Can anyone confirm the premise of the article? Are interviews actually harder?
And if so, maybe it’s because a lot of companies are “hiring” but not really. They’ll hire a senior for a junior position but otherwise just keep waiting for the “right fit”.
Can anyone confirm the premise of the article? Are interviews actually harder?
No interviewing is absolutely not harder (from the perspective of the hiring company). Have been interviewing candidates or hiring manager for 25+ years at this point. It's always been hard to run a good interview process or do a good interview [1] and hard to hire good candidates no matter how good the process (because good people are rare and always in demand). It doesn't appear to me to be harder to interview now than it used to be.
If anything it's a bit easier than during the dotcom bubble for example but for different reasons. Now I get fewer candidates in total but more candidates who are at or close to the skill bar, so discernment is harder but the consequences of making a suboptimal choice are not quite as extreme (because a lot of candidates are pretty close to each other), whereas then I would be spammed with a deluge of candidates the vast majority of which were totally hopeless and extremely few of which were competent at all so the temptation to lower the bar was extremely high.
[1] ie the task is a challenging one. It requires difficult tradeoffs, and time, skill and practise and application on the part of the interviewer. There is no one-size-fits all method which works for all roles, candidates and organizations. Interview processes tend also to degrade over time so any time when you think it's going well is a local maximum and it will slide from there and you'll need to rethink, change it up etc in a month or two.
I was hoping I'm not alone, I had mixed signals reading the article. OP talks about how the interviews are harder in 2024 and says candidates are using AI to crack impossible time bound programming tasks and instead recommend companies to do the interview online. Somewhere something is disconnected
Comments
Can anyone confirm the premise of the article? Are interviews actually harder?
And if so, maybe it’s because a lot of companies are “hiring” but not really. They’ll hire a senior for a junior position but otherwise just keep waiting for the “right fit”.
No interviewing is absolutely not harder (from the perspective of the hiring company). Have been interviewing candidates or hiring manager for 25+ years at this point. It's always been hard to run a good interview process or do a good interview [1] and hard to hire good candidates no matter how good the process (because good people are rare and always in demand). It doesn't appear to me to be harder to interview now than it used to be.
If anything it's a bit easier than during the dotcom bubble for example but for different reasons. Now I get fewer candidates in total but more candidates who are at or close to the skill bar, so discernment is harder but the consequences of making a suboptimal choice are not quite as extreme (because a lot of candidates are pretty close to each other), whereas then I would be spammed with a deluge of candidates the vast majority of which were totally hopeless and extremely few of which were competent at all so the temptation to lower the bar was extremely high.
[1] ie the task is a challenging one. It requires difficult tradeoffs, and time, skill and practise and application on the part of the interviewer. There is no one-size-fits all method which works for all roles, candidates and organizations. Interview processes tend also to degrade over time so any time when you think it's going well is a local maximum and it will slide from there and you'll need to rethink, change it up etc in a month or two.
I was hoping I'm not alone, I had mixed signals reading the article. OP talks about how the interviews are harder in 2024 and says candidates are using AI to crack impossible time bound programming tasks and instead recommend companies to do the interview online. Somewhere something is disconnected