How to get a job (or not)

[Birdjaguar]

In case you want a job in gaming. Grinding Gear Games is hiring. You'd have to move to NZ, but that might not be so bad.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2769628

 

[caketastydelish]

pros of moving to NZ: closest to the LOTR franchise that you'll ever get IRL

cons: your time zone will probably be different than the vast majority of people you already know and want to continue talking with.

 

[Birdjaguar]

pros of moving to NZ: closest to the LOTR franchise that you'll ever get IRL

cons: your time zone will probably be different than the vast majority of people you already know and want to continue talking with.

Auckland is 20 hours ahead of NM where it is already 1:00 in the afternoon tomorrow.

 

[cardgame]

If anyone in the US needs a temp job I'm pretty sure you can get one in a tax prep office, I think I've landed one there (we'll see). Also the census is coming up in the spring. Competition for that job probably depends highly on your local area.

 

[Old Hippy]

pros of moving to NZ: closest to the LOTR franchise that you'll ever get IRL

cons: your time zone will probably be different than the vast majority of people you already know and want to continue talking with.

time zones are meaningless to gamers

 

[caketastydelish]

That's not necessarily true. Also "the vast majority of people you already know and want to continue talking with" goes well beyond gamers.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Tough Interview Process Is Linked To a Higher Job-Acceptance Rate

BY KATHRYN DILL

Making job interviews more challenging could be a cost-effective way for employers to entice new hires, according to new research from job-review website Glassdoor. Y o u n g workers were more receptive than older workers to tough job interviews, with accepted offers among candidates ages 25 to 34 rising 3.1 percentage points after more difficult screenings.

Glassdoor parsed data from nearly 100,000 job candidates who used its website between January 2018 and November 2019, capturing their careers moves and asking them to rate their interview experiences.

“Research clearly shows the interview has a huge effect on how candidates see you as a company,” said Daniel Zhao, Glassdoor’s senior economist and a co-author of the research.

“Skills and career development are a priority for younger workers, and interviews are an opportunity for them to see if the company they’re applying for will equip them with the experience they want,” he said.

Among candidates for professional and technical jobs, raising the interview difficulty by even one level, as rated by job seekers on a five-point scale, was enough to lift acceptance rates by 2.6 percentage points, Glassdoor data show.

Having candidates complete skills tests as part of the vetting process raised acceptance rates by 2.5 percentage points. In contrast, taking a personality quiz as part of an interview lowered acceptance rates by 2.3 percentage points.

While many employers believe higher salaries and richer benefits are the chief way to entice more workers to join their organization, Mr. Zhao said tougher and more transparent interviews now appear to be a cost-effective route. Job seekers, especially younger ones, want the chance to perform and be assessed “for the unique skills they bring to the table,” he said.

Hiring in the current labor market is particularly fraught, because the U.S. unemployment rate is near a 50-year low.

That means companies have to lure most new employees from jobs they already hold. Around the

U.S. and across all industries, 17.3% of job offers extended to potential candidates were rejected, Glassdoor data show; the average rejection rate was higher among professional and technical jobs, at 19.4%.

Certain jobs have particularly high rejection rates. For instance, 22.6% of insurance job offers are turned down, while Java developers pass on 31.7% of offers.

Entry-level roles in marketing have among the highest rejection rates, with 41.1% of offers for marketing assistant jobs declined.

At the other end of the spectrum, jobs in food services, travel and tourism, arts and entertainment, and retail, had much lower rejection rates, ranging from 10.6% to 13.1%.

Server and machine operator roles had the lowest rejection rates, at 4.1% and 4%, respectively.

 

[Truthy]

That seems pretty confounded because high-paying companies tend to be more desirable employers and have a tougher interview processes. Though I do think the difficulty of the interviews themselves can improve a candidate’s interest in the position and company.

Of course, if the interview seems unfair or over the top, it’ll turn off candidates who see the interview as reflecting poorly on the company.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Of course, if the interview seems unfair or over the top, it’ll turn off candidates who see the interview as reflecting poorly on the company.

