The Interview Process is Broken

Something I saw on LinkedIn today reminded me of how broken the traditional interview process is. Let's see:

Step One

You apply for a position for which you may or may not be a perfect candidate. Let's say, you are - but your resume is not necessarily a reflection of that. You can get filtered out automatically based on an overall lack of keywords, end up at the bottom of the metaphorical resume pile if you don't have a LinkedIn Premium: Careers or the like, and essentially not even get considered at all for no real reason.

Step Two

Let's say you got lucky and got reached out to for an interview. It's largely an arbitrary process - the interviewer may or may not be in a mood for this, know what to ask for, or even be a good interviewer (it's a skill). Additionally, it is easier to pretend this isn't a thing, but it is: they may also simply not like you, and base their decision on that.

Step Three

Repeat Step Two until you've reached a person who most definitely did not know or care about this. As part of my interview for a senior managerial cyber risk position in an undisclosed company, I've been asked to code a Texas Holdem poker game using C# in real-time. As a matter of fact, I did do that and got hired due to possessing an unlikely combination of an enterprise software engineering background and a decent knowledge of the game, but that's beside the point.

Step Four

If you've reached this point, congratulations - it's time to discuss compensation. A typical company would ask you how much you were receiving in your previous role and then base their offer on that figure plus a marginal increase. The issue here is that a typical white-collar professional is grossly underpaid throughout their career. It starts in college: you don't have any experience, you are desperate-ish for a job and ripe for employers to take financial advantage of. As a result, it is very likely that you are well underpaid in your first real job, thus setting an excellent precedent for being underpaid throughout your entire career thanks to the abovementioned vicious cycle.

This doesn't sound good to me, and there must be a better way. Sending out interview questions in advance? An objective skills test, or a case study? How can we fix the interview process? Let me know in the comments.