tl; dr; There is more mess in recruiting than you think. I will tell four stories where excellent engineers were denied for reasons completely unrelated to their professional knowledge or compliance with corporate culture.

When people do not get a job offer, they often think that it is their fault: “Three companies rejected me in a row, I’m probably a worthless engineer.” Having worked for some time in IT recruiting, I can assure you that random factors and noise ( false-negative results ) also play an important role. Often failures are really caused by random things and irrational reasons.

Horror # 1: the candidate was rejected because of the framework

I transferred to the frontend developer position at the agency an engineer who participated in the development of ECMAScript and made a significant contribution to several other open source projects. It took me several weeks to find this person, and several hours to properly assess him, including a video interview (we love to do this on coderfit.com ). His candidacy was rejected by a programmer from the agency after a 10-minute review of code examples . They didn’t even communicate with him personally, but simply sent “canned goods” - a sample letter by e-mail:
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“[...] Although your resume and cover letter are very competitive, our recruiters reviewed your application and did not select it for further consideration. [...] "

This is a really bad answer, because no cover letters have been submitted. After reading this, I dropped everything, went to their office and talked to the programmer, who rejected the candidacy of the best front-end developer that I came across in 2017 .

At first, the programmer could not clearly explain the reason for the refusal, he simply said that “the code is over complicated” , although in fact it was perfectly structured, with all the ES6 operators and short functions in their places. After a ten-minute discussion of this topic, the reason for the refusal became clearer: the candidate used the MVC framework, unknown to the reviewer. I was so impressed with the use of this framework during my interview with the candidate that I could not understand how this could be a problem.

Some information why we used an unknown MVC framework. This agency, which was looking for a front-end developer, was an agency that performed repetitive tasks for each client. The lead programmer (not the one that considered the candidate) complained to me that "every time they have to reinvent the wheel." The candidate I proposed developed a new framework in my spare time that solved some of the agency’s problems.

Since the interviewer did not read my notes and did not watch the video interview recording, he was not aware of why the candidate used this framework, and simply clicked “Deny” in ATS . [Applicant Management System, Applicant Tracking System - approx. trans.]. But at that moment the lead programmer (who was in favor of this candidate) was on vacation and could not intervene.

Tip : Usually asking for the opinion of other people before assessing a candidate is a bad idea, but in some cases it makes sense if it gives an additional context .

This story is especially sad because the executive director paid me a fee so that I could find the “best people.” So I was especially hard at work for this task, but I didn’t receive any support from the staff and hiring engineers to truly evaluate the candidates I sent. That programmer, who rejected the candidacy of my candidate, even told me: “Recruiting for us is the lowest priority” . If you get a fee as a recruiter, then you make more effort, but all this costs almost nothing if there is no support from the entire team for which you are looking for employees.

Worse, the candidate no longer wanted to interview any Swiss employer when he was treated in this way (“conserved” by HR, no feedback, waiting for two weeks until his code is reviewed).

Scary # 2: Google’s ex-developer almost ALREADY rejected because he didn’t remember bye Bayes theorem

One startup was looking for a Python developer and scheduled an interview with a programmer who had been working for Google for four years in Zurich. It was not easy to present this guy to startups: they thought that he would request a sum in the amount of compensation from Google Zurich (more than 200 thousand francs - twice as much as the average annual salary of a programmer).

However, he turned out to be prudent in his demands and just wanted to find a harmonious team with interesting technical tasks. So he got the highest score in every interview and made a powerful impression on almost everyone he talked to. One startup conducted him through all four rounds of interviews, and in the last round he talked one-on-one with each employee.

And during the discussion after the first day, one employee got up and said that the candidate does not know or can not explain the Bayes theorem , and therefore it cannot be hired.

Everyone was especially indifferent and they silently agreed, except for the technical director. This is the only person personally interested in recruiting staff. He complained to the CEO that the company had not hired new employees for several months. Therefore, he used his veto power and made it clear that ignorance of a trifling topic by heart is a stupid reason to refuse an engineer. In the end, they took this man. As it turned out, he became the most valuable employee who ever worked for the company .

