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?
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.