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Comment by ghaff

2 days ago

There's even more overhead on the people being provisionally hired.

Yes, sometimes things just don't work out. But, if someone quits a job and maybe relocates, that's a big personal cost. It's just the way things work in some limited contexts (e.g. professional sports) but it's not and shouldn't be the norm.

I suppose you can give a huge sign-on bonus with no claw-back provision, but that's never going to happen in most cases.

I'm fully convinced the way to make better hires is to invest more, which will be more expensive. Which wouldn't be a problem unless we expected something else. It starts with quitting pretending the current process is working, or even close to optimal.

  • Has hiring ever really worked, anywhere? Especially as roles and need evolve? I guess you could argue that it sort of did, apropos of a play I saw last night on the astronaut program--and maybe the military in many cases more broadly.

    But, in many cases, I'm not sure how I, as a candidate for a tech job, would feel about a company offering me $200K--no strings attached--with the proviso that I statistically only had a 25% chance of making it through the next 6 months. (And is that really long enough anyway?)

    There are tournament-style professions. But I'm not convinced most professional jobs are or should be among them in general.

    • >Has hiring ever really worked, anywhere?

      yes. Best place i worked at - we hired only by internal references and only people from our University. Up until the company grew around 200 people. We didn't do technical interviews, just a short talk. And we were among top employers, including salary-wise.

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    • My first startup did one interview per person and then a trial period, all good.