All the examples I’m reading so far sound just fine to me. Pushing the limit is when the person making the hiring decision hires someone less-qualified for purely personal reasons, like the kid is the son of their best friend. Or when the hiring manager gets a call from their manager to ignore everybody else and hire the CEO’s kid when there are better candidates available.
“Putting in a good word” or “getting them an interview” are all perfecty reasonable benefits of networking, imho. If my wife’s friend’s cousin’s boyfriend just graduated from Cal with a degree in EE and I help him get a job at my company, my company tells me “thanks” and gives me $5000 for bringing him to their attention. They certainly don’t view it as cronyism. But the flip side is if I was the hiring manager and that kid was unqualified then it would obviously be wrong for me to hire him directly.
Actually some high tech companies have hiring committee to combat the hiring of my relatives or friends kind of thing, friends can refer you to an interview, but still up to you to do well at the interview.
Exactly. There seems to be a complete lack of understanding the difference between recommending family/ friends for a position, and using power to insert them into the position against the explicit desire of the hiring manager.
It is an SOP, as far as I know, to prohibit relatives or people in “intimate relationships” (e.g., GF-BF) from working in positions where one is directly or indirectly reporting to the other. There are no restrictions on non-reporting employment, e.g., the wife can be a group leader in R&D, and the husband could be an accountant…
To recommend, you may pass on a CV to HR, to use power you would call the CEO and hope for him or her to lean on HR.
The example in this thread was calling the CEO after several interviews had taken place. There is no value in that unless it overrides what the HR manager was going to decide.
sorghum, your understanding of how the hiring process in the US works is outdated. The HR manager decides nothing, unless the HR manager also happens to be the “hiring manager” - for a position in the HR department. For all positions, the hiring manager calls the shots - with the input of the team, and in small co’s the team can include the CEO and the VPs. The HR may pass their observations onto the hiring manager as well, if they wish.
DrGoogle, LOL, Google (and Adobe, and MSFT, and etc.) have a specific set of “exams” one has to pass to be hired for certain positions (know that because kiddo’s friends interviewed there). Biotech companies have something similar in their hiring of scientists - a scientist is usually asked to give a 40-50 min presentation about their research, complete with Q&A, to the group. It is an SOP, and not specifically designed to “combat” hiring of relatives.
BB, not set of exams but Google seems to collect the interview answers overtime and review them in the hiring committee. My kid had an interview at Google and that’s how I digged in deeper on their hiring practice.
While I was sleeping- this thread has been busy.
Sorghum- I’m not asking them to hire her. I would be asking that they put in word that someone my friend trusts feels this person would be a great employee. They obviously feel she is qualified for the job. Where I feel it would be helpful is if they narrow it down to a few candidates a recommendation could help.
We pay referral fees to employees all the time. The reason being we prefer candidates who are referred by our employees instead of just anyone off the street. Even after 2-3 rounds of interviews it is still hard for us to really know a candidate. There is nothing better to get someone internal’s stamp of approval.
“Today at 8:58 am
Is it OK if your friend is on the interviewing committee, if they tell you all the questions that are going to be asked, so your kid can prepare?”
Please do not be silly. I have no idea what you are talking about. What “committee”? Here in the US, we have teams, committees are for communists.
Its a tricky decision. The candidate is already well inside the “door”, so there’s no need to call to help with access.
I think I’d leave it alone. Companies that have hiring procedures in place don’t usually love having recommendations come in from left field (sorry, thats what a friend of the CEO’s wife is). If you want to do something, I’d possibly tell my friend that my relative has had several interviews there and that she has really loved and been impressed by the people she’s met. Doing more than that is a risk to the candidacy. And I’d try to do it in passing somehow rather than to have it become clear that conveying that information was the specific reason for the call. If there’s not enough routine contact to allow that, I’d leave it alone.
