@cartman82 I think he's explaining badly that the recruiting process overtly treats people as things. Tangential: His Google example presumably works for Google because they need people who understand abstract algorithms.
Generally his examples don't reveal the sector, which usually have common technical test problems for their company. If BigCorp A was a gaming company, maze-solving seems like a reasonable test.
If I was confronted by one of these unusual algorithms, I would get my phone out and google for help. If they objected I would ask "what? your employees don't get to use google?". I'd work how I normally work.
It's possible that these articles fascinate you because you are reading the rantings of a person who knows there's a problem, but doesn't understand what the problem is, so they just list every single part which put stress on them.
As such I'm interested to see how fascinated you are by my own ranting:
My recent jobsearch was unusually difficult. Triggered by my currency-trading employer deciding they wanted to outsource all development to Poland (I live in UK and no I wasn't going to suddenly dump everything and move) because the other UK developer handed in his notice days after I joined at the beginning of November. I found out about this in the middle of December.
Trivia: apparently they were upset that the other developer had left without negotiating. If you're the kind of person who is upset because your employee left without negotiating, you are the reason they're leaving, you psychopathic child.
Massive tangents aside, here are a list of bad recruitment practises and why they're bad:
- Sending me the technical test, and halfway through I find out the position has been filled. Timewasters. Fuck you.
- Online personality testing is an example of how there are no bad ideas, but there are poor applications of ideas. Have you ever tried answering 90 questions in 15 minutes without your mind wondering? It might seem simple at first: 90 two-option multiple choice questions is one every 10 seconds. The problem is that putting a mind into this state for 15 minutes like a robot is impractical unless you're hiring a mentat. They could have asked me outright whether I was either a robot or mentat and I would have said 'no' before they had given me the technical test which I had to spend time on. Naturally when they said "why did the 15 minute test take you 31 minutes?" the answer was "because it took 31 minutes for me to complete the test. Why was only 15 minutes allowed? Is this still part of the personality test?". The point is that it makes me livid that because someone has written a test, you're automatically wrong if you can't pass it, rather than the test being wrong. I guess I'm mostly annoyed because I'd clearly failed this, having passed the technical test, and missed out on another hugely fun opportunity because I'd agreed to do it on a Sunday. I partly brought it on myself by agreeing to time constraints which were stupid, but they chose to administer a test which would have resulted in my working alongside people who chose 90 random answers which represented their personality not-at-all, making my technical test time wasted. Man, that was a textwall. Donald Trump could probably keep Mexicans out with that.
- This next example covers a mistake by HR, which at least wasn't a timewaste, but resulted in a brief flurry of angry messaging. I'd had the interview and they had said my knowledge of Angularjs wasn't sufficient. This was bullshit, because a) I had answered their questions correctly, and b) out of everything on my skillset, Angularjs is not the weak point. I knew they'd made a mistake, so I decided to email them explaining why I knew it was a mistake. This turned out to sound a lot angrier than I'd meant it to, in the way it does when you're basically paraphrasing "if you had wanted to test me further on this skill, you should have done so rather than blaming me when you hadn't gotten your results together properly". I already didn't want to work for them, but I wanted the recruiter to understand the company he was representing had fucked up, not me. Predictably, he got back to me saying they had rejected me for lacking in other skills (probably TDD, Agile, etc, which I've never seen done well anywhere I've ever worked, so naturally I don't know how to do them properly either).
Success occurred when I interviewed with a technical guy who wanted Angularjs (my leading skill) but javascript in general as well (by extension, better than my other skills... yes I know it's a terrible syntax). I got on with the senior management who were interested in my extra-curricular skills (part of the Turing Test) and HR who, when I mentioned my friends wanted me to go to Barcelona with them (yes, Spain again. I'm interesting) said "oh yeah, you've got to go on holiday with your friends". I realised this was working throughout the entire interview, and I start on Tuesday.
I actually learned a lot in the last couple of months about managing my time when people kept demanding it. I've been keeping a calendar for a long time anyway because I do a lot of stuff, but also giving myself a couple of days for a technical test (they say two hours, but it's a lie). I should probably write a blog since I feel like I got down a process that worked, having not been this challenged at finding work for many years.
Anyway, that's my massive rant. I want to come back and check for responses, but if I don't, it's because I don't know how to use this forum software.