21 ms·

Inside Automattic's Remote Hiring Process

150 points by caiobegotti 11y ago

jasode 11y ago
In that time I’ve reviewed a total of 251 resumes. 63 of those have gone on to an interview (25% of applications received) That statistic stuck out to me and it looks really high. When I've gone through resumes for technical positions, less than 5% looked like something we'd want to set up an interview for. I'm guessing places like Google and Facebook interview less than 1% of their stacks of resumes. Is anyone else in that 25% acceptance range for interviewing programming positions?
- balac 11y ago
  It seems like the asynchronous approach that they take to interviews makes it easier to do more of them.
- sandyarmstrong 11y ago
  The asynchronous text interview seems less expensive in both time and money for Automattic. Perhaps that lets them get away with a higher interview rate?
- startlaunch 11y ago
  Note: This is after a pre-screen from Matt Mullenweg (Automattic's founder & CEO). Matt only passes on the applications that look good to him. Hence the high ratio.
- dudul 11y ago
  May also depend on how they got the resume. People applying in reaction to an ad? Recruiters? The "quality"of the resumes may depend on the source.
- gnicholas 11y ago
  This is probably because the resumes that the writer receives have already been pre-screened by the CEO. I tend to think that this pre-screening likely means that they are underinclusive—if anything—in moving candidates through the process. That is probably OK for a company like Automattic, which gets tons of resumes. But for a startup that has less name recognition, it could be more of a problem. Very interest read, overall!
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
tyingq 11y ago
Cutting to the chase, they seem to depend heavily on a month long trial period, where the work is performed as a contract resource versus an employee, at a $25/hour rate.
- learc83 11y ago
  Why such a low rate? This seems like it would automatically disqualify any but the most desperate job seekers.
  - tyingq 11y ago
    $25/hour as a straight invoice (subject to self-employment tax), is roughly equivalent to a $40k/year salary at a company that gives -0- benefits, at all. I have no idea if this has any correlation to the salary they ultimately offer. You're right though...it would seem to narrow the field down to those willing to severely undervalue their work for at least 30 days.
    - startlaunch 11y ago
      Nope. There's no correlation with the actual salary.
    - FireBeyond 11y ago
      Yeah - say you're working already and making, say $90K as a developer already. You're going to be taxed 25-28% of this $25/hr at the federal level alone. Money is money, but I could think of more things I could be doing than work for a highly profitable company for what might about to $15-20/hr take home pay.
      - nickpsecurity 11y ago
        "Yeah - say you're working already and making, say $90K as a developer already. You're going to be taxed 25-28% of this $25/hr at the federal level alone." That's a good point. Never even occurred to me.
  - 11y ago
raverbashing 11y ago
Well, in essence: Nothing there is difficult, people just need to think outside (the tiny) box they live in. Especially HR drones But still, the classic answer "not being a great fit" reeks of cynicism.
Killswitch 11y ago
> Once I fire off a contract, I’ll post a comment on our internal hiring P2 to give HR a heads up that a trial contract will be incoming shortly. > NOTE: P2 is a WordPress theme that makes threaded discussions incredibly simple. We use P2 for a large portion of our internal communication. > I’ll then create a new private WordPress.com blog and invite the applicant to be an editor. This is where I’ll post the project brief. This is also where I’ll move the conversation for the remainder of the trial. I understand WordPress is their business, but I feel that using WordPress for internal chat and interview board is kind of weird.
- georgestephanis 11y ago
  We also use Slack extensively, but P2s are a pretty solid choice for us (we used to have the unofficial slogan "more p2s than people!") -- it makes onboarding really easy, as the full history is easily searchable and you don't need to forward emails to new people or the like. It also defaults communication to open, which is super nice.
darylfritz 11y ago
> Note: Replying to applicants takes top priority over every other responsibility I have. Although I don't care for his example rejection letter, I like that they actually respond to applicants whether they interview them or not. It's nice to get feedback that your CV was actually read and reviewed by a human.
- poopsintub 11y ago
  I applied and had to follow-up a month later to receive that notice. They completely ignored me until I applied for a 'second' time.
funkysquid 11y ago
"consider re-applying as your skills and contributions to open source projects grow and expand." It's not us - it's you. I'm surprised they feel the need to blame the candidate, especially since I'd guess experience isn't always the issue.
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  I've got that kind of response from various places a number of times. You can't take it personally.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
Aside from trial payrate, the overall process seems really good. I'd like to see experiments in this method in other companies. Maybe even in large companies at the branch or store level with manager taking place of CEO in pre-approvals. The more interesting part, though, is questions to gain the most insight. There are forums where experts in marketing, site optimization, etc detail the results of their experiments to show what had real value and what didn't. They become sets of tactics one can throw at new, but similar, problems. If it doesn't exist already, hiring people should create such a site for coming up with assessment questions and tactics. Curated by good moderators and industry veterans if possible. Thoughts? Existing examples?
wheaties 11y ago
That works for everyone except those who would have to declare to their employer that they're working on the side, for whom they're working and on what. Also, there are places in the US which allow an employer to claim any ideas related to your occupation that occur both on the job and off it (i.e. any code a developer writes, period.) I'm assuming that type of thing is a no go and leave off a larger chunk of candidates than most people would be willing to admit.
