That is not really cheap, I am sure technology has helped reduce the amount of man administrative man hours, and helped fill a pipeline, but you still need to train new hires and actually interview them, which is no cheap.

Interviewing at all companies is always "free", because once your an employee, your time has "no cost", irregardless of what anyone's wages are, and regardless of any opportunity costs for the time.

As result, what we have are poor hiring evaluations, horrible onboarding, etc.

Meanwhile those managers are getting the salaries that better be spent on a team of great developers.

Either way, the effect on hiring is the same.

So it's not easy to actually hire. I'm not at amazon, but we do offer reasonable rates - example, new college hires get 130k+stock, benefits at our company.

Yes, we are in seattle and/or sf. Don't want to say the name.

* don't care if you have a CS degree (we have hired plenty of bootcamp grads)

* are 100% remote which is super valuable to some folks

* aren't looking for super specialized skills--we build websites and web applications on some common open source stacks.

* explicitly don't pay top dollar. As the CEO says in the typical hiring conversation, every so often we'll be talking to folks who are also talking to Microsoft and Facebook, and we'll quietly back away--we choose to compete on different axes than dollars.

But maybe we're on the lower end. We definitely pay above that band for folks with 1-2 years of experience.

So I'd consider 60k low for any urban area.

Not the poster,although I've found a lot of people will take 50% pay for fully remote jobs.

I was suprised just how valuable fully remote is to so many people.

If you are having this much trouble hiring, are you 100% sure your interview process is correct?

What is the KPI for your interview process?

But what metric are you determining that those 5 or 6 questions are correct?

For example, have you put together a pool of current workers that are successful at your type of work at different companies and seen how many can pass your interview test? Its pretty easy to find a recruiter that will reach out to their network and you pay 10 employed quality engineers $1,000 that do similar work to attempt the questions. If you find a significant amount of successful engineers cannot do it, then you may want to recalibrate.

I have helped several different companies fix their hiring process, purely by recalibrating their interview test questions to their specific needs. This sometimes actually means, more difficult or simply different types of questions. But very often people just do some Google searches for interviewing at FAANG and repeat those questions without tailoring them to their specific roles.

With that said, in the case of your company, it may very well be the case that the work you do requires particularly high IQ candidates, which is actually what most interview questions at the big tech companies test. In that case, you will always have a difficulty finding candidates as there are only a limited amount of high IQ people in the world. So changing your interview questions may not apply. But when that is the case, you can often save yourself quite a bit of time by asking potential hires to take an IQ online. This will cost your organization almost nothing and will likely screen out the vast majority of people that will not be able to pass those types of interview questions.

What I was trying to say that lot have been said about hiring metrics and standards around here and elsewhere. Yet, at the end of the day still like arbitrary in both ends and makes the job transaction cost higher than what could possible be.

Anyways, as I read your company’s interview process. Something came to my mind, why not let the candidate decide which questions to pick? I say so because I find the a lot of interviews are so hit or miss but if I was given a bit of control over the process, things could be different (or at least I would like to think this way).

The reality is outside of very early resume screening very little of the process is automated. Recruiting spends most of their day contacting people on sites like linked-in trying to find talent as not nearly enough shows up at our door.

My colleagues at FAANG companies tell me similar stories.

The cost of replacing an existing employee is also very high. In most domains can’t just plug that cheaper developer in, they need training and expertise building.

Outside of some very simple domains I don’t think your hypothesis holds up.

There is actually a Dutch site that tries to do something like that [0], but those recruiters are not even remotely as bad as these stories. They may be annoying parasites, but at least when they mention a number, it's fairly reliable.

[0] https://blacklist-recruiters.nl/archive/

Yes, just like Tinder and other assorted dating apps and sites have made it incredibly easy and efficient to search for a mate, but relatively few people end up in a relationship because of it. The act of swiping endlessly appeals to people, apparently. I vaguely remember hearing that once you are given 2 or more options, it induces strong paralysis, whereas if you have one option you tend to just jump at it and move forward with your life. I imagine the dynamics of dating and hiring are quite parallel.

You mean 3 or more? Because saying 2 or more just means you have options and therefore any options induces paralysis

The experience of the poster you are responding to doesn't seem to align with the situation you are describing. Sure posting an online job ad is pretty cheap. The rest of the hiring process, not so much.

Sure it isn't free, but remember, this person had made it all the way to the end of the process. The determination was made that they represented such a large gain, for the low salary they were paying, that it was worth the risk of that small cost to get an employee at a 30% reduction in salary.

