Another reason I'm happy to be retired

Many years ago, I went through a long interview process with a local software company. It was for a relatively senior position (director-level) at a relatively small place. (Were there 100 employees? 200?More? I've forgotten...) Among the people I interviewed with were the co-founder/CEO and the co-founder CFO. I didn't like either one of them. 

The CEO was extremely condescending and a-holey. During our conversation, we somehow got on the topic of price elasticity and he snippily asked me if I could define it for him. (I'd been to a fancy-enough business school; my husband was an economist. So, yeah, I could define price elasticitiy.) 

The CFO was also something of a prick, and we got into a debate about what financial information should be shared with employees of a small, closely-held corporation. Needless to say, our opinions differed.

Shortly after these close encounters, I had a direct convo with the hiring manager, and we quickly came to the conclusion that there wasn't a good fit between me and them. I did know someone who I thought would be a good fit, and he ended up taking the job. 

I ended up knowing a lot of people who worked at this company over the years, which grew big, went public, made that CEO a billionaire philanthropist, etc. Most of them weren't all that happy working there; most of them didn't last all that long; most disliked the CEO. 

(I couldn't figure out what happened to the CFO, other than finding that he's still alive.)

Aside from me meet and greets with the CEO and CFO, another obnoxious aspect of the job is that when I first stepped in the door for an initial interview, I was asked to sit there and do a writing sample. (Was there a math quiz, too? I can't remember, but I think the writing sample had me coming up with instructions on how to use a toothbrush.) 

I found the process entirely off-putting. It's no wonder I didn't end up working there. There's no doubt I would have hated every moment.  

About that sample: Not that I'm afraid of anything to do with writing. It's just that I found this request insulting for a professional position, especially because I could have easily supplied some writing samples.

Sure, there's be no guarantee that what I would have handed them wouldn't be material written by someone else. (It's been known to happen.) 

Still...

Anyway, I can only imagine how offputting I would have found it if someone had asked me to do a project for them before bringing me on board, which is apparently becoming a fairly widespread hiring practice. 

I don't know how all this came about. Maybe because references have proven unreliable, afraid that if they say anything that might put the kibosh on an applicant, they'll be sued. 

Whatever's driving this trend, it's a-happenin' as I learned when I came across this: 

An employer [Twitter handle: M Stanfield] has sparked fierce debate after being so shocked a Gen Z job seeker refused to spend 90 minutes on a hiring test because it “looked like a lot of work” that he vented about the situation on X, formerly known as Twitter.

People who've job-hunted recently have probably quickly found out that getting hired is no longer as simple as submitting a résumé followed by an in-person interview or two.

The tweet read:

“Me: really enjoyed the call. Please see attached financial modeling test

“Gen Z applicant: this looks like a lot of work. Without knowing where I stand in the process, I’m not comfortable spending 90 minutes in Excel

“Me:…well…I can tell you where you stand now”

In a follow-up tweet, he posted that “if an analyst can’t hammer that out in 90 min, they’re not the right person” for the investment analyst gig going.

Speaking to Fortune, Stanfield—who declined to confirm the name of his company—said such tests are fairly common in his industry as they're used to identify the skill level of potential employees.

During an initial screening call “the steps in the interview process” were laid out in full, he added, and candidates were also told that the test in question “shouldn’t take more than an hour.”

“If you want to get hired as an investment analyst, at least at my fund, you need to demonstrate your ability to analyze an investment,” he said, adding the task wasn't on a live project but an example situation. (Source: Fortune, via Yahoo Finance)

The article then devolved into a battle between olds suggesting that Gen Z's are a bunch of entitled brats who need to toughen up - M. Stanfield even suggested that they would have benefitted from getting into a few fistfights at a younger age - and youngs carping about the Boomer mindset, about old fogeys making unreasonable demands and being completely out of it.

I come down somewhere in the middle on this one.

I don't blame the interviewee for asking for clarification on where they stood in the interview process. And I don't blame job-seekers for being suspicious about providing free labor to a company. I've read about plenty of instances where a candidate has created a preso, blog post, or other deliverable and had an unscrupulous company use it without permission or compensation. 

On the other hand, if the candidate actually said something along the lines of 'that looks like a lot of work' - which may not have happened IRL - I don't blame the interviewer from knocking them off the potential hiree list. And the requirement that there would be a test for the position was clearly laid out. So it wasn't exactly a surprise pop quiz. (Can you define price elasticity...)

If hiring companies are going to demand these sorts of pre-hire tests, they should only give them to those who are finalists, or even about to be given an offer. And it does seem obnoxious to expect someone to spend 90 minutes on an unpaid task. So maybe the task could be shorter. Maybe, in this case, M. Stanfield could have had the candidate do a quick look at someone else's analysis (or a fake one) and come back with a first impression of what works, what doesn't.

And if someone's asked to create an actual work product, the hiring company might want to consider some small nod to compensation to those who don't get the job. Even a fifty-dollar Amazon card would recognize that the person had put in some effort. 

I'm no longer in the game, so this is never going to be my problem.  Just another reason that I'm happy to be retired.