- thisjustinm 11y ago
  I know there are places where that truly is a requirement to employment but I've twice successfully negotiated (once at a startup, once at an ad agency) those clauses out of my contract and I highly suggest others at least try to. It resulted in a few awkward conversations with HR / legal but I stood my ground and insisted that them owning my entire life was unfair and said I was happy to have them own my output during work hours but nothing more. If they don't come around I'd consider it a red flag.
  - crdoconnor 11y ago
    >I know there are places where that truly is a requirement to employment but I've twice successfully negotiated (once at a startup, once at an ad agency) those clauses out of my contract and I highly suggest others at least try to. I don't do this any more. I realized after a couple of these jobs that this level of explicit disrespect written into a contract pretty much tells you all you need to know about working there before you've even joined. Now I just pass politely and move on. The pay at places that would try and ram that in there was never that great anyway.
    - fweespeech 11y ago
      > I don't do this any more. I realized after a couple of these jobs that this level of explicit disrespect written into a contract pretty much tells you all you need to know about working there before you've even joined. Tbh, we had this come up when we purchased and I negotiated it out of my "new" hiring contract successfully. So far everyone I have on LinkedIn at #ParentCompany has quit but my little isolated bubble trundles on largely immune to such problems as long as we hit our sales/profit numbers. So I suspect you are correct in some cases but you can still sit in protected bubbles that have that in the contract AND are still worth working for.
ck2 11y ago
Matt used to put in the wordpress.com page headers something like "if you are looking at this you should apply" But that was when he only had like 12 people working for him. (edit: it's still there on every page served a decade later) Look at just a handful of people in 2005 http://web.archive.org/web/20051223160551/http://automattic.com/about/ http://web.archive.org/web/20051223160551/http://automattic.... a dozen in 2006 http://web.archive.org/web/20061225011025/http://automattic.com/about/ http://web.archive.org/web/20061225011025/http://automattic.... to the insanity of today https://automattic.com/map/ https://automattic.com/map/ and still Automattic is mostly a one-trick pony, it's 100% WordPress all the way down. Even when Matt had a chance to have a second program with bbPress and fix many of the nightmares with wordpress, he doubled-back and had them rewrite it into an insanely bloated plugin for wordpress instead.
- fweespeech 11y ago
  https://automattic.com/ https://automattic.com/ PollDaddy, Simperium, etc. aren't WP.
- georgestephanis 11y ago
  Eh, bbPress used to be on BackPress, which was a relatively unmaintained fork of the functional core of WordPress -- rather than having it run on unmaintained software or duplicating effort by pulling code across, it was changed to a plugin -- which is now much easier to set up and share users and content with your main site. It was a good change. Also, while WordPress.com is WordPress some of the way down, some of our other stuff is anything but. We've been migrating to much more API-driven functionality, and the current WordPress.com dashboard (codenamed Calypso) is purely Javascript, based in React, and fully open source. You can download and run it yourself if you like -- https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso And yes, as noted, Simperium/Simplenote, Cloudup, PollDaddy, Gravatar, others -- these aren't WordPress.
  - ck2 11y ago
    bbPress originally was a standalone forum written by Matt over one Christmas and greatly improved by a few other folks over a few years. It was exponentially faster than wordpress and fixed a great deal of WP legacy nightmare. Then Matt ruined it by having them create backpress and porting it to that. Then he destroyed it by making it into a wordpress plugin and just kept the name even though it was completely different. (I'm somewhat of a bbpress standalone "expert" perhaps the last one for what little it is worth)
vincentbarr 11y ago
> At any point in time, Matt knows better than anyone else which roles in the company have the greatest need for additional resources. I'm skeptical of this statement. It seems to rest on many unreliable assumptions (e.g. at a busy company, it seems that a team lead may know better than the CEO when his team needs additional resources to deliver). Other than that, I love their approach to interviewing: casual, asynchronous communication. When people are actively seeking a new role, they may not be the best version of themselves. They may be stressed, feeling frustrated, dealing with a life event, and attempting to conduct a job search on the side. This gives such candidates a better chance to be able to put a better foot forward IMO.
- georgestephanis 11y ago
  > I'm skeptical of this statement. It seems to rest on many unreliable assumptions (e.g. at a busy company, it seems that a team lead may know better than the CEO when his team needs additional resources to deliver). As a team lead at Automattic, pretty much all of us have regular chats with Matt -- some on bi-weekly group hangouts, others casual private conversations in Slack -- but we all communicate our personnel needs and concerns to him, and sometimes the solution isn't "Hire a new person for X squad" -- it may be take someone looking for a team switch and shift them around internally. Having actually experienced this in practice, Matt really is stellar at making sure we have the people we need.
Animats 11y ago
Someone needs to program Watson to get itself hired via this system. AI will have arrived when AI systems can get hired for remote jobs, competing directly with humans.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  That's great. Should try a chatterbot first as a Turing test for HR department. If they think it's real, they're too robotic to work for.
josep2 11y ago
I interviewed, made it to the paid project stage and got cut loose. Since then I've contributed to a number of open source projects and built some great things in production. Would now be a good time to apply again?
- dplgk 11y ago
  yes

