Ask HN: Do you think companies should pay applicants for interviewing them?

I don't think companies "should", but my companies do when we give people take-home projects to assess programming skill. Our preference is to do contract-to-hire, but not every applicant can assume that risk.

Thanks to this post, my companies will now pay applicants for interviews as well. Time is time.

I've honed my hiring process over the years, so we only spend more than 15 min with 3-4 candidates at most (and one of them is always a home run). It won't cost much to pay 3-4 people.

The problem is how much to pay? And does paying help the candidate at all. Usually the candidate is taking some kind of leave, and is already being paid so they don't desperately need the money. I think better than paying is to have equal consideration.

For example if a company gets 100 devs to do a 2hr online dev test, then picks 1 for an interview then they have generated 200 hrs of work in the community but only at a cost of 2 hr of their time. This is like 'spamming' in a sense. And this is what can waste a lot of time for candidates. They should have filters before those stages to minimise the time of candidates that they waste.

There are lots of jurisdictions & employment contracts that would require pre-approval from a candidates existing employer before they could accept that contract.

You can imagine why that wouldn’t be ideal.

I think you raise a good point, but in general no.

No, for what’s considered the classical interview of one or two phone screenings + one day onsite. No because I think it’s already very expensive for companies (both the process and accounting for errors), and it would create a false incentive for people to just randomly shop for interviews just to get paid an extra.

Probably yes, though, for everything that goes beyond. For example, the “classical” come for a day to work on w/ the team, or build this feature, or solve this problem and prepare a presentation.

It would be nice if there was an escrow platform that would pay the applicants for their time if the company failed to give a response in an agreed upon time span. This way, applicants would be compensated for all the time/lost opportunities of the “Well give you a response very soon” that never arrives.

Some of the places I interviewed gave gift cards between 100-200 bucks + expenses.

I think you're expecting someone to give over an hour of their time then yes.

I've had companies compensate me for interview time before and for me it certainly improves my likelihood to accept an offer. Knowing a company will be respectful of your time is important.

What do you mean by "no result"? Do you mean no communication or feedback about why the candidate didn't get the role? Also curious how much compensation you would suggest for an interview?

Oh gees. I've only recently spent a lot of time on the interviewer side of the table, and realized how much resume inflation there is out there, which doesn't come out until there's an in-depth technical interview. I can only image how much worse this would be if just getting into an in-person interview is incentivized. I see your point, but can't see that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.