I have a theory of why most of these changes in the job hunt came about: people became afraid of firing. I further theorize that this is an indirect consequence of primarily technical folks filling management roles.
How does a fear of firing impact hiring procedures? If you are afraid of firing, you're afraid that you won't be able to get rid of a toxic individual; that a single individual will act as a poison to the morale of your entire workforce. Thus, you want to make damned sure you don't make a bad hire in the first place - even when it means you leave a position open for a really long time.
This fear of firing has gotten so bad that FAANG-alike companies directly espouse how bad the impact of a bad hire is, how they would rather give up on 99 good candidates than hire one bad candidate.
But that's bullshit.
That's letting the fear of interpersonal interactions drive business decisions. The impact a bad hire can have on a work force is pretty minimal when caught and addressed quickly; it can even provide an overall boost to morale to know that the company is willing to address real problems in an adult way. Even a perfect initial hire can turn toxic after a few years: what will you do then, if not fire them?
Do you have 10 positions and 10 potential candidates? Hire all 10 folks, and fire the one bad person; your company will be better off for the decision. Much better off than it would be if you instead overwork your existing team because you haven't found your unicorn hires yet.
I agree that it's related to firing, but I don't think it's fear of interpersonal drama.
The simple explanation is that it's really expensive to fire someone without cause. It takes months because the company has to produce a paper trail proving they fired the person for a valid reason to protect themselves from litigation. That's months of paying an individual who may be incompetent or toxic, months of paying people who put together the paper trail, all the morale damage the individual causes, the damage that might arise from firing someone, even if it's someone no one really liked.
All of those things are costly, probably much more costly than not hiring the right candidate. At least so the reasoning goes.
As much as I hate it as an employee, "at will" employment means that cost simply does not exist for 48 of the 50 US states (including all states where FAANG have employees).
The cost is also not that high in non-at-will states, since there's typically a 3-6 month "evaluation" period where no paper trail is required.
Not entirely true. Just because you're in an "at will" state doesn't mean that someone can't allege that they've been fired for belonging to a protected class. That's why companies have HR departments, PIPs, and all that other nonsense -- to protect the company when someone tries to turn a justifiable firing into a payday.
The courts are really not that friendly to the protected class in cases like that.
There’s a lot of political bodies focused on playing up the idea that women and minorities are this big bad wolf suing legitimate businesses left and right over nothing, and winning. But it’s a largely fabricated narrative created by people trying to turn the leftist identitity politics arguments into a quagmire by “both sides!”ing the situation.
In reality there’s a substantial burden of proof for someone to win a wrongful termination suit.
> Do you have 10 positions and 10 potential candidates? Hire all 10 folks, and fire the one bad person; your company will be better off for the decision. Much better off than it would be if you instead overwork your existing team because you haven't found your unicorn hires yet.
Even if you hire two do-nothings and a negative-performing person (consumes half an FTE's day in questions), you still end up with 6.5 productive people. And frankly, a 65% productive workforce is pretty damn good. I've seen lots of companies where <65% of people are productive.
Plus, some of the do-nothing people can be alright with some direction. Sometimes people don't get anything done because they just don't know what to do. I've been on so many teams where the manager said, "we need a person to do X" and they end up with some random person that doesn't really know how to do X. The solution that I've found is to find something they can do and have them work on that. Most projects have no shortage of work that's more time-consuming than difficult.
For negative performing people, I usually give them something kind of busy-work that doesn't involve the rest of the team. They might not be getting anything done, but they also (mostly) aren't weighing down the team by asking them questions all the time.
Untie a person's ability to survive from their employment status. If we had universal healthcare and basic income then the necessity of most of the employment laws would cease to exist.
Don't know why you're getting downvoted. Much of the language I get from bigco people about why they are so selective is exactly this; it's almost a confession that once in, they are very bad at managing performance.
The downvotes are probably because I've implicitly called out individuals who believe in - have perhaps even published materials encouraging - the "missing out on 99 good hires is better than making one bad hire" philosophy.
I've also explicitly called out the FAANG hiring practices, which are frequently held up as the best practices in the industry by those doing the hiring. After all, who wants to be even partially responsible for hiring "that guy" when you can not or will not fire them later?
