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
Had an interview at a company. They asked me to do a coding challenge. Solve it without AI. The task was written in AI and requirements all over the place. Took me 6hrs+. I sent it and they wanted to see me in person. Took half a day off to make to the interview. Meeting went well. They call me and tell me my assignment was not what they expected.
There should be a hefty fine for this behavoiur.
What did they mean by not what they expected? Like they didn’t expect you to solve it, or didn’t expect the AI to give you an assignment?
They mean they are lying to the applicant’s face, gaslighting them.
What they did was the equivalent of contracting out a coder to engineer some software for them, without paying them for it.
The job market itself is a fraud, a scam.
Saying ‘its not what we expected’ is simply what they are legally required to do in order to be able to frame the entire thing such that they can’t be sued for getting useful labor while giving no compensation.
Its a framing device, frame it as a job interview. Its ‘oh your test performance was not satisfactory’, written on some kind of document somewhere. The actual point is to get free software engineering services.
Its a scam.
Think about if you tried to do this with physical, mechanical engineering or architecture: here, draw up some plans for this device or this part of a building… oh, we’re sorry, that’s not satisfactory… but anything you submitted during the job interview, thats the intellectual property of the company now.
You can also scam the job market itself by simply coordinating with a market research firm, have a set of companies issue an array of ‘job openings’ that are not real job openings, what they actually are is a way to do a survey of the job market itself.
Its all a complete fucking joke at this point.
Also, a metric companies report on, and then those reports get amalgamated into broad economic data… is just literally ‘how many job openings did we post’.
So, if you wanna look like you are a growing company, for extremely little cost… just post fake job openings, that you’ll never hire for.
Have 1/3 or so of all job openings by all companies look like this, idiot ‘economists’ who can’t figure out what is actually going on, look at the aggregate numbers and conclude the economy is growing 1/3 faster than it is.
And there’s also the classic ‘we want to do an internal promotion, but for legal reasons we need to pretend its a competetive search through the whole job market, so here’s a bunch of fake job openings where everyone other than our internal person will be unsatisfactory’.
Recruiters and HR know all this shit, they do it regularly, and they’re usually not very keen to tell you about it.
They’re all scum, as low and contemptible as a scammy car loan/lease salesman, or a ‘date the rate marry the home’ used house salesman.
Kinda reminds me of a course that I took from Google, regarding IT. To earn my certification, I had to complete assorted challenges…but the assignments had broken links, or not compatible with my browser (Firefox). Sure, I am supposedly certified, but I was doing weird workarounds to earn it, which sometimes allowed me to skip parts of the online testing.
It is stupid, and I refuse to believe that I am actually qualified to be “Google IT Support”.
I would say that solving the problem in the way you did makes you well or over qualified, lol.
‘Wait, all of this is stupid!’
That guy/gal. You want them, that one, the one with the capacity to think outside of the box, within the specific technical realm of the job.
But, we live in a world run by MBA’s with extremely fragile egos, so, we get insane nonsense instead, where every business process is basically built around making incompetent idiots feel smart.
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?
It should be outlawed to have more than two interview round. Just fuck off with that dehumanizing ratrace bullshit
I know someone that had a 3 tier interview for a balloon handler. They made arches and stuff for parties. This was a part time position. Didn’t get the job either…
I’d just tell them to go fuck themselves at that point
Economy is rough these days so employers are getting away with it
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.
There’s no way that would be a viable career.
- You’d have to reliably get interviews, which is hard enough as it is.
- It’s a lot of work to do sustainably—more work than many jobs imo.
- You get none of the other benefits of accepting the job.
- Eventually you would run out of companies for which you were qualified, and you’d probably stop getting interviews.
Your argument sounds similar to anti-welfare arguments. Sure, some people may abuse the system, but it wouldn’t pay that well, and the positives to society would greatly outweigh any abuse.
Exactly, for every one person who abuses the rule to get 10 hours of labor paid to them in exchange for doing no work, you’ll have 999 people that are actually using the system as intended.
Are you really the kind of person that’ll fuck over 999 people just to make sure that one person doesn’t get ahead in a sneaky way?
Not to mention, some companies right now are abusing interview candidates to get free work with “trial project” type assignments, or “How would you fix this problem, if you were hired?” type of free consultations. If some candidates abused the companies in return, I’d call that fair play.
But think of the shareholders. Who’s helping them out?
Are you really the kind of person that’ll fuck over 999 people just to make sure that one person doesn’t get ahead in a sneaky way?
