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.
Edit: this post seems to have gained some traction. Do you think I should try writing to my MP and suggesting it? I live in the UK where fake interviews are a real problem right now
So start a company and pay for candidates. What’s stopping you? If it’s the best business model you’ll make millions or billions
I miss hired.com It was a hiring platform that tipped the scales a little in favor of the interviewee. You could take an assessment to prove your basic competence in programming and thereby cut out a round of interviews.
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.
Are you using ddg nowadays?
Agreed
Looking for a job now and a single company so far has has taken 6 hours of my time.
Two for the initial requirements for applying, the reading their 5 page information, writing a cover letter, etc.
Then two hours on a screening interview, and the initial interview, though that second one went from 1 hour to 1 hour 45 minutes so it was actually 6 hours 45 minutes
Then two more hours on a technical interview
This is where I’m at now, and i still am looking at two more one hour interviews with higher up, then the CEO herself.
That’ll make over 8 and a half hours IF I get the job.
If I don’t get the job, man, this was a fucking waste…
In principle, jobs should be a mutually beneficial relationship. I give them resources, they pay for that but in reality, the balance 100% tipped to their side
I have to apply for jobs, they dont have to apply for employees
I have to write cover letters and separate letters to tell them how much i love their company and how badly i really want to work there and how much I’ll sacrifice for them
They interview me on their turf, their rules. We don’t get to interview the company. Some companies allow us to ask a few questions, but that’s it.
Shits fucked up
Interviews actually cost the company. They have to pay those people interviewing you, and not working for clients at that time. That’s why I don’t see many applications going to interview phase at all. Most applications are just filtered by AI, or some HR and it never goes to the actual hiring manager. And they don’t interview unless they are pretty sure about wanting to hire the candidate. At least the companies without ghost jobs do that.
But HR only interviews are probably different, they might do interviews to justify their job.
So then a person could make his living by interviewing for jobs he’s not qualified for and could never get? I guess that probably wouldn’t happen.
I didn’t used to hate the long interview process until I applied for a job that had me fill out like a hundred questions for background information. It was like, “Have you ever been convicted of embezzlement for an amount greater than $500?” No. “Have you ever been convicted of embezzlement for an amount less than $500?” No… “Have you ever been convicted of embezzlement for exactly $500?”
Did you know that if they can guess your crime with enough specificity, legally you have to admit to it? At least that’s what I assume, based on the questionnaire. Like, “Have you ever been convicted of violating the endangered species act while crossing state lines in a class C vehicle on a Sunday?” And I’m like, “No, but you’re so close!”
Anyway, I got the offer, but then they rescinded it when I asked for more money.
After about 10 years experience in the field, my interviews tended toward the whole day kind of thing. Different companies do it differently, but basically if you’re going to the effort of bringing a candidate to the company, might as well grill 'em for most of a workday. Some group interviews - those are pretty intimidating: a room full of people who know what they want and you guessing what it is they actually do. Mostly a series of one-on-ones, the most hostile one-on-one interviewer I ever had turned out to be the guy whose desk I was about to take over, shuffling him from a window seat back to an interior cube - he really really didn’t like me in the interview, I gently mentioned it to my boss-to-be he just blew him off “don’t worry about him, he’s always like that…”
So then a person could make his living by interviewing for jobs he’s not qualified for and could never get?
That’s already a flaw of the current system, so no change means no new downside. People receiving unemployment usually have to prove they’re looking for work, but there’s not usually a requirement that you’re applying to things you’re likely to get.
If you call unemployment “pay” - it’s such a small amount compared to a real job it’s ridiculous, but on the other hand: you’ve got no other sources of income so: jumping their hoops is the best way to get some money coming in.
It’s weird. I was applying for an engineering tech job and they asked if I’ve ever knowingly violated the second law of thermodynamics, but wouldn’t tell me if it was a deal breaker if I had. Anyway that place burned to the ground before I heard back on my interview anyway.
I was considering “cabin toilets” for a place off grid. It came down to composting and incineration models. While I was deciding, the incineration toilet factory burned down. Apparently that was Incinolet in 1994?