150 points by caiobegotti 11y ago

In that time I’ve reviewed a total of 251 resumes. 63 of those have gone on to an interview (25% of applications received) That statistic stuck out to me and it looks really high. When I've gone through resumes for technical positions, less than 5% looked like something we'd want to set up an interview for. I'm guessing places like Google and Facebook interview less than 1% of their stacks of resumes. Is anyone else in that 25% acceptance range for interviewing programming positions?

balac 11y ago
It seems like the asynchronous approach that they take to interviews makes it easier to do more of them.
sandyarmstrong 11y ago
The asynchronous text interview seems less expensive in both time and money for Automattic. Perhaps that lets them get away with a higher interview rate?
startlaunch 11y ago
Note: This is after a pre-screen from Matt Mullenweg (Automattic's founder & CEO). Matt only passes on the applications that look good to him. Hence the high ratio.
dudul 11y ago
May also depend on how they got the resume. People applying in reaction to an ad? Recruiters? The "quality"of the resumes may depend on the source.
gnicholas 11y ago
This is probably because the resumes that the writer receives have already been pre-screened by the CEO. I tend to think that this pre-screening likely means that they are underinclusive—if anything—in moving candidates through the process. That is probably OK for a company like Automattic, which gets tons of resumes. But for a startup that has less name recognition, it could be more of a problem. Very interest read, overall!
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

tyingq 11y ago

Cutting to the chase, they seem to depend heavily on a month long trial period, where the work is performed as a contract resource versus an employee, at a $25/hour rate.

learc83 11y ago
Why such a low rate? This seems like it would automatically disqualify any but the most desperate job seekers.
- tyingq 11y ago
  $25/hour as a straight invoice (subject to self-employment tax), is roughly equivalent to a $40k/year salary at a company that gives -0- benefits, at all. I have no idea if this has any correlation to the salary they ultimately offer. You're right though...it would seem to narrow the field down to those willing to severely undervalue their work for at least 30 days.
  - startlaunch 11y ago
    Nope. There's no correlation with the actual salary.
  - FireBeyond 11y ago
    Yeah - say you're working already and making, say $90K as a developer already. You're going to be taxed 25-28% of this $25/hr at the federal level alone. Money is money, but I could think of more things I could be doing than work for a highly profitable company for what might about to $15-20/hr take home pay.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      "Yeah - say you're working already and making, say $90K as a developer already. You're going to be taxed 25-28% of this $25/hr at the federal level alone." That's a good point. Never even occurred to me.
- 11y ago

raverbashing 11y ago

Well, in essence: Nothing there is difficult, people just need to think outside (the tiny) box they live in. Especially HR drones But still, the classic answer "not being a great fit" reeks of cynicism.

