patrick.net

Two sides can play this game. May I suggest making generic business cards with only your name, phone number and email address.

When making a favorable impression with people and businesses you care about, hand them out to create interest in contacting you for more information.

HR recruiting for technical positions - a total disaster. They evaluate smiles, dress and grooming, but would pass over Einstein himself.

Once I arranged an interview with HR by going over their head, to a senior manager. He arranged for my telephone interview, it was scheduled, but the HR bozo bailed on the call. What can you do? Complain? Either way you are fooked.

What are trick questions? I think brain teasers and problem-solving type questions are useful.

Just ask the candidate to inform you if he/she heard of that before.

You can usually tell if she is coming up with an answer? Or if she is merely recalling the answer.

Body language is everything. Look into her eyes.

Sometimes, the purpose of asking a question is to find out more about the thinking process of the candidate. Is she over-complicating things? Or worse, is she trying too hard? The answer is usually unimportant.

Blurtman says

They evaluate smiles, dress and grooming, but would pass over Einstein himself.

Einstein might or might not be a great employee. A company does not hire to reward talent, it hires to fulfill a function.

That said, remember that in reality a natural person makes the hiring decision. You are hired if you consciously or subconsciously align with her will to power.

It pays to reverse-engineer the psychology of your interviewer.

In the end, you want the hiring manger to find reasons to accept you. The same set of facts framed differently in the mind of a "decider" will have very different results.

For companies like Google, it really depends who will interview you.

Sometimes, they ask really easy questions. Sometimes, the interviewers may be out to get you. It is like the roll of a dice.

One tip: PROJECTION

Always project a confident but agreeable persona. First, you will not perform if you put pressure on yourself. Second, your hiring manager wants a competent person who will not turn into a threat.

Peter P says

What are trick questions? I think brain teasers and problem-solving type questions are useful.

Just ask the candidate to inform you if he/she heard of that before.

You can usually tell if she is coming up with an answer? Or if she is merely recalling the answer.

Body language is everything. Look into her eyes.

I assure you I have in years past brilliantly acted the part of seeming to think about a brain-teaser question and then of coming up with the answer after waiting just long enough to make it believable, yet still quickly enough to look smart. Several times. You wouldn't have caught me.

I feel no guilt, because brain teasers are utterly irrelvant to actual work in a real job.

I assure you I have in years past brilliantly acted the part of seeming to think about a brain-teaser question and then of coming up with the answer after waiting just long enough to make it believable, yet still quickly enough to look smart. Several times. You wouldn't have caught me.

THAT is problem-solving on a higher level, isn't it? ;-)

Patrick,

Going through a job search myself I understand your frustration; however I also recognize the reality of the job market. There are HUNDREDS of applicants for most jobs. Applicants are screened arbitrarily - its a numbers game. The hoops that HR sets up is simply a way to eliminate 99% of the applicants to a manageable number. They do not care about your (or my) feelings. They don't care about being perceived as rude and why should they? The only accountability HR has is to their company and being sure the WRONG person is not hired. If the position goes unfilled so be it - that gives weight to the "critical shortage of STEM employees" myth.

underwaterman says

Linkedin and using your connections there get you thru to a hiring manager and bypassing HR on the first round much faster than going thru recruiters in my experience.

Yes, that's the best solution for individuals IMHO. You have to bypass HR and make personal email contact with the hiring manager. If you can do that and the hiring manager thinks you're a good fit for the job, lots of these other problems go away.

I also ran into the weird issue of now being older than most of the people interviewing me, but there are advantages too, in that the hiring manager is usually my age.

New Renter says

The hoops that HR sets up is simply a way to eliminate 99% of the applicants to a manageable number. They do not care about your (or my) feelings. They don't care about being perceived as rude and why should they? The only accountability HR has is to their company and being sure the WRONG person is not hired.

That seems like short-term thinking to me. HR people should care about being perceived as rude if they want good applicants in the future. Or even business relationships in the future. Just look on LinkedIn if you want to see how closely interconnected everything really is. It never pays to be rude.

