Do you do all day interviews for 'free' or do you invoice the company?

Surprising a company with an invoice is immature, waste of your time, certainly not going to get you the job, and will burn bridges.

I answered your question. Expect an invoice at my hourly rate.

A job interview is a (2-way) sales call, you'd do it as an investment. The better your product, the less of these sales calls you have to make with different "customers", to land a deal.

Funny. But seriously, the way you manage this is to build marketing and sales into your rates. Your rate should built bottom-up: direct cost + indirect cost. The indirect costs include time off, marketing/sales, benefits, admin, a little profit, etc. Grab a book on consulting for an explanation of how to do this. Good luck.

The company would just send back an invoice for the cost of recruiting, HR, background checking, etc. and the prep and interview time of the engineers interviewing the candidate, who would definitely come out on the losing end of that deal.

That’s the most insane thing i’ve ever heard.

They’ll often offer the pay you but demanding money for an interview is crazy.

If someone comes interview with me and it turns out their resume is “padded a bit”, I don’t invoice them for wasting my time.

Think of it more like a first date and you each pay for your own meal.

I like the idea. The caveat is that if at the end of the day the output isn't usable, there's no payout.

Seriously though, I've only done even a half-day interview if there was at least a 50% chance I'd want to work for the company at the end of the day. I'm about 5 for 7. One that fell through, I wanted to work at but their HR went into freeze and I ended up working for a spin-off company. Another I spent way too long on an obvious recruiting open coding contest so counted it.

I don't know, maybe if you are a rocket scientist and one of one million in your speciality.

The rest of us can refuse the interview, demand an invoice or whatever, but there are others to take our place without those headaches. I understand the pain as I was a consultant and got upset at losing a day's wages on nit-picky and uncertain interviewers (especially for a contract), but there's not much to do about it.

A whole day of interviews is very abnormally long. I've interviewed for CTO roles at SMEs and never spent more than 3 hours. Companies will usually break it up into rounds.

That said, interviews serve both parties to some extent. You want to know if you like the company, too.

If the company is inconsiderate enough to demand a whole day of unpaid time, perhaps the culture is a bad fit to begin with.

By the same token, if they interview you, offer you a job and you turn it down, do you owe them the wages of people who spent time interviewing you?

I do like the idea of them paying you for your time. I dislike sending a thank you letter, I always think they owe me a thank you letter.

This reminds me of a quote I heard during the dot.com bubble. "If I can't expect 1000% return I'm not investing in a company". It's such a high level of expectation that you just know a correction is coming.

No that’s dumb

Interview at a company that pays for it if you want to be paid. Airflow offered me $500 upon acceptance of their coding challenge. I would never ask, that’s dumb. If in the 0.001% chance they do pay, you will cost yourself the job.

My company takes people out for lunch as part of the interview.

Why kill your job opportunity by doing that? Might as well stay home.

I mean, if you invoice the company they won't pay it, so why does it matter?

An all-day interview is okay in my books, it's like an open house in a way.