I whined here about an interview that I tanked in the past and how it made me strongly adverse to working there. I've had lots of challenging interviews - one recent one gave me 2 days to write a notional rocket engine development program and also solve a bunch of engine-related problems - but the one I tanked felt unfair. It was basically a pop physics quiz and I was not informed of this beforehand. It was a screening call too (not a follow-on technical interview), which for most companies is not really technical but more of an personal/professional background interview. Needless to say, I was completely blindsided as I sat in a parking lot on my 30 minute lunch break, trying to do complex physics calculations without so much as a pen and paper.

I admit culpability - at the end of the day I should have been better prepared than I was. I had gotten complacent with how easily I handled screening interviews in the past and was basically resting on my laurels and got caught out. At the same time, the style of interview gave me insight into the type of candidates they will tend to select - basically the same kind of people that are at SpaceX - and truth be told I do not tend to like the kind of environment that those personalities create in the work place. It's needlessly competitive, combative and suffuse with self-destructive arrogance. In short, the kinds of guys who excel at pop physics quizzes tend to be jerks, so the process de facto screens in favor of jerks even though that's not the intent.

It may sound like post-facto rationalization but I'm a strong believer in candidates using interviews to screen companies as much as the companies are screening them. Obviously you don't always have that luxury and one difficulty I ran into after getting fired is that I had previously turned down a lot of companies and had run myself out of many options.

 

[Truthy]

One company was immensely annoying because they made me install spyware and do a 3-hour-long test proctored by a lady in India. I had to set up a webcam so she could watch me the whole time, I had to prove to her I didn't have any notes or anything stashed away, and I had to ask to go to the bathroom. Plus, some of the questions were vague. Which would have been fine in a normal interview because I could ask for clarification or explain my assumptions to the interviewer. No such luxury in this case. And I didn't pass. But I wouldn't be bitter about it if it hadn't been such a bad experience.

The normal thing to do is have the candidate do a Google hangouts (or similar) interview with an actual employee. You (the candidate) share your screen, work through some problems, and you talk with an actual engineer as you work through the problems.

 

[Synobun]

Extended interview processes sour me to the company when it's entry level. The amount of work doesn't match the importance of the job. I had four interviews with a company over the course of two months before finally getting rejected, all for a bottom-of-the-ladder office job. A colossal waste of time for everyone involved.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

asking them to rate their interview experiences.

So they based this on self-reported data.

 

[Birdjaguar]

So they based this on self-reported data.

Yes.

Glassdoor parsed data from nearly 100,000 job candidates who used its website between January 2018 and November 2019, capturing their careers moves and asking them to rate their interview experiences.

It is based on whether or people accepted or rejected offers from companies based on their interview experiences. Steps: Have an interview; get an offer; accept or reject the offer and ask if the interview affected your decision. Who else is going to know better if the interview affected whether or not you accepted or rejected an offer?

 

[hobbsyoyo]

One company was immensely annoying because they made me install spyware and do a 3-hour-long test proctored by a lady in India. I had to set up a webcam so she could watch me the whole time, I had to prove to her I didn't have any notes or anything stashed away, and I had to ask to go to the bathroom. Plus, some of the questions were vague. Which would have been fine in a normal interview because I could ask for clarification or explain my assumptions to the interviewer. No such luxury in this case. And I didn't pass. But I wouldn't be bitter about it if it hadn't been such a bad experience.

The normal thing to do is have the candidate do a Google hangouts (or similar) interview with an actual employee. You (the candidate) share your screen, work through some problems, and you talk with an actual engineer as you work through the problems.

I do not think test-format interviews are useful. I do not mean this as a weird flex/humblebrag, but I do not find it that difficult to assess someone's understanding of a technical subject without a formal interrogation. Maybe I'm uniquely imaginative but I don't find it that hard to imagine and then share a technical scenario with a candidate and through that conversation assess their understanding. Making it into a formal test is a bit lazy tbh. Turning it into a conversation also gives you a better understanding of their personality and character as well, something which is impossible to assess fairly in a test situation.

Testing does introduce the illusion of standardization and de-personalizing of the interview process though.

Extended interview processes sour me to the company when it's entry level. The amount of work doesn't match the importance of the job. I had four interviews with a company over the course of two months before finally getting rejected, all for a bottom-of-the-ladder office job. A colossal waste of time for everyone involved.

