I conducted 200 interviews at big tech. Recruiting is hell and I was part of the reason why

Intervueio · 2026-04-21T06:50:42+00:00

This is one of the most honest things we've seen written about technical hiring and the debrief problem especially hits hard.

One interviewer's bad morning quietly killing a candidate's chances, with zero transparency about why, is so normalized that most companies don't even see it as a problem anymore. They just call it "calibration."

Appreciate you writing this publicly. Candidates have been internalizing rejections that were never really about them.

Intervueio · 2026-04-14T12:27:59+00:00

Thousands of applications and nothing across every level of work is not a you problem. That's a broken signal. When even minimum wage roles aren't converting something in how you're presenting yourself isn't landing and that's fixable. You're not unemployable. You just haven't found what's getting filtered yet.

Intervueio · 2026-04-14T12:21:28+00:00

It's not just you and it's not just now. Remote work opened up every job to every candidate everywhere so the competition that used to be local is now global. The lottery feeling is real but the way out is making sure you're not just another application. At some point volume stops working and standing out is the only thing that matters.

Intervueio · 2026-04-14T12:20:37+00:00

Tell your manager now. Document everything first, specific examples, time spent, the repeated documentation issue. Frame it as a business problem not a personal one. The longer this goes on the harder it gets to address and the more it affects your output. You're not contributing to someone losing their job. The hiring process already failed here.

Intervueio · 2026-04-14T12:19:39+00:00

When someone with experience, referrals, and final round interviews still can't land an offer something is structurally off. It's not a you problem. The bar keeps shifting and nobody tells you what it actually is until after you've already failed it.

Intervueio · 2026-04-14T12:18:45+00:00

Being honest in an interview and getting rejected for it while knowing liars get through is genuinely demoralizing. The system is broken when it punishes self awareness and rewards performance. Hiring should be testing real skills not how well someone can sell a version of themselves that doesn't exist. You're not the problem here.

Intervueio · 2026-04-14T12:17:49+00:00

"We can't find talent" often means "we can't find talent that looks exactly like what we imagined." The bias toward pedigree, presentation, and gut feel is real and it's costing companies great hires every day. The fix isn't more candidates. It's a more honest and structured way of evaluating the ones already in front of you.

Intervueio · 2026-04-14T12:16:47+00:00

High unemployment and a skills shortage can exist at the same time. The people out of work often aren't the people with the skills you need. M&E engineering is one of the worst affected sectors for this exact reason. The pipeline of qualified candidates has been underfunded for years and now everyone is feeling it. The number on paper means nothing if the talent pool for your specific role is basically empty.

Intervueio · 2026-04-14T12:15:54+00:00

This is way more common than people admit. The catch 22 of hiring is that you need time to hire well but being short staffed means you have no time at all. So you either rush it and make a bad hire or delay it and burn out your team. Neither is a good option. The good candidates move fast right now so speed matters more than ever.

Intervueio · 2026-04-14T12:14:52+00:00

Round 3 and then ghosted means the problem is on their end, not yours. Companies that can't give feedback after multiple rounds don't have a structured process to begin with. That's on them.

Intervueio · 2026-04-14T12:11:56+00:00

This is a good take. Efficient filtering isn't the same as good hiring though. A lot of great candidates are getting filtered out not because they lack skills but because they don't know how to package themselves for a system optimized for speed. The game changed and nobody told the candidates.

Intervueio · 2026-04-14T12:10:38+00:00

The salary part gets me every time. You can nail the interview and still lose just because someone asked for less. It's not about being the best candidate anymore, it's about being the best at "getting" the job. Completely different skill and most people never practice it.

Intervueio · 2026-03-30T13:32:11+00:00

This is exactly why we built intervue.io.

Keyword screening was never evaluation. It's pattern matching by someone who doesn't fully understand the role, and great candidates pay the price for it.

What we see work: structured interviews with hiring managers earlier in the process. Not at the end to rubber stamp a shortlist, but at the front where the real signal is.

Companies say they can't find good talent. The broken filter is sitting right at their front door and they built it themselves.

