>I also got lectured by senior management for exposing them to liability since I didn’t ’go through the whole process’.
I work in an "at will" state. Our 3 people are usually on teams chatting about the interview going on and will decide to end it early and not waste everyone's time if it's not going well. We've never had anyone tell us they were concerned about that. What liability was senior management at your company concerned about?
The same one FAANG used to tell us that we couldn't do it either.
To paraphase "We want to give the candidate every chance to prove themselves, and cutting the interview short gives them a bad impression of the company (and it would make it easier to sue us for unfair discrimination)."
Since it was just a few (or in this case 1) interviews, and that makes it easier to claim that I cut it short because queue whatever protected class. Which, if someone was going to be that kind of jerk to a candidate, I guess doing it on the first interview WOULD be the one, eh? It would just be my word against theirs, instead of x interviewers vs theirs.
And I guess the riskiest type of candidate for that kind of crazy behavior WOULD be the person who felt okay blatantly lying on their resume about such a fundamental fact AND EVEN SHOWING UP FOR THE INTERVIEW, come to think about it.
We didn't get sued in this case though. I think the interviewee was just surprised someone was interviewing him who actually knew how to code.
I literally couldn’t let it happen. The thought was roughly as palatable as intentionally ‘groining’ a coworker on a guardrail or letting a kid walk into traffic.
After getting chewed out, I never walked them out early though.
I guess that is why FAANG told us to not talk between ourselves and put everything into the system for the HC independently - so we wouldn’t know what we were in for, and would give each individual interview a fresh shot without all the anticipated pain and suffering. Makes it easier when you can’t see the nut shot coming I guess?
Makes sense, but yeah - terrible.
To be fair though, out of hundreds of interviews I’ve done, that was top 5ish for bad. Most were much better.
In the late 90s, I worked at a place that would walk people out as soon as we'd reached a hard-no decision. As the first tech interviewer left the room, in the hallway, the second would ask some innocuous yes/no question. ("Hey, my car's at the shop; can you give me a ride over there later?") The answer to that question was whether or not to continue the interview slate [and was almost always "yeah, sure, no problem"]. If it was yes, go into the room and introduce yourself. If it was no, they'd walk off together to find the recruiter who would walk the candidate out.
That place never stopped doing the practice, but other places I've worked (including the current) have decided against that pretty brutal candidate experience. (And, as you say, have also had a policy not to share any information about the candidate's performance until after submitting the write-up and recommendation from the interview.)
