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.
Your previous employer does via unemployment benefits. They pay a tax to fund it.
Unemployment lasts a limited time, and this doesn’t address the problems with hiring companies dragging their feet of having ghost jobs.
Then fix THAT problem.
Isn’t that kind of what the OP was trying to do? Lol
No
They want to introduce a whole new system that everyone can complain about it being broken.
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
The point is the difference between the slacker on the shop floor and the slacker in the back office is just the job title, not the approach. If you can let other people do all the work while you collect a paycheck, you’re winning as a slacker.
Now, you might think, ‘but won’t they just get fired once their direct report gets wind of what they’re doing?’ The answer is yes, but if their direct report is also slacking, when would they see the employee’s work to know they need to be fired?
And if they’re a good liar, the slacker can say ‘Oops, yeah, I fucked up by trusting Soandso with that. I’ve fired them now so it won’t be a problem anymore.’ Then they burn that employee/contractor and keep collecting a paycheck. Depending on how lazy/stupid/gullible their management is, this can be repeated for years.
What a sad life. I could not live with that damocles sword over my head
I think a way forward is to make the government handle the hiring process. The companies put a fee into escrow, which is paid to the government if no hires are completed or retained.
The government interviews potential hires, anonymizes and DEIs, retains resumes and information from job seekers, creates the infrastructure for reviews to be left by people for a company’s work conditions, and so forth. If a pattern of false jobs emerges, the government can prevent the company from issuing further offers for 3 or 4 months, with a heightened penalty for the escrow thereafter. If people are consistently hired and retained, the escrow penalty is reduced.
Corporations shouldn’t be responsible for hiring, because they are strongly incentivized to do bullshit.
IMHO funnelling anything through a central authority is destined to lead to bottlenecks and inflexibility. I could see something similar being achieved by heavily regulating the hiring process though. And possibly involving some sort of certified 3rd party* to guarantee impartiality, that isn’t the government. (*A licensing model avoids the central authority bottleneck)
I am not opposing but there is a big risk here.
Essentially there are 2 customers,
The company wants a worker, but the worker a company.
In a current hiring process if your not a fit for the company well thats end of story… but not with a centralised third system who is hiring for many different companies where they can hire you for another company instead were you are a better fit.
Sounds good on paper for now but.
The government needs you to work to pay taxes. The job of the government worker is to make sure the open positions are filled. Neither requires you or the employer to be long term happy with the deal.
Over time they will drown in crap positions that are technically legit employment but that no one actually wants and the government will get pressured to fill those positions.
So when you walk in, and you don’t instantaneously manage to sell yourself as one of the prime few worthy of the actual decent jobs everyone wants, they will try to push you in all the shitty ones till you stop coming back.
Then there is also you can’t really ban someone from employing someone directly.
This is a good point but it already happens with the current system.
I already can’t get an interview, this would make it impossible.
Love it.
Unfortunately, then there would be professional candidates who just never accept a job.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.
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.
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?
But think of the shareholders. Who’s helping them out?
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.
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?
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.
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.
Daily Mail reader?
Wouldn’t limiting the interview pay to be below minimum wage/below the hourly salary of the job alleviate this?
Companies will hire internally
Ok? They do that anyway. Sometimes people leave and they have to hire externally.
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
As someone who’s gotten rejected have 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
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…
From the context, it seems pretty obvious they were clowns.
I’d just tell them to go fuck themselves at that point
Developers did this to themselves by becoming self important gate keepers.
Now they bitch about it.
Yes sure I would love to be interviewed then everywhere everyday
Lmao Have you tried getting an interview lately?
Yeah but I don’t know how it is for other industries or fields honestly
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.
So start a company and pay for candidates. What’s stopping you? If it’s the best business model you’ll make millions or billions
Collective action problem:
A collective action problem or social dilemma is a situation in which all individuals would be better off cooperating but fail to do so because of conflicting interests between individuals that discourage joint action. The collective action problem has been addressed in political philosophy for centuries, but was more famously interpreted in 1965 in Mancur Olson’s The Logic of Collective Action.
A great many things that would be good for society are not feasible to be the first/only one to do. The world would be vastly safer if there were no nuclear weapons, but in a world where other nations have them it becomes self-negating to not have them. The only way to get the social benefit of all companies doing something is to legally mandate it so there is no disadvantage.
“What do you do for a living?”
“I’m a professional interviewee.”
The sad reality
Spending ten hours of spamming resumes to get one hour on an interview call sounds like a bad way to make money
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…
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.
How would it make them go up? It currently costs zero, and adding the cost of that pay doesn’t change any other expenses for recruitment contractors. Even if they don’t view it as a significant cost relative to the full HR department, they’d still either ignore it and maintain current rates or view it as an avoidable expense and minimise it. I don’t see a mechanism for increasing them unless the law gave them some backdoors to, say, pay below standard wages while asking candidates to do work as part of the interview, effectively turning them into sub-minimum wage workers for businesses where that might be useful.
Because people involved in hiring have no idea what they are spending to find and hire employees. Once they learn what they’re spending and on what, they’ll definitely agree to spend a tiny bit more to ensure the upfront investment pays off in a good employee.
EX: My company, we are currently hiring another accountant to join the team. We’ve spent somewhere in the range of $20,000 so far trying to fill that role. I expect we’ll get closer to double that by the time these dipshits find the right person.
So we’re talking about, say, $30,000 in expenses to find the new employee.
What would an interview pay? A few hundred dollars, max? Let’s say $100 to make the math easy.
If we interview 5 people for the job and hire one, we will have spent $30,000 + $500, or $30,500. If we interview 10 people for the job and hire one, we will have spent $30,000 + $1000, or $31,000.
We doubled the number of interviews (much larger pool to find the right candidate) and the overall cost was only 1.6% higher.
A savvy manager would significantly increase interview numbers for a small increase in cost. Big benefit, little downside.
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.
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 incentivise 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.
Thank you, this is the kind of scrutiny I was hoping for
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
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.
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.
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.