I'm in advertising, a career with an extremely high churn rate. Accounts come and go and jobs along with them, so you're virtually always in the job market. I've never been unemployed for more than a few weeks, because I learned early on how to interview.

You go in and interview them. And no, I don't mean go in and act like an arrogant git. You ask questions and get THEM talking about what THEY want. It's easy. You simply ask questions like "What are you hoping your new hire will really do for your company?"

And let them do the talking. Oh - and LISTEN to the answers. Then you tell them how you can meet their needs, WITHOUT making them listen to you babble on. Be concise. They'll enjoy the interview and think you have world class communication skills.

Come to think of it it's no different from any other human interaction. Everybody wants to be heard. Learn how to listen.

HR people should care about being perceived as rude if they want good applicants in the future.

HR people are people. They care about themselves. They just need hire people that make them look good long enough.

In many large companies, being able to detect who is sleeping with who is more important than actually doing work.

who are we !@#$ing kidding here?

our economy HAS GONE TO SHIT.

the businesses can't hire anyone because the taxes are so !@#$ing high.

underwaterman says

Just to expand on the age discrimination. I interviewed at VMware and Netapp a few of years ago. I've also been in google's cafeteria and visited friends on apples campus. Have you noticed the age of the people and distribution? There seems to be a definite age bias going on for the young in these tech companies. You can read about it on glassdoor.com also.

they just want 'tech people' to learn THEIR technology. The don't want well rounded people. The industry simply does not respect knowledge at all. They dont want expertise they just want one answer: YES.

APOCALYPSEFUCK is Shostakovich says

The easiest way to the HR ladies' hearts is to demonstrate how you can pick up half-dollars with your dick without bending at the knees.

Or fetch that binder 2 cubicles away they need so desperately with it.

That seems like short-term thinking to me. HR people should care about being perceived as rude if they want good applicants in the future. Or even business relationships in the future. Just look on LinkedIn if you want to see how closely interconnected everything really is. It never pays to be rude.

Again hundred of applicants per job with no reason to believe the future holds anything different.

MershedPerturders says

who are we !@#$ing kidding here?

our economy HAS GONE TO SHIT.

the businesses can't hire anyone because the taxes are so !@#$ing high.

No, they WON'T hire people unless there is a need. In some cases the "need" is to perpetuate the illusion of growth, or to perpetuate the illusion of an employee shortage to influence immigration policy. Hell maybe rejecting qualified applicants is a way to grind down the unemployed to accept a lower wage.

I many cases there is NO need to hire anyone, a contractor will do.

there's no need for ANY OF THIS SHIT AT ALL.

American living standards are about giving half-dead boomers a sense of personal accomplishment at the expense of just about everything else.

MershedPerturders says

there's no need for ANY OF THIS SHIT AT ALL.

American living standards are about giving half-dead boomers a sense of personal accomplishment at the expense of just about everything else.

Thanks for telling it like it is. But you will be soon labelled as someone who wants old people to die in the streets.

MershedPerturders says

the businesses can't hire anyone because the taxes are so !@#$ing high.

It's not our taxes. It's our health care costs, which are by far the highest in the world.

And health care costs are high because our campaign finance system is broken. For example, in California the insurers successfully blocked an attempt to give the state insurance commissioner the power to say no to excessive premium hikes.

The insurers did it by bribing state legislators with campaign "donations". I confirmed this in a chat with my state rep.

Nothing will get fixed until corporations are barred from bribing politicians.

underwaterman says

I don't know if you've worked recently in high tech but they started taking
away offices about 7 years ago and have continued to save on the real estate
cost per employee by stuffing them like mice into an even smaller box. HP did
started at the Cupertino site in 2007 and Cisco just finished their real estate
compression and now sit at open tables like you see at these startups all the
time. Someone got the great idea awhile ago that they could save real estate
cost and get rid of cubicles altogether. People I know at Cisco and HP hate the
open space concept and hate working in it.

