interviewing again

I attended an interview a little while back. No I'm not seeking new opportunities. I'm getting settled in with a new, better team since January and things are going pretty well so far.

The team is looking to add a new person to backfill for turnover. A candidate got through the first interviews with HR and the team lead. The TL asked the developers to do the next interview. It was a good interview I thought. The candidate was pretty solid and I thought he came across pretty well. Myself and the other developers had some probing questions. After the interview the team lead escorted the candidate out and we had a quick meeting to give the instant feedback and offer a thumbs up or thumbs down hiring recommendation.

It's a good experience to be on the other side of the desk. I didn't think I'd get to do any more interviews. In the first couple of years with the company I did a number of interviews for everything from co-op student through to team lead. I enjoyed doing them and I believe I was good at it. Then one day HR announced that in order to do interviews we had to go to some sensitivity / political correctness training class. I of course declined and that was the end of interviewing. I'm not sure what happened between three years ago and today, I didn't bring it up when the TL mentioned about us doing an interview.

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I'm glad the disastrous HR policy is apparently no more. The closest I heard to a rationale at the time was something about what if a rejected candidate comes back with a lawsuit? yes let's talk about that. The company is large, with thousands of employees. So it's safe to say there have been around 100,000 interviews. Of these how many lawsuits have there been? Probably zero, none that I ever heard of. In the worst case even if some settlement ended up being paid to a troll lawyer then we can quantify the cost of these settlements over the population of interviews. And in the worst case the cost is probably about $1 an interview for these theoretical lawsuits.

Now let's compare that to the cost of a bad hire. Even for an entry level programmer or tester the cost of a single bad hire is staggering, well into the tens of thousands. And at the intermediate level and above it's certainly upwards of and into six figures. So what's more important financially, avoiding some imaginary theoretical small lawsuit that legal/HR would have to deal with, or avoiding a bad hire that development and the entire company would have to deal with.

Obviously the value of avoiding bad hires is orders of magnitude more important (and hazardous, as bad candidates are many and can often get quite deep into the recruiting process and even all the way on board). Yet HR/legal had the power they added this policy in order to make their lives theoretically easier. The term for this business antipattern is local optimization, where some department will put in some new rule or procedure that makes their workflow easier or faster while the overall cost to the business as a whole is worse off.