It's probably only a little time spent on their end while your contribution is totally free to them at that stage. It's disgusting to me how often I get strung along and my time wasted by companies. They say the job market is great but that isn't reflected in the interactions that companies have with candidates for sure. They may feel pressure to pay higher wages but certainly none to show common courtesy.

Edit:
Testing is good for assessing what someone has learned and can repeat on the spot, but I find it absolutely useless when it comes to assess how well someone will work someplace. And I'm not just saying that because I flunked that interview! I have passed many just like it before. That's where I get the intuition of those tests end up screening for a certain type of person - I saw it first hand. Work is as much about problem solving and getting along with other people as it is about raw knowledge and many test formats do not capture those things.

Sure, you can use it as a proxy for problem solving, but it's a false scenario to start with. I can count on my hand the number of times I have had to figure something out with a time limit in the real world! It is exceedingly rare and just the stress of the interview, then the stress of the test on top, means you are not getting a fair assessment of who they are.

Edit 2: I make an exception for skills-testing. Like a welding or machining test is fine. Programming tests are borderline imo because they can cross the gap between a demonstration of skill and problem solving.

 

[IglooDame]

I do not think test-format interviews are useful. I do not mean this as a weird flex/humblebrag, but I do not find it that difficult to assess someone's understanding of a technical subject without a formal interrogation. Maybe I'm uniquely imaginative but I don't find it that hard to imagine and then share a technical scenario with a candidate and through that conversation assess their understanding. Making it into a formal test is a bit lazy tbh. Turning it into a conversation also gives you a better understanding of their personality and character as well, something which is impossible to assess fairly in a test situation.

100% same here. I conduct roughly 5-20 interviews a year for various levels of network engineers annually, globally. Most of the time, I do a screening phone interview personally, and if they pass that, then they sit (usually virtually) with the majority of my network engineering team, and I warn the applicants in advance: most of the questions are technical ones.

And yes, I/we can tell if someone is websearching answers to technical questions without webcamming them, at least based on the results of doing interviews this way over the past several years. Sure a team technical interview is stressful, but then again dealing with an outage in the middle of the night affecting a million endpoints that include security cameras and home health monitoring is stressful too and I think seeing how candidates respond to pressure is a legitimate part of my interview process.

 

[aelf]

One company was immensely annoying because they made me install spyware and do a 3-hour-long test proctored by a lady in India. I had to set up a webcam so she could watch me the whole time, I had to prove to her I didn't have any notes or anything stashed away, and I had to ask to go to the bathroom. Plus, some of the questions were vague. Which would have been fine in a normal interview because I could ask for clarification or explain my assumptions to the interviewer. No such luxury in this case. And I didn't pass. But I wouldn't be bitter about it if it hadn't been such a bad experience.

I tend to distrust anything done out of India due to past experience and knowledge of their working style. Hence, a company that has HR in India do the recruitment process would raise red flags for me.

 

[Truthy]

I tend to distrust anything done out of India due to past experience and knowledge of their working style. Hence, a company that has HR in India do the recruitment process would raise red flags for me.

Their HR is American, but they use a third party proctoring service for that stage of their interview of process.

 

[aelf]

Ah. That's still not great, though, and is probably why your experience was so bad.

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Who else is going to know better if the interview affected whether or not you accepted or rejected an offer?

Since the assessment is based on subject-dependent evaluations, I'm not sure if their conclusion automatically follows. Tough interviews could be caused by a number of things: high competition, interviewers out of touch with workers in their field, etc. The advice to "make interviews harder" is a suffocating overgeneralization that doesn't say much.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I think the authors might be drawing too many conclusions from the data; ie. mixing causation/correlation. Maybe tough interviews are just correlated with high desire for the jobs for reasons unrelated to the tough interviews. I have had very challenging interviews that absolutely made me interested in the job, but the challenging part wasn't a key feature of that desire. It's just that in the course of the challenging interview, I came to really understand what I would be doing and it happened to be exactly what I wanted.

If the interviewer hadn't been tough, we would've skipped over the nitty-gritty details that get into your daily work routine. I value information on work routine and when I just straight ask about it, I usually don't get good answers for various reasons. But I can still learn about it indirectly by how they frame the interview. A tough interview can be more thorough, so I learn more about the company and may like them more because of it.