Haha-I am amused by this new trend. My old compnay that I worked for , before being offshored has adopted this trend too. They are not an IT company-just a company that uses IT to run the business. But some doofus consultant sold them this "trend" and now they removed all cubicles and it is first come first serve. You rush in and grab the first seat available and even the managers don't have offices!!

Soon they will all treat us like school kids.

* Say exactly where the job is within the job listing itself. It is amazing but true that job listings frequently don't even say what city the job is in. Even "San Francisco" is not specific enough. Give an address.

Around here some only give a state name, if even that,

Where I work HR requires a job application; we don't have a choice. We do our own hiring though, and just have any successful candidates fill the application out along with the rest of the HR paperwork. So far we've been able to get away with it...

Ironically, as I was reading this a recruiter got back to me.. with a 20 question test. Gahhhh...

CMY says

Ironically, as I was reading this a recruiter got back to me.. with a 20 question test. Gahhhh...

You're applying at Initech?

This is exactly why companies are floundering. HR folks, because they have no depth of knowledge about the company's technology, nor what it takes to keep it successful, can only evaluate form over substance. Having these folks in charge of screening candidates is a nightmare scenario, like having a blind person defuse a bomb.

mell says

You're applying at Initech?

Judging from some of the reviews I've seen on Glassdoor.com, it might as well be.

I'm uniquely qualified for this position, so I figured it was worth a shot. We'll see.

* Do not skimp on lunch during the interview. If the applicant is going to be there at lunchtime, make sure it's high-quality. Applicants know that the company probably is not going to treat them any better as an employee later, so a dismal or non-existent lunch will be perceived as a bad sign.

Ah, yes...years ago I worked for a company that provided free food in the break-room (frozen entrees, drinks, snacks, etc.), and was slightly horrified when I saw a hiring manager was "treating" an applicant to a frozen microwavable lunch. I never did see that applicant again...

Might as well do this in real time- that test was a joke.

Not because it was easy, but because it was likely written by the Dev team (but used for a Project Management position).

I also checked some similar positions at this company and they mentioned all of the terms/requirements that weren't in the ad I responded to. I basically sent them a follow-up letter stating as much, and thanking them for the opportunity. I'm not going to twist myself into knots if they can't get their recruitment process together.

bdrasin says

Where I work HR requires a job application; we don't have a choice. We do our own hiring though, and just have any successful candidates fill the application out along with the rest of the HR paperwork. So far we've been able to get away with it...

Making the candidate copy info from his resume to some application is an insult illustrating just how little the company cares about the candidate's time.

It is never legally necessary. If you need data entry, hire data entry clerks. Maybe it's not HR's choice, but HR could point out to the executives that the application process is pissing people off. Every day. All day long.

Making the candidate copy info from his resume to some application is an insult illustrating just how little the company cares about the candidate's time.

Since it's my field, I created a four-page website that is an easy-to-digest summary of where I've been and what my focus is. I have a conventional resume (page) but I agree it's maddening to go through that time and time again.

I don't understand how anyone with an open creative position doesn't allow for some coloring outside the lines.

HR = Hardly Relevant.

Interviews at my Tutti Frutti take five minutes. If you've got a sense of humor and a strong profile, we're good.

Here's a good one. I interviewed at a place where the VP was reading his phone during the interview. He gave me an N-Queens / chessboard question I was completely unprepared for, regarding optimal moves that a knight can take...something like that.

I don't play chess, so that was strike 1 and 2. I struggled along, mentioned something about Prim and Dijkstra's algorithms and scribbled something out. When I could get him to look up from his iPhone he nodded, and started sketching out his own solution. It was obvious he also had no idea how to solve the question he'd asked.

At the end, after he put down the chalk, he said --I'll never forget this-- that his solution was big-Oh of either nlogn or n-squared, which is like a weatherman claiming it's going to be sunny or a 120 mph hurricane the next day. This is what CS interviewing is like all too often these days.