But, here's my point: I've been part of the process that hired "that guy". I was also consulted on the decision to fire "that guy" a month later. I was wholly on board with the action in both cases; and in the process we got two other great employees that we never would have hired if we were afraid of taking chances.
Thanks for the details. I too have been part of that committee. I've also given the green light on people I could barely understand in free-flowing conversation due to language gaps based on the assurances of lower-level people that they are good and can get better. Like you, "I regret nothing". :-)
To me it paints a terrible picture. My suspicion is that the dangerous bad hires are not the utterly incompetent people who will flail in place until removed. The dangerous ones are going to energetically do all sorts of peripheral, irrelevant work, try to insinuate themselves into a lot of 'process' type setups, and move around the company in a way that stops anyone from ever noticing that they can't actually do anything. I suspect a lot of BigCos have very weak immune systems against such mobile 'attacks'.
It's in no way a fear of firing someone that's little easy. The fear is the weeks/months of issues before someone is fired. Further, many people that are part of the process will be working with this person, but not be able to fire them.
> Is there also a fear of three people doing the work of four for weeks/months since there's the possibility someone could be a bad hire?
Apparently not at my employer. My team was 10 people 4 years ago, and we're down to 6 now, without much dip in workload. We had someone leave about a month ago, and we're still fighting to get a job rec to replace that person.
Dont forget that in many European countries it is not easy to fire people.
That is why the 6 months probation period takes place.
However the amount of bad hires I have seen is immense.
There are so many people coming into the industry because its hip or because its easy money with knowledge from an online course that I could not hire them.
They miss basics of OO programming etc. And then what? you take him in, which has costs time, money, hardware to let him go within a month?
On the other side I think you can weed these out quite fast with 1 personal interview.
Looking back, often no talent has been better than poor talent (or those that actually decrease group productivity). Huge opportunity cost with bad hires, and even more challenging to move them out to somewhere that they would be happier/more effective/less disruptive.
Supposedly risk should be probability times cost. But I think that people have a remarkably difficult time processing a risk that's based on a very high cost and very low probability. (The limiting case of an infinite cost and infinitesimal probability is how I describe Pascal's Wager).
In those circumstances, it's easy to imagine the mental math: Firing someone could cost many times their salary, but a screening service costs 50 bucks per candidate. So the chance of weeding out one bad candidate pays for the service, right? Where's the fallacy?
I think the fallacy is that the service doesn't actually improve the hiring process, and the ROI is zero.
I have a theory of why most of these changes in the job hunt came about: people became afraid of firing.
That in itself isn't unreasonable. While much of the US has at-will employment, most of the rest of the world does not, and hiring the wrong person can be extremely expensive.
However, I suspect with current hiring trends we should not attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by incompetence.
Firing a person on a work visa is a seriously dick move, especially if they are from china or India, where the waiting lines for a green card is 3-10+ years.
If they're literally incompetent or toxic (i.e. "bad"), it's obviously better to find that out during the interview process and not hire them in the first place. The 10 "potential candidates" don't include anyone that the interview process detected as bad.
Interviews are imperfect, and damaging candidates will slip through the cracks. Are you seriously suggesting that a business should decide not to fire someone based on their immigration status, rather than their performance and integration with the team?
How does a fear of firing impact hiring procedures? If you are afraid of firing, you're afraid that you won't be able to get rid of a toxic individual; that a single individual will act as a poison to the morale of your entire workforce. Thus, you want to make damned sure you don't make a bad hire in the first place - even when it means you leave a position open for a really long time.
This fear of firing has gotten so bad that FAANG-alike companies directly espouse how bad the impact of a bad hire is, how they would rather give up on 99 good candidates than hire one bad candidate.
But that's bullshit.
That's letting the fear of interpersonal interactions drive business decisions. The impact a bad hire can have on a work force is pretty minimal when caught and addressed quickly; it can even provide an overall boost to morale to know that the company is willing to address real problems in an adult way. Even a perfect initial hire can turn toxic after a few years: what will you do then, if not fire them?
Do you have 10 positions and 10 potential candidates? Hire all 10 folks, and fire the one bad person; your company will be better off for the decision. Much better off than it would be if you instead overwork your existing team because you haven't found your unicorn hires yet.