What is Wrong with the Hiring Process in the UK and My Advice on How to Make It Less Painful
During the last month I have been actively looking for a job in London after moving here from Ukraine. My background is master’s degree in computer engineering and more than 6 years of high-performance C++ programming. I’ve spoken with 20 companies, had 20 technical interviews, 7 of which were on-site, 4 full-day, got really bored of writing toy-code, discovered a few absolutely amazing companies and landed 7 offers. However, this process has absolutely exhausted me, as on average every company had 3 interview rounds with at least a week between them. So here is my advice to you [and my future-self] on how to spend less physical and mental resources on this task. Someone might also want to optimise their hiring process :)
- Never ending phone calls.
99% of recruiters call without prior written notice, which makes absolutely impossible to perform your job duties as you keep getting distracted. Lots of recruiters are perfectly fine sending the information about their positions and companies via email, just ask for it. By default, they give all the details by phone, but there is a solid chance that positions from different recruiters will duplicate each other, so it’s worth having the company name before allocating your time for a phone call. Advice #1: consider not publishing your phone number and removing it from your email signature. Dear recruiters, engineers hate phone calls, stop calling them.
A lyrical digression. If you are hired via an agency — they receive 10–30% of your annual salary. A company can refuse you because they don’t like the recruiter or they don’t want to pay this fee. It works the opposite way too: I’ve seen a few good companies, but I’ve already stuck to one recruiter and I, let’s say, didn’t enjoy conversations with him/her. It’s also worth saying that once you refuse an offer — there is a really high chance that your recruiter turns into a pumpkin after being so kind and helpful. Fortunately for everyone, very professional recruiters do exist.
2. Take-home programming assignments.
70% of companies ask you to solve a pretty boring but massive CS task (can be even as annoying as discouraging using std::string) or to implement a trivial client-server using a library that company uses in production, but you are not familiar with (neither want to be at that point in time). Either way, they expect you to commit 5–6 hours of your time without meeting the team first. You commit your resources, they don’t. Doesn’t make you feel respected after all. Some companies use time-limited programming assignments: from 60 to 120 mins, which by itself is okay except for being stressful because of the ticking timer, and finding 2 uninterrupted productive hours if you are employed could be a difficult thing to do. Advice #2: Decide for yourself as soon as possible what you think about this kind of assignments. I ended up refusing all companies that have such practice, and still had a lot of interviews.
3. Coding puzzles at technical interviews.
I am pretty okay with whiteboard coding as long as with having a degree and 6 years of commercial experience I’m not supposed to implement a hashmap or a shared pointer. Yup, I have been asked of both. Advice #3: all of these whiteboard coding questions are generic, you can advance your skill with e.g. this book. The trick is to understand that these questions are not complex, they are supposed to be solved in 40 mins max. Do not overcomplicate the problem.
4. Only one interviewer.
Then it is your word against his/her word. It is not specific to the UK, but given the next disadvantage such experience drastically increases the amount of wasted time. I happened to be in a situation, when an interviewer was not in the mood at all, was arrogant and cocky, and then gave me feedback of me being impolite. Or when you solve everything in the most efficient manner, and then the interviewer provides feedback of coding being bad. There are no witnesses, but there might be a bias. Advice #4: leave them alone, but provide as much feedback about the interview to your recruiter or on e.g. Glassdoor as possible. If the management is wise — they will at least decrease the scale of the problem. Anti-loops happen.
5. The process usually takes a few weeks.
That was pretty surprising to me, as in Ukraine you could have landed an offer on the same day you have had your interview. Some companies have too many interview stages, some schedule the initial screening too slowly, some — both options. Some companies would require a background check after you accept their offer, which could last up to a month. Advice #5: either have some money to live a month or two being unemployed or carefully pick who you are interviewing with in order to save your time (and nerves) and not to lose your current job.
6. Security check.
I happened to be in a situation, when a company forgot to tell me about their mandatory background check (the one including criminal records check). I accepted an offer, signed a contract with the start day in a week, then a couple of days later I contacted the HR team with questions at what time to arrive on my first day, who to ask for, etc, and they told me that they require the security check before I can start. Various financial institutions immediately tell you about this process, it’s quite a common practice. Their check could last a month or even more. However, this company was not in the finance sector, so it didn’t come to my mind to clarify the question. Advice #6: Explicitly ask about the background check, the HR representative might forget to tell you about it. It does not cause any problems for you, just takes some time.
Hopefully, this information would save someone time and effort. Anyway, interviews are a separate skill, which quite often has nothing in common with how good you actually are at your job. As for me — if I will be looking for a job again, I would go with applying to companies directly and will never ever publish my CV on job search websites. Good luck! :)
