Comment by jonas21
4 days ago
Every time I've hired someone at a big company, it's taken multiple months to get candidates through the pipeline, and it was not uncommon to have to go back to the candidate pool when someone would accept an offer and change their mind before starting. 90 days to fill a role would be considered relatively quick.
What an absolutely insane way to do business. Everybody is out here trying to squeeze every last drop of efficiency out of software teams to the point of shipping garbage. Meanwhile managers, executives, and hr are operating under the belief that taking literal months to move "candidates through the pipeline" is eminently reasonable.
> eminently reasonable
Companies feel like they have no choice, for two reasons:
1. Jurisdictions where workers must give minimum notice periods before leaving their prior employer - the worker accepts a competing offer, gives notice, waits out the notice period, then starts. And many workers often ask for additional unpaid time between jobs before starting (since no vacation days have been accrued yet at the new job).
2. Hiring happens by committee. In most companies, job candidates must be interviewed by, at the absolute minimum, an HR screener, the hiring manager, and the hiring skip-level; and usually also by people who will be peer teammates, plus an HR "culture" interview. If you need to pass a committee of 3-6 people, interviews must be scheduled with each member of the committee; at one committee member per week, that is 3-6 weeks.
6 weeks (1.5 months) plus background checks plus getting pay packages approved plus 30 day notice periods plus two weeks unpaid vacation is, yes, a multiple month endeavor at minimum to fill a role. The only way to fill a role within a week is to grant full hiring autonomy to the hiring manager and only hire people who are currently unemployed (and therefore have no notice period or desire to take more unpaid time before starting), which in most companies beyond early startup size, is a complete non-starter.
Immigration red tape and education verification can add even more time on top of all that.
We are at the moment hiring for a L3 (no fresh graduate but someone with 3-5 years of experience). The role has been open for two months now (it was a backfill). I personally am in charge of the technical screen which is the second interview after the hiring manager. I am already getting a filtered set of candidates after the recruiter and the hiring manager review candidates. Of the 5 that have come my way, I’ve said yes to 1 person and 1 as a yes, pending another technical screen. We are not even wanting an exact match, nor are we expecting cure for cancer. Yes there are a lot of people looking for jobs but you don’t realize how many candidates are just not what their resumes portray. It takes forever to get someone competent in the pipeline and even then, you know nothing about their work ethic. The reason the pipeline is slow is because the candidate pool is flooded with over the top resumes that are not backed by actual talent and once you hire a wrong candidate it is extremely difficult to fire them, even with at will employment contracts.
Any manager will tell you, they’d rather not go through the long hiring process.
> once you hire a wrong candidate it is extremely difficult to fire them, even with at will employment contracts
I live in a country where the probational period is 6 months (Germany), so the law says people can get fired without cause or justification, just give them 2 weeks notice or 2 weeks garden leave.
Even with that, it's a very arduous process to fire people. Even in cases where they repeatedly refused to show up for work, I've seen HR departments asking managers to "try harder". This only makes both the employee and the manager suffer.
The reason for that is simple: HR departments are extremely inefficient machines.
From what I've heard from other fields it seems as though this is somewhat unique to the tech industry. I share your belief that it's ridiculous. Companies somehow got along fine pre-FAANG with a few interview rounds before Google and Amazon convinced everyone that you need to have five rounds, a panel, a take home assessment, and a slate of brain teasers to pick out the true worthy 10x engineer.
Grow some balls, do a couple interviews, and just pick the candidate you like the most. You're hiring for a glorified IT guy, not a NASA astronaut. Companies that stretch out the process to a ridiculous degree need to get over themselves.
EDIT: and to be clear, yes, I've been on both sides of the hiring table
> From what I've heard from other fields it seems as though this is somewhat unique to the tech industry.
At least in (Northen) Europe ghost jobs are a pain on the ass in most industries, even for low-skilled labour. Hiring companies - not the actual companies that need a worker, but an intermediate - try to just amass a database of workers so they can say to their client that we have hundreds of people with these qualifications ready to come to work for you. It’s not even legal, but they still do it.
