If they are not delivering, other jobs are irrelevant, they aren’t meeting the bar.
Look up the overemployed subreddit.
It's my job to balance the workload such that they have enough work to make it worth it for me to employ them, and increase that workload where bearable so I can make more profit from their employment. If they are not underperforming and still doing two jobs, then I have failed my task because I have not effectively exploited their abilities for profit.
Ever had a medical claim by your over employed staff? Which insurance pays?
Do you pay for training?
In case of intellectual property theft from you or the other company, do you know what are your obligations? (Receiving company is can held liable.)
What amount of taxes do you withhold? What are the penalties for withholding significantly wrong taxes in your jurisdiction?
Of course you pay for training, why wouldn't you?
Working for competing companies is even stupid than being overinsured, and could potentially be illegal (for the employee).
Company withholdings don't change so this is not your concern.
1. The employee's insurance pays; in the US, they pay at least part of their insurance costs so it is unlikely for them to be covered by two services. If so, they can choose. If they were injured on the job, or in some capacity based on your work, then how is it different? Actually, how is this situation different from them purchasing outside insurance or being covered by their spouse? It's unlikely to be a problem and if it is it's not unique.
2. Sure, why not?
3. What does this have to do with them having multiple jobs? If they steal your intellectual property, that's a problem whether or not they are employed elsewhere. How does double employment compound this? If you hired someone from another job and they brought stolen property with them, is that different?
4. They are responsible for letting you know how much to deduct. You can do standard mandatory deductions based on expected salary and as long as you pay the required employment taxes based on the salary you pay them there isn't a difference in withholding on your end, only on theirs. If they owe more in tax, what do you care?
It's not like that. Since work is a market, you exchange a previously agreed amount of money for a previously agreed amount of work and knowledge.
Otherwise, the employees can also say they failed at their task if they wouldn't determine you to part with a large sum while putting in the minimum possible amount of work and working two jobs minimum.
That coin has two sides.
I have no idea why they would want to work two jobs minimum as a part of their task at my job specifically, but yes, part of being an employee is understanding how much money you can get paid in a negotiation with your employer and getting that amount is a success.
“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”
It makes it easier to identify things like pointless ‘not invented here’ syndrome, or where a company is being very inefficient in an area because they don’t know of any alternatives.
It’s common for companies to hire in outside consulting firms or independent contractors who also work for a great many companies in an industry for the exact same reason. It’s a way of keeping on top of what the industry norms are.
Plenty of pros and cons there, but that is a big part of why.
The other reason is the board of directors works for the shareholders, and represents their interests. Institutional shareholders hold shares in a lot of different companies, and if they have someone they know and are comfortable with performance wise, most would prefer to have them on the boards of as many companies as they think they have the expertise to oversee.
That’s pretty much never what happens though if someone does it when applying for a full time salary position, and line managers know it, which is why you see people get worked up about it. People doing it try to convince themselves it’s not a scam, but it almost always is.
The folks doing this on boards, despite any hate and derision they are getting here, are often exceptionally talented, educated, and have a long list of references where they have been doing it before successfully. They were voted in with full visibility to their other board memberships, and while being open about it and any potential conflicts of interest. They’re just not software engineers. I have yet to meet one that didn’t work their asses off either, just not in the way you might recognize.
There can be (and is, of course) nepotism, cronyism, etc. that happens, same as anywhere, and the shareholders who vote that in get what they deserve as well in my experience. Sometimes it’s also as simple as ‘x owns this company, and wants y to takeover when they’re gone, so y sits on the board.’. Rare in public or widely held companies though.
Ownership has it’s privileges, and it’s costs after all.
Just because something is the status quo and it is happening without mass protests, doesn’t mean people are agreeing to it.
Too fucking bad they don't "like it". I don't give one bit of care to the centimillionaire and up club.
Oddly, that's the second time I've used that word today: talking about Rishi Sunak earlier.
If that's not "stealing" but regular people actually working multiple jobs with actual deliverables in a way you couldn't even tell is,
then "stealing" is good and I will help as many to do it as possible, especially from the HN poster companies coming out and countersignaling it so hard.
I've worked a full time w/ benefits job and freelanced on the side. The only aspect of that I would feel that would be unethical is if I were to mix IP from the firms that should remain private.