Are you sure you want to see people’s actual answers to this?
I agree with all of that actually. I’m just used to trying to find the failure mode of anything that sounds good lately.
Yeah if it could be enforced I think it might be viable.
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.
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.
A half dozen applicant tracking systems handle 90% of the jobs that require interviews.
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.
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.
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
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
This sounds viable until you consider what the application process will devolve into.
The initial screening process will become even more annoying which will cause more bot applications and in return it will get even more annoying.
We have a massive government mandate that requires that you apply for a large number of jobs in order to qualify for unemployment benefits.
We have job agencies who are incentivised to place candidates, any candidates, with no penalties for incorrect placement.
We have unpaid internships that normalise free work for hire in the most susceptible population, job entrants.
We have automated processes run by HR to weed out unsuitable applicants before the actual employer sees anything.
We have technically unqualified HR departments demanding qualifications for things that don’t exist without any controls by the actual employer.
This idea won’t address any of this, and I think it will make things worse.
E: spelling
Easy solution. The company is allowed 1 free 30 minute phone call to both verify basic resume details and to schedule a lengthy interview.
Takes care of the bot issue, and a 30 minute phone call is less of a burden on the applicant
Thank you, this is the kind of scrutiny I was hoping for
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.
OK, but who does it cost more? The person being interviewed is also burning opportunity and time but we assume it’s free because no one is paying them?
Sounds like it wastes both sides’ time and money, but measuring up to determine who is wasting the most time and money doesn’t really help anything other than furthering Whataboutisms.
Ideally, we change to a system that doesn’t do that (nearly as much).
It makes me wonder why companies chose to waste to many people’s time then if it costs them money too. Perhaps that cost hurts them less than the interviewees?
The world of business is FILLED with people more interested in their own leisure than the company’s benefit at every level. Everyone knows about the slackers making minimum wage but every time you hear a company has hired a contractor, that’s a manager looking at the choice between A) putting in the time and effort to hire an employee, train them, integrate them into the team, and manage and support them as they do necessary work, or B) just writing a check from company funds to the contracting company and taking off early to get a few beers with their buddies, and wouldn’t you know it, somehow it seems like the answer is always to spend the company’s money.
Dang, hiring feels like the last thing I’d want to outsource. Don’t they literally need to know what the job entails to be able to hire correctly? Maybe I’m overestimating the effectivity of corpos
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.
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a professional interviewee.”
If companies have to pay for every interview, I doubt they’d do as many so you’d have a hard time getting enough interviews to make that viable.
Companies already pay a ton of money to utilize indeed and all those sites. Any cash they’d pay you to interview pales in comparison to what they’re already spending on the unfilled job.
I don’t think it would cause a declining number of interviews. If anything, it might cause interviews to go up, once employers can see the drop in the bucket of spending the interview represents.
True, then there could be a charge to accepted candidates who then reject the job to block the emergence of such an “occupation” as well. But then if one legitimately declines because of the salary, hmm… idk… Maybe to avoid this, the money should go to some governing board…
The sad reality
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.
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.
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 aren’t qualified and they have to pay for every interview, either you are being honest on your application and they aren’t interviewing you or you’re lying and you open yourself up to charges of fraud because you took money under false pretenses.
As someone who’s gotten rejected after multiple technical rounds. Yeah there definitely should be some compensation for anything close to real work. BUT as someone who has both been hiring and looking lately the far bigger issue ATM is application volume. There’s currently no real way to solve the massive bot problem
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.
i used to be an assistant in corporate hr in the mid 1990s… we had locations in several dozen states plus mexico, but all of hr was in the main office. we’d fly candidates in, put 'em up in a hotel, provide transportation to and from airports and interviews, as well as a generous per diem for meals. they ‘made’ more in a day off that (even factoring-in a reasonable meal budget) than i made in a week.
Companies will hire internally
Thats not really a bad thing unless I’m missing something. My experience is that companies would rather never promote existing employees which has lead to people having to job hop to get ahead.
My older family members are so confused and judgemental about me working for 4+ companies in my 7 year career but I’d still be paid as if I was “entry level” if I stuck around at them
The main downside is they often do that so they don’t have to pay as much as they would to attract an external candidate.
I made it from customer service rep to senior admin level IT in my first stop on my career, and I was getting paid 60% less than market average. Good thing I was treating it like an internship.
That’s not a bad result either. But if they have any growth they will need to hire externally
Ok? They do that anyway. Sometimes people leave and they have to hire externally.
How would they get initial people to hire infernally?