I think a lot of these problems are created by the companies themselves, and to lesser degree by candidates. Posting ghost jobs, asking for insane qualifications to run a simple website, interview process lasting 3 months… And candidates firehosing the job ads with bs CV’s generated by LLMs does not help. Currently I think you need to know somebody inside the company pretty well to get hired.
The fix would be pretty simple: > Grow some balls, do a couple interviews, and just pick the candidate you like the most.
I did that with one of the faangs. Congrats you passed hiring committee! Oops no open roles!
2 months later recruiter from the same company hit me up. Told them I already passed the interview just give me the job already. Oops no roles, you just have to wait! So why are you reaching out? Couldn’t give me an answer.
True. But if your job is HR taking a long time to hire people and maintaining a high level of turnover is probably good for your job security. I don't think it is overt, but I have noticed that large orgs have a lot of HR process, small companies just try hard to maintain staff.
A lot of it has to do with how long it takes to find the right candidate. As someone who has been involved in a lot of hiring over the last 20 years, I can say there's been a huge shift within the last couple of years and open reqs get 10-25x the number of applicants, which instead of increasing choice in a positive way has just resulted in the average applicant quality decreasing. That means recruiters and hiring managers spend a LOT more time vetting and also invest in parallel candidates to try to hedge, because so many candidates applying are legitimately unqualified.
It may sound like I'm blaming candidates, and sometimes it might be fair to, but this is also a problem caused by companies not investing in training and hiring junior level employees, which means that people who are unqualified feel forced to apply for more senior roles, as those are the only roles hiring. It's honestly shocking how many candidates I've interviewed in my career who don't even meet the basic bar for the role they've applied for, and are essentially just hoping to get lucky and snag a high-paying tech job even if it ultimately results in them being terminated, they can collect a check for 3-9 months without delivering.
Mass applications, AI cheating, fraudulent representation (e.g. saying you are person X but are actually interviewing on behalf of person X who you are not), lying on resumes and in screeners, and even nation state attacks on hiring (see North Korea trying to farm tech jobs for money to get around sanctions), it's not great on the hiring side either.
Hiring the wrong person in corporate roles is very, very, very expensive. New hires are expected to be unproductive right out the gate, and it's hard to measure productivity in general, so you can easily end up in scenarios where it takes months to notice there's an issue and a year or more before you can get the person back out the door. So you really do have to double and triple check that a prospective hire is the right choice.
It can move faster than months, of course, when everyone's willing to prioritize it. But as anyone who's worked in hiring can tell you, the set of people who want hiring to move faster is much larger than the set of people who are willing to accept inconvenient interviews and fill out their feedback promptly.
It's only expensive because we destroyed our abilities to train workers. It really shouldn't matter in 95%+ of roles if someone isn't a perfect fit. If they have the fundamentals, they should be up to productive speed in 6 months at worst. That's 1000 hours of training. For reference, a semester of classwork for a single course is recommended to take 140 hours (we can make it 200 hours for engineering work). A company really can't get someone with the basics up to speed in 5 college courses?
Well, no. Because we abandoned the idea of fostering talent. We instead insist natural talent exists who will swoop in, be productive in our proprietary systems day one, and outdo all the pathetic engineers who spent years at the company. Almost like we're drafting for a sports team instead of training a workforce.
But at least sports teams spend time making teams feel like teams.
Most tech companies have a: - recruiter screen - tech screen - multiple interviews during an "onsite" round
Job is posted. You apply along with hundreds of other people. The recruiter/hiring manager needs to spend some time sifting through them along with juggling all the other tasks they have going on. Let's say that this takes 1-2 weeks. Some places may let the opening sit longer to get more applicants.
Several candidates are identified as possible fits. Recruiter reaches out to them to schedule the recruiter screen. Schedules need to line up. This likely takes 1-2 weeks until the recruiter screen happens.
The recruiter needs to schedule the tech screen after a successful recruiter screen. Again, schedules need to line up. This could take another 1-2 weeks.
Feedback needs to be submitted and then the onsite round is scheduled. This could take another 1-2 weeks.