Otherwise, who the hell cares. If I'm doing task work and meeting expectations then I'm holding up my end of the bargain. I'm not a slave and my work does not own me. Standing around the proverbial water cooler wasting company time is acceptable, but doing something productive during my downtime is not?
If the people are actually delivering equivalently to other employees then there's no need to worry if they're working one or two extra jobs.
How does have more than 1 job change this logic?
If you can get the job done then I don't see why it matters, and if you can't I don't see why it matters if you can't and you only have 1 job or you can't and you have 2?
Especially since rescinded offers have suddenly become acceptable, I think most people going forward should at least have the two jobs overlap by 2 weeks.
Meeting productivity targets is an important aspect of your job, but so is being available during business hours, meetings/collaborations, etc.
Moonlighting is working another job outside of business hours - which I agree, employers have less of a right to object to.
This paternalistic bullshit will be the downfall of companies who care more about micromanaging and controlling their underpaid employees than they do about actually delivering something to the market. If someone isn't producing, fire them. If someone is only being given 10 hours a week of work, and they have enough free time to get another W2 job and earn another full-time salary, that's 100% a company/management problem.
If you want to get paid by the hour or unit rate, be a consultant.
To a certain point I agree with you, but how much an employee actually outputs is a constant negotiation between the business and the employee - this is where expectation comes into play.
If you are performing beyond the baseline, you can negotiate to be compensated for exceeding it, or you can take a break.
There is no expectation that an employee should perform more work "for free" just because they can.
I believe in fairness between both sides - there is no free lunch in either direction.
This position collapses the first time someone's boss asks about workload and the employee has to lie or admit they have tons of free time.
Im sure there are unicorn cases where employees are never asked how long a task will take, or about their bandwidth for new tasks. However, in reality, the vast majority of situations require constant deception.
Most of the time the lying starts at the beginning with false employment history.
Most employment contracts, even for salaried workers, list things such as "37.5hrs per week".
If this is the understanding, and you aren't working diligently for those hours, you're a thief and fraudster, a scam artist, and should be fired.
If you get done a task early, ask for more work!
The attitude of people in this thread is laughable. People in this field are some of the most privileged, well paid members of our society.
To hear such persons moan and bleet over their lot is laughable. Grow up people. Just disgusting.
I don't know if anyone was advocating for going as far as you're suggesting (break doesn't mean paid vacation) - merely pointing out that an employee is granted the right to negotiate their labor at any point. If they get declined, that's fine. But the idea that you are a literal slave for 37.5 hours regardless of your capability is very flawed and you'll never convince the person that actually creates value of that.
The funny part for me is that I have grown up - I used to share your position but time and time again I was proved wrong, so I changed my mind.
There is zero defense for this. None.
There is no way to work 22.5 hrs per day, 5 days a week, and not be a thief, a crook, scum.
This is who you have aligned yourself with. This is the behaviour you have defended.
Into this conversation walked the spoiled, the entitled, the scam artist. People advocated working multiple full time jobs, and equated doing normal work as "slavery".
Above, you do so again. You liken working diligently, to slavery. Good grief.
Working beyond explicitly assigned tasks is not "performing more work for free". It's doing your job.
That's funny because if I hire a company to do some work on my house, they do strictly the tasks assigned and even try to charge me more than agreed. They don't try to make my house better.
The right analogy is you hire a full-time handyman (whatever go with it), and you come home to find them on your couch in the middle of the day, their excuse is I fixed the dishwasher, and your response is likely to be “I’m not paying you to sit on the couch, go change the ac filters, fix the garage door, and re-seal the deck”
If you want people to work beyond the bounds of their contract, then renegotiate the contract.
Without it being in the terms, it's not a duty you have to fulfill. It's not deceptive not to do favors for your supervisor.
Most people won't lie about it when they turn it in on Friday, they'll just turn it in when it is due and not explain. Why turn it in early if there is no reward for doing so other than more work?
As I've said elsewhere, this is a management problem, not an employee problem. As a manager I made sure people knew that there was a path to promotion, to advance within the corporation. I checked and tracked their progress and their work, and worked myself to make an environment where contributions were noted and rewarded. If a company or manager doesn't do that, they won't have people outperforming the base expectations for long, and they don't deserve to.