The technical director was right. This candidate installed the developer’s environment on the work computer in record time, found and fixed three bugs on the first day of work. In the end, everyone was extremely impressed and glad that they invited this guy to work.

Puzzles or questions on algorithms are used in Google and other companies, because these large firms can afford a large number of false-negative results in the interview process - they can refuse candidates who could be great employees because they don’t close their doors to anyone ( Google receives three million applications per year). As Erin the Little Birds once wisely remarked: “The definition of insanity is to act like Google and hope that you will succeed.”

Horror # 3: the personnel department has forgotten about the candidate

Usually, I watch closely what happens to my candidates and how they pass through the recruitment funnel. But at that time I was on vacation, and the executive director promised that he would take it to work. But an employee of the personnel department who worked remotely from another country did not process the application. Since I was on vacation, I also did not get in touch, and the candidate thought for several weeks that his application was rejected, because no one came in contact (in fact, this does not mean refusal). Typical engineering error.

Two months later I contacted the candidate and asked how he was doing. Neither he nor the personnel officer could not understand why no one had processed his application. So I wrote a letter indicating to CC: all those involved in this process, asking them to complete the employee clearance procedure.

Employees of personnel departments usually pay little and they are hopelessly disorganized. Staffed recruiters often perform administrative tasks, rather than looking for employees. Or even worse, sometimes in the personnel department there is no employee at all who is responsible for accepting applications, refusals or redirecting resumes. These guys often do not understand the technical professions. In 15 minutes, they are told who to find, and then they are supposed to carry out the right “selection” of candidates. Due to a lack of understanding of the context and the essence of technical professions, this often leads to poor results.

Scary # 4: The candidate was rejected because he was better than the interviewer

In the comments to this article on Hacker News it was mentioned that sometimes excellent candidates are rejected because they are too good . So I will tell a story that I remember.

In that story, I still think that the candidate turned out to be better than the interviewer. The candidate was a 22-year-old boy, a participant in open-source projects, a programmer-child prodigy, whose candidacy the developer rejected after screening the code, we’ll call him John. I was so shocked by this refusal that I organized a telephone conversation and discussed this issue. The teleconference was attended by three people: HR-manager, John and me.

All the reasons that John called during the conversation were a little ridiculous, and I could not tell if he was serious or not. Also, patches, pull requests and other activities of John on Github looked pretty shitty, but it was he who was responsible for screening the code, so I had to take his opinion into account.

John pointed out some problems in the candidate’s code, which he even showed on the general screen. All the things he mentioned related more to style and were not real problems. All other subjects of his critics seemed bad at first glance, but in reality they had good reasons (detailed try-catch blocks because of the not very clean API, with which the code interacted). Then I ran out of patience. The criticism made me go beyond the bounds of decency - and I mentioned that the quality of the candidate code is better than the crap of John on Github . Then my temperament let me down. In addition, HR immediately stopped me and said that “here we value not John”. It was difficult to answer something, so I changed the subject and soon ended the conversation.

This may be the subject of another article, when and why people secretly like to hire candidates who are a little more stupid and / or a little less capable than they are . Both individual interviewers and companies in general may be afraid to hire employees who are more qualified and more talented than themselves. Refusal due to the fact that the candidate is too good is unacceptable - so they use tricks, concentrating in areas where the candidate is weak or different from the norm. Here is an article about how this was supposedly done in educational institutions of the Soviet Union (special tasks for oral exams at Moscow State University, which offered to solve the applicants of Jewish nationality, with solutions - approx. Per) .

findings

There is more mess in recruiting than you think. If you are refused, it does not mean that you are a bad engineer, because failures often occur by mistake.

If you ask yourself the question of why there are recruitment agencies, well, sometimes in order to prevent such things as are described in this article. We make a living by finding the best combinations of candidates and vacancies and — apart from the owners of the company — we are more interested than others in finding a suitable candidate for a job. If you know crazy stories of failures in employment, write in comments.