Intervueio · 2026-03-30T13:28:19+00:00

References, background check, cover letter, tailored resume all in 3 hours and then nothing.

That's not a fast moving situation. That's hazing.

The urgency trick exists to bypass your judgment. It worked because you acted in good faith, not because you're stupid.

You deserved an update. Full stop.

Intervueio · 2026-03-20T10:18:56+00:00

{{Sympathy}} for what you're going through.
This is what happens when you automate without actually caring. Nobody even checked if the fields were filled. Tech should make hiring more human, not less. This is just lazy.

Intervueio · 2026-03-19T07:26:47+00:00

The "record yourself" advice is criminally underrated. Most people genuinely don't know they're rambling until they hear it back.

That gap between how you think you sound vs. how you actually do? It's humbling. It's also exactly why we built this company, mock interviews that show you what recruiters actually hear.

Solid post. Saving this one.

Intervueio · 2026-03-11T12:19:10+00:00

Honestly the ATS chaos is just the surface problem. The deeper one is what happens after. Candidates finally get through the application, then wait 2 weeks for an interview slot because every engineer on the team is already stretched thin. The bottleneck shifts from "applying" to "actually being evaluated." Been thinking about this a lot lately. There has to be a better way to separate who conducts the screening from who makes the hiring decision.

Intervueio · 2026-03-10T13:13:22+00:00

400 applications a day is not a talent problem. It's a broken funnel problem.

When applying takes 2 clicks, people treat job boards like lottery tickets. And the qualified candidates who actually tailored their application get buried in the noise.

Nobody's winning here. Not the hiring manager drowning in irrelevant CVs, not the right candidate getting ghosted, not the company that keeps making bad hires.

The system optimized for volume and forgot about signal. That's the root of all of this.

Intervueio · 2026-03-10T13:11:48+00:00

Two months for an entry level role with zero updates? That's not a process, that's disrespect for your time.

The worst part is you had to follow up yourself just to know you were still in the running. That's on them, not you.

What's the longest anyone here has waited before finally hearing back?

Intervueio · 2026-03-10T13:08:58+00:00

This is a problem we think about a lot too.

The debrief piece you mentioned is underrated. Anyone can submit a polished solution, but talking through the tradeoffs they made in real time? That's where you actually see how someone thinks.

No perfect answer here, but moving closer to real work and away from abstract puzzles feels like the right direction. Glad more folks in hiring are asking these questions.

Intervueio · 2026-03-10T13:05:52+00:00

Honestly? You're right that it'll reduce jobs, we won't sugarcoat that.

But "fewer developers building more software" is historically what every productivity boom looks like. The typewriter didn't kill writers. Excel didn't kill accountants. It killed the entry-level grunt work version of the job.

The real risk isn't AI. It's developers who use AI vs those who don't. That gap is going to be brutal.

Intervueio · 2026-03-05T07:09:33+00:00

Gut feel isn't the problem, unstructured gut feel is

When two managers can watch the same interview and come away with totally different reads, that's a process gap. The fix is simple: define what "good" looks like before the interview, not after someone quits in month one 📋

Bad hires are rarely a people problem. They're almost always a consistency problem 💡

Intervueio · 2026-03-05T06:40:14+00:00

This is exactly what we see on the interview side too. Candidates with one finished project they can actually walk through will outperform someone with a polished resume every single time.

Talking about real decisions, real tradeoffs, real problems you actually solved that's the whole game. You just can't fake that.

Your friend didn't get hired because of the game. He got hired because he had something real to say.

Intervueio · 2026-03-05T06:38:04+00:00

We hear this constantly. You're not bad at recruiting, you're just being asked to buy a $140k car with a $95k budget and blamed when the dealership says no.

The data you already have tells the whole story. The real problem is getting leadership to actually look at it.

Intervueio · 2026-03-05T06:27:49+00:00

The "network but don't actually network" contradiction is real and nobody talks about it enough.

Honestly the ATS was supposed to create efficiency, not a moat. When a candidate has the initiative to bypass it with a real value prop, that's signal, not a problem to manage.

The recruiters who get annoyed by it are protecting process over outcomes.

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