In a hypothetical case where someone only has 10 hours of stuff to do a week, I'm sympathetic, I'd be pretty bored by that too. But when I see a SWE describe a scenario like that, most of the time they end up meaning that they have 10 hours of coding tasks a week, because they don't consider anything else to be a real part of their job.
On the other hand, speaking of "delivering," companies like Amazon and UPS have figured it out. Amazon wouldn't care if you were working a second job, because they know your output down to the nearest Joule at any given moment.
What the hell else are you even doing that you don’t have time to ensure your employees are doing their job? You’re really not that busy.
Wow. That's...astounding. If you're such a poor manager that....managing...is too hard. Perhaps you should go back to IC work.
Employees don't have to be continuously monitored to see if they're doing work, that's how you wind up with spyware and butts in seats mentality. Are they checking in their work? Are they completing their stories on time? Are they getting near the average number of story points done in a sprint? If so, leave them the fuck alone.
Story points are supposed to be a proxy for amount of work required, seems reasonable to track that. It's not like I'm saying you should be measured by the lines of code you add or something arbitrary.
So yes the kind of process that plans everything in two week sprints and tracks tasks lasting maybe just a few hours each via daily meetings is micromanagement. That's what it's called when managers are so incapable of setting a clear direction and then trusting their people to get the job done that they have to check up on progress several times every day and constantly meddle with the real work.
It's mostly for planning, though.
You won't be able to do that for knowledge work, and you'll end up using proxies like butt-in-chair time or jira-tickets-closed which are easy to game and push away the actually competent workers that have outside options.
Just do your job as a manager.
As for reference checks: If a reference is on a resume that I've been handed by a candidate or that candidate's agent I check it. Glowing references really highly correlate with job enthusiasm and honestly most developers don't list them anyway, so even having one that's positive without being glowing is a good signal.
Anecdotally, there is slight correlation between university prestige and interview performance. But not enough to toss lower tier university graduates - if their resume is otherwise strong, they're worth interviewing regardless of school.
The strongest signal I have as a hiring manager is a successful internship/co-op. If the candidate worked on interesting projects and can discuss the tech stack and business problem being solved, they're likely to be a good hire.
The few collegiate athletes I've hired have also been top-notch. But not enough of them to claim correlation. Would be interesting to see if there's a real correlation there.
The main complaints I've heard about the prestigious institution hires are:
1) They tend to excel well when given a problem that can be solved with a rather templated approach, but tend to struggle more with poorly defined problems
2) They tend to have higher turnover, with the speculation that they jump ship as soon as a perceived higher status opportunity arises. Meaning, they start a lot of projects but don't see them to completion
I don't know if I've had enough experience with the differing groups to draw strong conclusions one way or another.
OP is okay with employment verification, but it should wait until after the offer is signed. Any offer will be pulled back if the job seeker lied about their job history
If you move a judgement call of that kind to after the offer stage, then the offer letter becomes a lot less meaningful.
That may be true, but if a potential employer gets current employer references before any offer is made, the candidate is at serious risk of unemployment (let go and no offer to replace it), or an uncomfortable change in relationships at the old job. The risk to the candidate is high.
Besides, many offers are lowball without much room for negotiation. Why would a candidate take the risk, not even knowing if there's a good enough offer contingent on the reference?
If a potential employer asked for a current-employer reference from me before making any offer, I would terminate the process even if I expect a great reference, because it shows the employer doesn't care about (or doesn't think about) the fundamentals from an employee's perspective, and that is a big clue that it's likely to be an awful place to work in other ways.
A good employer doesn't act as if employer and employee are in equal positions with the same to lose. I've been jerked around by too many employers and potential ones who don't care about effect on their employees, sometimes at large financial cost to myself, so these days I'd just drop the company if they seem oblivious to how things affect the candidate. There are plenty of good ones who also pay well, and those are also the ones I'd rather help succeed.
If it's just about the amount of the offer or level of the position, they always have the option to revise it up after they get a reference they like.
At least in the US such reference checks are impossible these days. To avoid litigation any serious company is going to:
a.) have the call directed to an HR rep rather than the manager or any other employees
b.) the HR rep will only verify title and dates of employment.