The onsite round will have multiple interviewers. This means more people to collect feedback from which likely increases delays in getting that. A debrief is normally scheduled with everyone who interviewed them. But let's say one week to gather this and make a decision.
An offer is made. It takes some time to prepare and get sign off. There will be time to discuss with the recruiter to explain the details, plus some time needed for negotiation and thinking it over. This could be another 1-2 weeks.
Additionally, some candidates may want to ask for more time during these phases in order to prepare better or align their schedules. This pushes back the process for all other candidates if the company is hiring for a specific job in order to give all candidates a fair assessment against the pool.
Adding this all up, we arrive at 6-10 weeks.
This absolutely sucks if you don't have networking skills, but this is exactly why it pays of to network. You're basically able to skips 50 - 90% of the recruitment "pipeline" is you know the right people and they want you specifically.
In 2019, when I applied to the company I still work for, I went to the interview, waited chit chatting with the manager because the other interviewing manager was 20min late, and when he came in he asked few questions and said “Ok, I don’t think we need to interview anyone else, when can you start?” They find it funny I had a cat and that I asked for way too little money.
Last place I applied to, one screening and two interviews, took several months, and in the end came second even though I was ready to take 700€ paycut. The job was basic AV&network upkeep, felt like I was applying to become an astronaut.
The person I responded to said that filling a role in 90 days would be "relatively quick" so you've already improved theoretical hiring efficiency by up to 50%.
But it still doesn't sound like a very effective process typed out like this.
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Maybe I'm an old fart, but I've never had a job take over 14 days to get. Stringing people along for 3 months is absolute insanity. This is what happens when people get turned into numbers instead of actual beings with needs and emotions.
Same, in the past it was much faster.
IMO the reason it takes longer now is because multiple people are getting interviewed simultaneously.
Considering job postings are getting 10x more resumes than before, I'm not surprised companies are hedging their bets and interviewing way more people for the same position.
Is that a high paying engineering role at a tech company in the US?
If so, 14 days is unheard of. Tell us more.
3 months? Try 6. 7-9 rounds of interviews over a 6 month period. It's insane.
People need to stop subjecting themselves to that. Eventually companies would get the message.
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You’re not even hearing back from the recruiter for 14 days if the job posting just went up. I mean it takes 1-2 weeks from the day you got told that you’re getting an offer to the day when you sign it.
I am hearing from multiple people in hiring departments at different companies that they are doing 7-9 rounds of interviews for non-coding tech roles.
These companies have lost their minds.
That sounds pretty insane to me.
IME (hiring, not interviewing) it's always been 3-4 rounds. First is an HR phone screen (usually 20-30 minutes on the phone), 2nd with hiring manager, 3rd with a senior engineer/architect, and a 4th with the hiring VP. And those are almost always combined into a single morning or afternoon(2+3 or 3+4) and the final round doesn't always happen (VP's choice).
7-9 rounds just means 7-9 conversations. Just talking to a recruiter and the manager are 2 rounds. So 5-7 interviews that evaluate competency. You usually get the lower end unless you ended up giving mixed signals.
Sounds like asking a lot from candidates but unfortunately candidates lie a lot and the cost of hiring candidates that don’t match up to the requirements when paying $300k-$500k/year is just too high. Firing people is hard and takes a long time, especially in management roles. My personal guidance to managers is to have rounds match the level and experience required for the job. You can hire an intern with 2 rounds after the hiring manager conversation but a staff IC probably needs 5, directors need 7.
I'm talking about 7-9 rounds for non tech companies, and each round is at least an hour plus interview. These roles aren't even hitting the $200k marker.
It's an effect of "once burned twice shy". Every time there was a "bad" hire they had to change things. People add to the list but no one ever wants to advocate for a lighter process since they might be blamed for it.
It's just cruel
Maybe the cruelty is the point? They are looking for people that will put up with bullshit and suffering?
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Remember that the average job candidate is absolutely clueless about how positions are created and filled in real life, so seeing bad assumptions like “most positions are filled in under ninety days” shouldn’t be surprising.