it might be viable.
Companies will hire internally
Thats not really a bad thing unless I’m missing something. My experience is that companies would rather never promote existing employees which has lead to people having to job hop to get ahead.
My older family members are so confused and judgemental about me working for 4+ companies in my 7 year career but I’d still be paid as if I was “entry level” if I stuck around at them
The main downside is they often do that so they don’t have to pay as much as they would to attract an external candidate.
I made it from customer service rep to senior admin level IT in my first stop on my career, and I was getting paid 60% less than market average. Good thing I was treating it like an internship.
Ok? They do that anyway. Sometimes people leave and they have to hire externally.
That’s not a bad result either. But if they have any growth they will need to hire externally
i used to be an assistant in corporate hr in the mid 1990s… we had locations in several dozen states plus mexico, but all of hr was in the main office. we’d fly candidates in, put 'em up in a hotel, provide transportation to and from airports and interviews, as well as a generous per diem for meals. they ‘made’ more in a day off that (even factoring-in a reasonable meal budget) than i made in a week.
It should be outlawed to have more than two interview round. Just fuck off with that dehumanizing ratrace bullshit
Developers did this to themselves by becoming self important gate keepers.
Now they bitch about it.
I know someone that had a 3 tier interview for a balloon handler. They made arches and stuff for parties. This was a part time position. Didn’t get the job either…
I’d just tell them to go fuck themselves at that point
From the context, it seems pretty obvious they were clowns.
As someone who’s gotten rejected have multiple technical rounds. Yeah there definitely should be some compensation for anything close to real work. BUT as someone who has both been hiring and looking lately the far bigger issue ATM is application volume. There’s currently no real way to solve the massive bot problem
This sounds viable until you consider what the application process will devolve into.
The initial screening process will become even more annoying which will cause more bot applications and in return it will get even more annoying.
We have a massive government mandate that requires that you apply for a large number of jobs in order to qualify for unemployment benefits.
We have job agencies who are incentivise to place candidates, any candidates, with no penalties for incorrect placement.
We have unpaid internships that normalise free work for hire in the most susceptible population, job entrants.
We have automated processes run by HR to weed out unsuitable applicants before the actual employer sees anything.
We have technically unqualified HR departments demanding qualifications for things that don’t exist without any controls by the actual employer.
This idea won’t address any of this, and I think it will make things worse.
Easy solution. The company is allowed 1 free 30 minute phone call to both verify basic resume details and to schedule a lengthy interview.
Takes care of the bot issue, and a 30 minute phone call is less of a burden on the applicant
Thank you, this is the kind of scrutiny I was hoping for
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.
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.
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”.
I would say that solving the problem in the way you did makes you well or over qualified, lol.
‘Wait, all of this is stupid!’
That guy/gal. You want them, that one, the one with the capacity to think outside of the box, within the specific technical realm of the job.
But, we live in a world run by MBA’s with extremely fragile egos, so, we get insane nonsense instead, where every business process is basically built around making incompetent idiots feel smart.
Maybe after the second round?
working full-time for free
Like, working full-time for free to find a job?
For free
Companies should be searching for employees
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.
This is a good point but it already happens with the current system.
IMHO funnelling anything through a central authority is destined to lead to bottlenecks and inflexibility. I could see something similar being achieved by heavily regulating the hiring process though. And possibly involving some sort of certified 3rd party* to guarantee impartiality, that isn’t the government. (*A licensing model avoids the central authority bottleneck)