I haven't heard of anyone doing the type of reference check you're describing since the very early 2000s.
OP mentioned having to bring a diploma, and to me that does indeed seem ridiculous.
In the USA, the National Student Clearinghouse [1] provides degree verification that is the standard. It is much more reliable than someone showing a piece of paper.
How do I know this? The hire who lied about graduating also produced a falsified diploma, which blew me away. I confirmed it was false because when I checked with the university in question, they pointed out some things that confirmed although it was similar, they never would have issued one like this. (And the registrar confirmed this person did indeed never graduate)
It’s rarely prosecuted outside of high profile cases though.
So employers beware and all.
Were there any problems with their performance? I mean, why do you care about their diploma if they were able to pass interview and then perform on the job afterwards?
I do agree that outright fabricating credentials is a worse lie, but the job market and interview process is morally corrosive by nature.
The honest and most common answer "I want more money" makes you look greedy and you had to come up with a more acceptable excuse, Like "Your product is very interesting", "I'm "Looking for new challenges".
kind of like the initial steps of dating where you kind of know what the other is up to but you don't talk about it until you had evaluated each other and decided that "yeah I want to be your girlfriend" or "yeah I want to hire you" and then you finally can take your mask off and talk with honesty.
Monkey brain fault, I guess
These are just normal human things. Like for e.g. How to give negative feedback to a direct report, while not discouraging them to keep trying harder and motivating them. You need to have tact and be strategic in how you approach that conversation.
The common retort "Well I just want it straight without sugar coating, corporate speak sucks!" doesn't address that not everyone is the same, and you need to apply a layer of human sensitivity to certain types of conversations. The more you know someone the more you will be familiar with their mental state, and the more freely you can say things without this 'emotional handshake'.
I'd argue this is about story telling capability. Telling a story well, is an art. Chances are you've seen a number of stand up comics tell an otherwise factually boring story - but somehow made it hilarious. This is why there is the "they were so funny when they said 'foobar'....guess you had to be there."
The problem here though is now your interview process is evaluating stroytelling skills rather than job skills per se - well unless you're looking to hire a good storyteller. On the other hand, interpersonal communication is important...
What kind of opportunity are we talking?
I think it highly depends on the circumstances. Job performance and lying to gain entry don't necessarily correlate. The "dishonest for personal gain" argument goes out the window in this profit-driven world. If anything, it's encouraged with the precedence already being set by the employer market itself. Employers will cheat candidates out of whatever they can get away with; that's the norm not the exception.
If a candidate has more work experience than their would-be college educated peers, you've effectively shut out a valuable asset for no good reason. Maybe they've assessed the position and determined it's an arbitrary barrier for getting hired, but honesty would be far too risky. If they passed your interview, then either your education requirement is unnecessary or your interview process sucks and you're allowing bad candidates in regardless. Maybe this trait of fabricating education credentials means they're actually resourceful and understand risk assessment?
FWIW I'm a high school drop out, no degree. I work in FAANG and I'm going on 17+ years of work experience in tech. Lack of degree has never been an issue for me. If I see the requirement there, I still apply and each time the employer has waived it. I'm just playing devils advocate here.
The opt-out process for the site is detailed here: https://www.studentclearinghouse.org/privacy-policy/
Crtl+F for 'opt-out" and you can find the email address there and other information.
> Most college registrars will confirm dates of attendance and graduation, as well as degrees awarded and majors, upon request
And for the National Student Clearinghouse, you do need a person's name, school, and date of birth. Although date of birth might not be wildly difficult to get, it is an extra piece of info that won't surface if finding someone's name randomly on the internet or in a phone book.
The report is very plain - it confirms basically what the FTC quote mentions.
Given that registrars give out that info, are you still concerned? If so, I'm interested in what you would propose as a solution if you are applying to a job and they want to confirm that what you have stated on your resume is true. Perhaps a system like credit scores use where you can lock your credit against being checked, and then unlock it for a short time window?
I'm sure HN can think of all kinds of clever approaches to allowing this, and perhaps the clearinghouse website will indeed change significantly sometime.
