> Let’s say we pass a law that prevents offers from being revoked. This will make hiring much harder and increase 5 rounds to like 10 and involve many more committees and even then most candidates other than sureshots getting rejected.
I don't see what one has to do with the other. You only extend an offer after you've vetted the candidate, and afterwards there is no more screening, so sudden revocation doesn't have anything to do with candidate quality and everything to do with economic conditions. One might imagine that strict laws against early termination of a contract would lead to less hiring when the company fears that they might be affected by a downturn... but that would then pretty much be the intended purpose, to think twice before you can afford someone before hiring them?
It is incredibly connected. There is business risk introduced for making an offer. Increasing that risk means that the vetting process can be increased to make up for that extra risk incurred. If companies feel they need 4 or 5 rounds of interviews today before making an offer and you all of a sudden mandate that there's more of a risk for making an offer, they might decide on an extra round or two of interviews to try and be even more certain about their decision.
Personally I think a lot of the issues around hiring could be solved by making firing much more trivial and less risky for businesses: this would make a lot of the process around hiring and the many extra rounds of interviews less important. Companies would be a lot more incentivized to give people they like a shot and see if they can hack it in a role or not. This would IMO be a big improvement for say self-taught developers or those with non-traditional backgrounds who can get easily dismissed because they present more of a risk than somebody who went to X good school and worked at big corporation for Y years.
> There is business risk introduced for making an offer. Increasing that risk means that the vetting process can be increased to make up for that extra risk incurred.
Why does it increase the risk? Are they regularly screwing over hires like this? If so, it's good to force the behavior change. If they only screw over hires like this in economic downturns, then "more rounds" wouldn't affect that so they wouldn't add more rounds.
I understand your perspective here. I think everybody is rightly outraged and has their blood boiling when they hear stories about employers screwing over hires. I'm right there with you for wanting fairness and a good process.
What's the solution to improving job-seekers lives though? I think this is a case where the incentives are really counterintuitive and solutions that sound good are the wrong ones to make peoples' lives overall better.
On the surface, it sounds great to focus on a goal oriented outcome and give employees better protections and make firing harder. Giving Americans European style workers rights sounds great. But in practice, I think that just makes the hiring process a nightmare and makes it a risk for businesses to try and add anybody because there's always a chance that things don't work out for some reason. This is why there's so many stupid rounds of interviews and hoops to jump through for every position now.
I think we'd go a long way to making hiring much better by doing the counterintuitive thing: making firing much easier and reduce business risk as much as possible. Make the risk for businesses nearly zero for hiring anybody because it's so easy to reverse things if they don't work out, and all of a sudden the incentive for multiple round interview processes goes away because you'd want to rush and snatch up anybody you like and want to give a shot without risking losing them in a 6 week multi-round interview process.
Adding more risk for hiring IMO just increases how awful the hiring process will become.
Feel free to hate me for saying all of that. I know it sounds bad on the surface and I can't really articulate this theory in a way that's perfectly convincing. But this is one of those things that for some reason makes perfect sense to me and is a strong gut feeling as the correct thing. Also note that I'm a job seeker at the moment, and I'm saying all of the above through a self-interested lens of wanting to make the hiring process as simple as possible.
> Adding more risk for hiring IMO just increases how awful the hiring process will become.
I'm not disagreeing with that in general, but I want an explanation of where the additional risk would come from in this situation. And why, because of that specific risk, companies would do something like add more hiring rounds.
If the additional risk is just getting stuck with an employee during a downturn, more hiring rounds wouldn't affect that, so there would be no reason to add them.
Also it seems like it's currently pretty easy to fire people. I'm not at all confident you could reduce the hiring process by making firing even easier. And how do you propose handling the people that already have jobs and need a commitment before quitting them?
The Effect of that kind of policy was already tried in Italy to a certain extent.
The result was that For every new "Temporary Investment" (meaning a project that needed 1-3 years of pushing) Noone was hiring and everyone, no exceptions was "renting" bodies from "consultancy firms". The result was distatrous for the companies that needed to pay Consultancy prices because they could not afford to hire without being able to downsize after 1-3 years and the employees who ended up in the consultancy sweat shops because they were pratically the only ones who would offer to hire. The salaries stagnated because the market stagnated (and still Italian Salaries in Tech are among the lowest in all EU). The only ones who profited from this were the middle men.
Many still see this kind of a policy as something to be admired but I would rather have a vibrating market and change jobs every 2-3 years rather than "settling for life" like the proponents of this system predicate at a sweat shop.
I don't see what one has to do with the other. You only extend an offer after you've vetted the candidate, and afterwards there is no more screening, so sudden revocation doesn't have anything to do with candidate quality and everything to do with economic conditions. One might imagine that strict laws against early termination of a contract would lead to less hiring when the company fears that they might be affected by a downturn... but that would then pretty much be the intended purpose, to think twice before you can afford someone before hiring them?