My favorite "funnel" so far was applying for certain company in Colorado. It twas I think 10:45p in the evening, and I got a reply about 15mins later indicating that I was invited for an "interview". Scratching my head, I mean who was up working at this time, I looked into it...
It wasn't an interview, even though they insisted it was. It was a completely automated skill assessment "interview" with an AI. Or put better... it's a CAPTCHA that takes roughly 60mins to complete. If you just happen to pass their CAPTCHA, you might get to then talk to a real person.
I laughed and of course did not continue. This is the biggest honkin piece of baloney I've seen yet. It puts 100% of the burden on the candidates, so the HR department at the company can go back to trimming their hangnails or whatever they do.
I recently took a “one way interview”(I’ve had multiple recruiters use that term) where I had to be on camera, and talk to a machine that interpreted responses completely incorrectly causing me to have to try and negotiate with a fucking clanker that when I said I could work in the US I actually meant I could work in the US.
2 days later they replied back that I hadn’t had a long enough tenure in my career and couldn’t trust me enough to hire.
I don’t know what companies plans are because they are creating an environment where even the people they do end up hiring are going to resent them from day one based on the dehumanizing treatment they are applying to the interview process.
A policy I started to adhere to a while back was never take a job somewhere that doesn't invest at least as much time & energy into interviewing you than you are with them. If they expect me to put in a bunch of effort and they're putting in 0, that's a hard no.
Even if they also put in the effort, doesn't mean it's worth it.
When interviewing for a FAANG, I had 13 hours of video call interviews with different people ranging from HR to managers of different teams. I was then invited to fly over to the US for formal interviews, where I had 3 days of interviews with different teams, about 5 hours each day (not helped by the fact that they had 3 teams interested in me, and they all wanted to go through their full interview process separately).
When I got back home, I then had another 3 hours of phone interviews for some reason, one of which was "from a manager I'd be working with extensively if I got the job" (I got the job, and in 2 years never even spoke to his team once).
I later learned that I'd aced all my interviews and they thought I was perfect, and they still insisted on yet more phone interviews even after 15 hours seeing me in person. The irony was as the HR manager was arranging the last one, I was very close to saying "if they still haven't decided after this many interviews, I'm not sure one more is going to make any difference, so I'm not doing it".
I actually wished I had refused that last interview because I got the job and hated it. Every other job I've had has required at most 2 one-hour phone interviews or 1 one-hour phone interview and a couple of hours on-site interview, and every company I've worked for has been better than that FAANG. For me now, having more than 2-3 interviews would be a major red flag.
There's some research that the bulk of an interviewer's impression of you is made in the first 10 seconds of meeting you, and the rest of the interview is just finding evidence to support that decision, good or bad.
I wish I could live that way, but I am still trying to get a job as an Engineering Manager again since I genuinely enjoyed the work the same way I enjoy playing excel sheet simulators like EU IV, but the position has been annihilated or halved in a lot of firms.
I have taken the time to try and drop back down to just an IC engineer again but have been explicitly told that I either, was trusted to be able to do the job since I became a manager, or that they didn't trust that I would stay around since I had already reach manager level.
Most companies seem to be applying the heuristics of the pre 2022 era for software to prospective employees, while still demanding the benefits of this new era.
Hell I see a ton of people in this post talking about how referrals are the only way to get real signal, and I had two different Principal Engineers respectively at Riot and a financial firm too niche to name without outing myself refer me and not even get a phone screen. With said friends who referred me getting a brick wall from their HR department when trying to follow up.
The hiring system for tech is fundamentally broken atm, but companies are the ones with only leverage.