I consider the clearinghouse's approach as similar to the insecurity of checking account numbers. Basically, if someone has your name, checking account, and routing number, they can ask a bank for money from your account. As an account holder, I've asked my bank, "Can I tell you to not give money to certain parties from my account?" And their answer was a flat no. I am much more concerned with that, and nothing is changing on that front anytime soon. At least I can move my money somewhere without a checking account, but it's still fairly hard to live without a checking account somewhere.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/avoid-fake-d...
Yes, absolutely. It should not be legal for registrars to be doing that either IMO. I don't generally think that it should be legal to build businesses on the exchange of third party information without the direct consent of the third party in each specific instance.
In times past, perhaps a reasonable approach would have been to fax a photocopy of the alleged degree to the registrar or clearinghouse for pass/fail verification.
These days the individual ought to be able to initiate the registrar or clearinghouse to send a digitally signed document to the company.
Or, you can try to guesstimate that by checking with previous employers. Which was the OP's point I guess, or alternatively the OP's point was "I give my employees a 40 hours/week contract, so they can't really have another job (and still perform adequately, or simply they can't depending on the law of the country)"
The relevance here is many managers have experience with employees who seemed fine in interviews and barely met performance bars (or just flat out didn’t) despite working just one job.
It’s well within their legal rights (and a useful heuristic!) to not hire someone because they’re not comfortable rolling the dice on a candidate being able to meet performance criteria because they’re working multiple jobs. Because working multiple jobs is a lot harder than working one job on pretty much any metric one can think of, and is not a protected class or status.
They’ll also reap any blowback or rewards from doing so, including difficulty finding candidates, or not.
A manager considering it for something like a software dev position would just be hurting themselves, though likely only a little as I doubt ‘candidate wears plaid’ comes up often.
If it was someone hiring for a fashion designer position, or a public facing spokesperson position, plaid could be a huge plus or a huge minus (I’m guessing huge minus as of right now for most), and what the candidate wears and how the they present themselves relative to current fashions and norms is a huge and important element that the hiring manager would be incompetent to not consider.
That said, there are plenty of managers who are pretty incompetent.
You don't. But you never know that for sure. The whole interview process is just gathering data to make an estimate about whether or not the person will successfully perform in the role. Them having another job would be almost the strongest indicator I could imagine that they will not be successful.
As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, many people successfully work multiple jobs.
> Most benefits plans will detail the eligibility requirements to participate in the plan, including employee classification (full-time, part-time, regular, temporary, etc.) and/or numbers of hours worked per week or month. Once these classifications change for a covered employee, his or her eligibility will need to be reassessed.
> Short-term, temporary changes usually will not change an employee classification. For example, if a full-time employee goes on vacation for three weeks, most employers would not change the employee's full-time status. However, if an employee reduces his or her hours during the school year to accommodate his or her class schedule, employers may want to reclassify the employee to part time due to the length of the arrangement. It boils down to how the employer defines the classifications and how they are used in the eligibility requirements of each plan.
---
Without getting to an attempt to measure productivity...
The nightmare scenario for HR in this situation is to have someone who is a full time worker and getting full time benefits is found to be splitting their time between two or more companies in a way practically means that they couldn't be working the necessary number of hours to be eligible for benefits at the company.
Having an insurance company or similar decides that your employee isn't eligible for the benefits that you claim they are and ask for an audit of employee time now and going forward, this gets into the "this is gonna suck" category.
There are also issues of IP assignment where one (or both) companies make claims to the inventions that were produced "during work hours" at the other company.
An employee lying on their W-4 about having multiple jobs can create a lot of legal and bureaucratic overhead.
That employee also likely assigned all IP they created during work hours to two companies.
That's not to say that some employers wouldn't be OK with it, just that it tends to be thrown in by the lawyers because why not.
Non-competes are illegal or unenforceable in the following US states: California, North Dakota, the District of Columbia, Oklahoma, Maine, Maryland, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Washington.
Also, if a company asks you to sign one, you can say no. I always do.
For example, in California, you can't ban someone from working for a competitor after leaving.
You absolutely can ban them from working at at a competitor at the same time.
How?
California offers protection for "lawful conduct occurring during nonworking hours away from the employer's premises."
