How not to interview someone who already has a job (2011)

Sometimes the people who ask you to interview are not the same people who do actually end up interviewing you, or they don&#x27;t communicate with each other.<p>At one of my last interviews I was told I don&#x27;t look like I want the job enough because I was dressed casually. I was very confused. I reminded them that they requested an interview with me several times, even after I told them I was not on the market, and that I had actually taken time of work for the interview. I only showed up because they practically begged me. I was so annoyed at some of the questions. &quot;What value can you add to this company?&quot; No sir, how can YOU make it worth MY while to join you, considering that I have to leave a position that I&#x27;m perfectly comfortable with? After finally understanding that I was happy with my current job, one of the interviewers asked me &quot;So why are you here wasting our time?&quot; I was infuriated.<p>The whole experience left a bitter taste in my mouth. I don&#x27;t think I would ever consider interviewing at that company again.

I think this also applies to someone who is unemployed. All I want is to do meaningful work and get paid. I&#x27;m tired of the hamster wheel of job applications.<p>For coders, a major offender is the variety of TrueAbility&#x2F;Codility&#x2F;HackerRank&#x2F;custom code challenges. FizzBuzz is fine. You want to filter out people who just can&#x27;t code. Beyond that, timed challenges don&#x27;t tell the recruiter anything about how a person interacts with others, or maintains code, or researches solutions for new problems.<p>And then, after I successfully complete the code challenge, investing time that I really can&#x27;t afford, they just look at my resume and delete my application, anyway.

For engineers without open source contributions, why not give a coding project? It seems to me like there&#x27;s no need to eat into the person&#x27;s working time, spending a few hours solving an interesting problem shouldn&#x27;t deter people you want hire to code all day, and the signals you&#x27;ll get are orthogonal to what you&#x27;ll be able to assess in person.

&gt; You will go through 6-8 interviews!” I thought: “YOU will hire a bunch of unemployed people”.<p>Can someone explain why HR managers have such a severe prejudice against hiring unemployed people? Imho, its their job, to select those people from the unemployemnt pool that fits the company, and have the skills. A HR who only poaches employed people, is doing a bad job, and hiding his laziness under an evil prejudice.

I don&#x27;t understand why they dont lede with here&#x27;s the $$ and here&#x27;s the problem. I don&#x27;t want to work on bullshit no matter how many massages and drycleaning you give me. I don&#x27;t want to work for $40k plus lottery tickets on earth shattering problems. Why do we have to play this time-consuming game before you tell me the info I need to hear? This doesn&#x27;t scale. I&#x27;ll stick to the devil I know.

The &#x27;one phone interview, one on-site interview, make a decision&#x27; format is how every good company I&#x27;ve worked for has hired, ranging over multiple industries and multiple decades.<p>You can tell a lot about a company from your very first interactions with them. I&#x27;d steer clear of anything more elaborate than what she described, they are probably guessing about how to hire, and that mean&#x27;s they&#x27;re probably guessing about how to run a business. That kind of risk can be entertaining and instructive, but might not be great for your career.

I once had an interview for a job while I was already employed. They asked why I wanted to leave my current job, I told them I didn&#x27;t and that I liked my job, but I also look for better opportunities. My interviewer seemed incredulous at this concept, and thought I was wasting her time. Does she only want to hire unemployed or unhappily employed people? So dumb.

I&#x27;ve had folks get irate when I wouldn&#x27;t spend the day at their interview. I was in alpha release, fighting fires and working on a deadline! I&#x27;m kind of glad I never worked for that idiot.

Or, an even shorter TLDR: Decide!<p>How much does it cost to have 7 people interview a candidate anyway? Even without considering that the best candidates will run away, how can companies justify that?

I&#x27;ll save this for the inevitable barrage of LinkedIn messages that will appear after I start a new job soon.

Hah, my latest gig, one interview, around 10 minutes in it was like &quot;so how do we make it worth your while coming to work here?&quot; (answer, ok money, excellent working conditions). Working well. Nice to have special skillz

It&#x27;s easy to say when you do have a job