The hiring process has moved further and further from the company and is controlled by a bunch of middle-man companies who found a niche and made an industry out of it. No wonder hiring has become more expensive and riskier for a corp.
That middle man dynamic sounds strikingly like enshittification
working full-time for free
Like, working full-time for free to find a job?
For free
Companies should be searching for employees
I guess there is a selection bias on internet comments, but as someone that has been on the interviewer side several times now, I have to say: the interview process is not even remotely cheap for companies. At least the companies I worked for take them seriously and the time investment of senior professionals is huge, which is not cheap at all.
On top of that, there is always pressure for hiring quick, so I don’t know which companies you guys are interviewing, but I don’t know any company that just likes “fooling around”.
Maybe you are not choosing the correct companies on your applications? or maybe you are applying to meat grinder companies such as Meta or Amazon?
As interviewer you would be surprised how many people apply to “senior embedded C developer” without much idea of how to even program, even with theoretical experience on the CV.
This is a 2 sided problem, and I understand it might look one sided sometimes, but it is a very complex problem to solve. Believe me, no one wants to be “hiring manager”, but also, no one wants to deal with a bad team member.
Paying interviewes directly would not help at all, as it would create a new level of mistrust for people trying to gamify the process. And this will end up being paid by honest job seekers and interviewers.
Just a side note: I live in EU, not the corporate American dystopia, so my argument might not apply to the USA. For example, an error on hiring here becomes a huge problem lasting months, in USA I believe you can just fire people at will without prior notice, so you can be more reckless with the interviews.
Senior embedded C developer here in the US. I can speak first hand experience at people applying to be on my team that have reasonable sounding experience and then collapse under interview questions.
Everything else you said applies here too, legally we don’t have repercussions for firing someone quickly (once had a team member for two months), but a healthy org will try very hard to get hiring right because it can cause pretty bad morale to see a revolving door and there is a massive brain and resource drain having to constantly be training new people.
I agree 100%
I, too, hate job hunting, but I’m having a hard time seeing where unemployed people have to work full time for free, unless it’s a working interview.
You’re getting into the weeds about the definition of “work.”
Any definition of “work” that excludes calling, writing applications (AKA writing reports), emailing, interviewing (AKA meetings) etc. also excludes many paid positions.
Generally, my out of town interviews include paid airfare, hotel and meals to do the interview, this has been the professional standard since the 1970s and before… Yeah, it’s “unpaid time” but the expenses being borne by the company in the process are pretty obvious, and not insignificant.
Now, I can easily imagine today with AI HR screeners playing games of 20,000 questions before admitting you to a face-to-face round, yeah, that’s gotta be annoying. One way to win those games is not to play, only deal with companies that respect your time - I understand all too well that sometimes there aren’t any - but if they’re wasting your time like that during the interview process, odds are high that they don’t really have anything to offer anyway.
At more of a bottom-end job hunt, in high school I drove down the beach stopping in at every hotel filling out applications cold - low investment on my part. Four months later, I got a call back, apparently I was the only application on file.
Generally, my out of town interviews include paid airfare, hotel and meals to do the interview, this has been the professional standard since the 1970s and before… Yeah, it’s “unpaid time” but the expenses being borne by the company in the process are pretty obvious, and not insignificant.
Oh, what industry were you in?
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.
Love it.
Unfortunately, then there would be professional candidates who just never accept a job.Edit: I’ve had a lot of great replies pointing out that it likely wouldn’t be a big deal anyway. I’m just used to finding fault in anything that sounds good lately.
Wouldn’t limiting the interview pay to be below minimum wage/below the hourly salary of the job alleviate this?
It would, I was just overthinking it.
Daily Mail reader?
No. All news lately tends to focus on the negative (which there is plenty of), not just tabloids. So knee jerk reactions like mine are easy to have.
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.
A half dozen applicant tracking systems handle 90% of the jobs that require interviews.
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.
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.
Is this c/unpopularopinion?
That would disincentivize HR from shortlisting candidates though.