Note that it specifies "nonworking hours". There is also an exemption for working for a competitor.
https://www.mossbollinger.com/blog/2020/december/my-employer...
My employer can also ban me from stealing money or tools. If they discover it, they can legally fire me.
You stated that non-competes are illegal. This is incorrect in the context of concurrent employment and moonlighting with competitors. Those types of non-competes are completely legal.
I expect we will see a rise in the number of contracts that explicitly state no other employment during business hours.
Non-compete in this context means post-facto (forward-looking) non-competes.
That is the letter of the law, but that has not been the interpretation (re: a 2020 appellate ruling mentions this)
https://calawyers.org/business-law/california-appellate-cour...
I also happen to know that ND non-competes are enforceable in a limited fashion.
1 - you are a manager.
2 - you are selling a company.
If you are a coder or regular employee, then no, the non-competes are not worth the paper they are printed on.
> The Jimmy John’s agreement prohibited employees during their employment and for two years afterward from working at any other business that sells “submarine, hero-type, deli-style, pita, and/or wrapped or rolled sandwiches” within 2 miles of any Jimmy John’s shop in the United States, according to Madigan’s lawsuit. An agreement in effect from 2007 to 2012 extended that to 3 miles.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-jimmyjohns-settlement/jim...
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/22/jimmy-johns-drops-non-compet...
They were being sued in IL & NY by the states' attorneys general over the issue.
I fail to see how verifying decades-old degrees would have prevented this.
Or did you get pissy because you didn't have a person's livelihood to hold over them to make dance to your song?
You know, we could get people recruited on a double/triple and take an ongoing %, to monetize his crying.
If that employee does all of their work for you, why does it matter if they work another job? Are they underperforming? I'm sorry, but I don't see how that is a scam. In retail, people work multiple jobs all the time. Why is it suddenly unethical the moment it turns into an office job?
>(their downfall was neither of them were meeting productivity expectations, not getting their work done)
It's only unethical if you're not in the ruling class. If you're an executive, it's perfectly fine to sit on the board of multiple companies simultaneously (each one paying you $50,000+ per year).
Unless you are somehow working them in totally offset hours, or you have _literally_ zero meetings and work in a completely asynchronous environment, then you need to disclose.
But that's not true for an overwhelmingly large number of people. You aren't just being paid for output, you are also being paid for time.
Ethically though, I don't feel this way at all. They're paying for my output not my time. I don't get paid overtime when I work extra nor do I get credit for working on the weekend.
I don't think I'll convince you but I guess I would say you don't owe your employer your life. They'll cut you off when it's to their benefit and it's best you do what's best for you.
Even just a tiny bit of effort in the application process does miracles to filter out people who do not really want to work for your company. Because sending hundreds or even thousands job applications requires you to optimise your efforts and reject possible employers who would require you to spend total of one day in the process.
On the other hand if found the company you would like to work for, you researched the position, you have realistic demands, spending that time is just an investment in getting the job you really want. For example, when I interview I take a day off so that I am rested, fresh and with my head reasonably empty of the projects I am currently running so that I can present my best on the interview.
If a company has that little respect for my time to make me jump through all of these bureaucratic hoops, seemingly to prove I can tolerate mindless nonsense, I don't want to work for them.
Yup, all my data is on linkedin, then I click apply, and I get taken to a whole other website? And no way to fill in from linkedin?
Clearly corp x cares little about my time.
And for what? Why? Is 'Apply with linkedin" that bad?!
Here's the truth, top talent? Corps need to do the work. Not us.
I am sorry this is the way you see it.
Have you ever tried figuring out where you would like to work, researching the company, be excellently prepared for the interview and working them to get the best terms?
Trust me, it is easier than ever and I have been a long time on the job market. Right now, trying to put ANY effort will immediately put you in front of other candidates because 99% of candidates, frankly, are too lazy for barest effort on their part. Which this entire comment section is an excellent example of.
'candidates, frankly, are too lazy for the barest effort'.
If you join the company, there will be a lot of things that will not work perfectly and yet you will be asked to do things anyway. Everything is in constant flux at any startup because of growth and at large companies things are broken because of entrenched mistakes.
If everything works perfectly it means the company obsesses over its internal processes to the point of ignoring everything else. Which is also a problem.