If you are going to save 30% of $140k, that means you will save $42k. It would take a lot of interviews to make up that gap.

Mind letting me know where you work so I can avoid it? Interviewing is part of the job and needs to be accounted for. You don't just make your employees do overtime because you don't want to plan out your companies work well

If their other work falls behind because they spend too much time interviewing, well that is the company's problem. I have never worked with anyone that would stay late because they interviewed someone that day. That is ridiculous.

And as for staying late "to get the work done", what job do you work in where the work is ever "done"?

Eg when we post a senior eng job on eg glassdoor, stackoverflow, or linkedin, we are deluged with resumes. Just the ad easily costs $250. Then we get applications who ignore that we don't sponsor visas, clearly don't have the skills required (6 year SAP programmer who wants to be a senior fullstack eng? No thanks), or are junior eng trying to make a huge jump. 1.5 years experience does not make you a senior SE who can be trusted to design and land large features with minimal oversight.

The first problem is an eng manager reviews all those resumes. It easily requires 10 minutes per, including writing nice rejection letters. And that's just for inbound. Outbound can take 30+ minutes per.

If someone passes the resume filter, we do a phone screen with one of our senior eng shadowed by a junior. A 45 minute call plus prep plus decision afterwards costs me 2 hours of eng time.

If you come in, we do about a 3.5 hour interview across 6 people. We cover travel expenses and lunch if an interview runs over lunchtime.

The whole thing easy costs us $1.5k, plus tons of eng time. And that's if we source. If a recruiter sources, we're looking at 20%.

Which part of senior full stack are they missing? Front end, back end , API?

https://cloudplatform.sap.com/capabilities/technical-asset-i...

>1.5 years experience does not make you a senior SE who can be trusted to design and land large features with minimal oversight.

Yes and 25 years experience doesn't make them one either, especially if it is the same 25 years.

You could find a 2.5 jr with the skills required.

I mean if they started their own start up they could be designing and landing features with no oversight within 18 months.

>The first problem is an eng manager reviews all those resumes.

Yes it's better to have actually engineers do the initial review. They understand the job, will see through the BS and scale better. The more people you hire, the more resumes you can review.

I'm sorry, but this sounds very strange from someone claiming to know about interviewing and hiring.

You need an engineering manager to filter out SAP programmers who want to be a senior full stack engineer? You need an engineering manager to figure out someone only has 1.5 years of experience?

How many people are you interviewing? How many positions are you filling? Seems like you would realistically need about 5-10 phone screens plus 1 or 2 in person interviews to fill a position. 3 if your phone screens were really off the mark.

I'm actually curious who hired you. Because this sounds like dismal operations management. Seriously, you seem to be a great example of how much a bad hire can cost a company.

"Seems like you would realistically need about 5-10 phone screens plus 1 or 2 in person interviews to fill a position. 3 if your phone screens were really off the mark." Just curious what your thought process is to arrive at these numbers?

Also in this thread: piles of people complaining hr runs hiring. We have an eng manager run hiring for our eng. You: bring back hr to review resumes!.

We're hiring on the order of 15 eng over the next calendar year. Ask anyone who has actually done this (say, for example, the folks at yc) hiring is incredibly expensive. I saw an interview where an Asana founder said he spent perhaps 20% - I can't recall, but significant percentage -- of his time hiring. That's super senior executive time focused on getting employees in.

As more recruiters offers their services to employers the employers starts to feel like there are more potential hires than there actually are.

As a thought experiment we could assume that there used to be two recruiting firms for each employer but then costs went down and now there are ten. This gave the illusion that there are five times as many potential hires even if everyone should take a step back and realize that the recruiters are still all trawling in the same pool in their search for talent.

I also wonder how much of it is also #1 data gathering, #2 advertisement, and #3 slightly counter to what you are saying - bad tools/people using said tools.

for point one, I can learn a lot on what microsoft is doing by pulling resumes from microsoft workers, even more if I interview them. you can quickly glean direction, head count, tech stack, etc.

for point two, tech companies especially have to remain relevant in the news. Imagine if you post positions for great ML shiny positions, that gets seen by tens of thousands of people for 0 cost. "Did you see that great posting at company X? wow they have an impressive Y team"

point 3, I have seen recruiters get thousands of resumes for a position they posted on the web, really want to hire someone, but instead send people through the hiring loops because of direct contacts. Its like they search for skills, the resumes on the website dont get searched well so they assume there are no matches. its baffling to me this happens given the tools you mentioned