There exists no company that is in a state of change where everything works perfectly. And every non trivial company is always in a state of change.
If you can't get over one broken form you simply aren't cut for the job.
Unless you do something truly groundbreaking or contributing to a cause I deeply care, which makes me to want to really work there, I will just go to the next company where will be a lot of things that also not work perfectly, but I don't have to jump through these hoops.
I guess the good people will just have to go work for one of the 20 other companies who will hire them based on a personal introduction and a couple of reasonable interviews instead then.
Two of the most reliable indicators I have ever found for places I wouldn't want to work are employers who think they're special and only want to hire true believers who agree and employers whose HR and/or legal teams manage to create so much unnecessary friction in the recruitment process alone that it's actively difficult to work with them even if the people doing the useful work there would want to make the hire. These behaviours seem to be quite accurate predictors of poor working environments for those who do get hired in the end.
One of the reasons I got fed up of being someone else's employee and shifted towards B2B and entrepreneurialism was exactly that the above strategy wasn't really working even back then. If it's a direct approach without a personal introduction there's too much randomness to justify jumping through a lot of hoops in a recruitment process even if in fact there would be a great fit and everyone would be happy if they ended up working together.
With the kind of market we've had in the tech industry for at least a decade now it doesn't make sense for good candidates to spend too much time on potential employers who make it too difficult to work with them. Maybe that will change again if the growing economic problems persist for more than a year or two but I'm a long way from placing that bet right now.
Setting up a spam magnet just attracts spam, not the “candidates with the most opportunities.”
I think this may be more a consequence of blasting out numerous applications, than the cause of having to do so.
Every job I've gotten in the past 20 years has been a) the company I was targeting to work for, and b) the result of a targeted, careful, and studious effort to get in there.
I just wanted to add to anyone: make sure you actually understand who was the employer and give an opportunity to address the potential lie.
Sometimes people (in a rush to read the cv) assume that a contract position, for instance, was a permanent role and similar mistakes (even when clearly specified in the cv) and these checks might make people drop out of the process unfairly, without recourse.
Question for you: One of the previous companies I worked for changed their name after I left. The company is still searchable under the old name. Should I list the new name, or old name on the resume? I feel like it's not really my problem, but also is my problem, you know? It's a weird thing. I'm not sure how common of a problem this is.
Vice President of Red Lectroids
For example: EMC (now Dell)
> After this, we heavily beefed up our pre-employment screening, which is all of what this person is complaining about.
So practices were already in place to detect and correct this.
That makes it quite foolish to distrust all applicants across the board, and make their experience worse, when performance tracking and correction was already a solved problem.
That said, making the process worse for your good candidates is a horrible solution.
I feel for that employer, but making the application process more onerous would be a red flag for me, as a candidate.
They are going to potentially hurt themselves if not careful.
We've had several instances of foreign contracting companies forging identities and using paid actors (who sound and act American) in order to get into our company. Not only do these scams seem somewhat common they are also a massive security risk. We usually find out quickly because there is almost always an inconsistency in their employment history.
Your process is like everybody elses:
1. automated resume screen hunting for keywords 2. HR human review 3. HR call 4. 3-4 other calls 5. detailed screening 6. offer
If you are doing detailed screening BEFORE interviews, stop right now. It is wasted effort. Nobody else does it that way.
I've (literally) employed people who were working 3 jobs without any of the other employers knowing about one another. We were being scammed. This happened not just once, but with 2 people (1 full stack engineer who is a HN regular, and another was an account manager).
This was at a 15 person company, and 2 out of the 15 were working multiple full-time W-2 jobs all with full time benefits. At the end they were both let go once we discovered the deception (their downfall was neither of them were meeting productivity expectations, not getting their work done)
After this, we heavily beefed up our pre-employment screening, which is all of what this person is complaining about.
Unfortunately there are people in the job market who scam companies. To find and weed these people out before they make it in the door, we need to do things like verify your degree (even if it was 20 years ago) not because we care whether you have a degree, but as a test to see if you were truthful on your resume.
Edit: Also, if anyone requests reference checks from your current employer, you should say no. It's not standard practice to check current employer, only prior employers (at least in the US).