Killswitch 11y ago

> Once I fire off a contract, I’ll post a comment on our internal hiring P2 to give HR a heads up that a trial contract will be incoming shortly. > NOTE: P2 is a WordPress theme that makes threaded discussions incredibly simple. We use P2 for a large portion of our internal communication. > I’ll then create a new private WordPress.com blog and invite the applicant to be an editor. This is where I’ll post the project brief. This is also where I’ll move the conversation for the remainder of the trial. I understand WordPress is their business, but I feel that using WordPress for internal chat and interview board is kind of weird.

georgestephanis 11y ago
We also use Slack extensively, but P2s are a pretty solid choice for us (we used to have the unofficial slogan "more p2s than people!") -- it makes onboarding really easy, as the full history is easily searchable and you don't need to forward emails to new people or the like. It also defaults communication to open, which is super nice.

darylfritz 11y ago

> Note: Replying to applicants takes top priority over every other responsibility I have. Although I don't care for his example rejection letter, I like that they actually respond to applicants whether they interview them or not. It's nice to get feedback that your CV was actually read and reviewed by a human.

poopsintub 11y ago
I applied and had to follow-up a month later to receive that notice. They completely ignored me until I applied for a 'second' time.

funkysquid 11y ago

"consider re-applying as your skills and contributions to open source projects grow and expand." It's not us - it's you. I'm surprised they feel the need to blame the candidate, especially since I'd guess experience isn't always the issue.

voltagex_ 11y ago
I've got that kind of response from various places a number of times. You can't take it personally.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

Aside from trial payrate, the overall process seems really good. I'd like to see experiments in this method in other companies. Maybe even in large companies at the branch or store level with manager taking place of CEO in pre-approvals. The more interesting part, though, is questions to gain the most insight. There are forums where experts in marketing, site optimization, etc detail the results of their experiments to show what had real value and what didn't. They become sets of tactics one can throw at new, but similar, problems. If it doesn't exist already, hiring people should create such a site for coming up with assessment questions and tactics. Curated by good moderators and industry veterans if possible. Thoughts? Existing examples?

wheaties 11y ago

That works for everyone except those who would have to declare to their employer that they're working on the side, for whom they're working and on what. Also, there are places in the US which allow an employer to claim any ideas related to your occupation that occur both on the job and off it (i.e. any code a developer writes, period.) I'm assuming that type of thing is a no go and leave off a larger chunk of candidates than most people would be willing to admit.

thisjustinm 11y ago
I know there are places where that truly is a requirement to employment but I've twice successfully negotiated (once at a startup, once at an ad agency) those clauses out of my contract and I highly suggest others at least try to. It resulted in a few awkward conversations with HR / legal but I stood my ground and insisted that them owning my entire life was unfair and said I was happy to have them own my output during work hours but nothing more. If they don't come around I'd consider it a red flag.
- crdoconnor 11y ago
  >I know there are places where that truly is a requirement to employment but I've twice successfully negotiated (once at a startup, once at an ad agency) those clauses out of my contract and I highly suggest others at least try to. I don't do this any more. I realized after a couple of these jobs that this level of explicit disrespect written into a contract pretty much tells you all you need to know about working there before you've even joined. Now I just pass politely and move on. The pay at places that would try and ram that in there was never that great anyway.
  - fweespeech 11y ago
    > I don't do this any more. I realized after a couple of these jobs that this level of explicit disrespect written into a contract pretty much tells you all you need to know about working there before you've even joined. Tbh, we had this come up when we purchased and I negotiated it out of my "new" hiring contract successfully. So far everyone I have on LinkedIn at #ParentCompany has quit but my little isolated bubble trundles on largely immune to such problems as long as we hit our sales/profit numbers. So I suspect you are correct in some cases but you can still sit in protected bubbles that have that in the contract AND are still worth working for.

ck2 11y ago

Matt used to put in the wordpress.com page headers something like "if you are looking at this you should apply" But that was when he only had like 12 people working for him. (edit: it's still there on every page served a decade later) Look at just a handful of people in 2005 http://web.archive.org/web/20051223160551/http://automattic.com/about/ http://web.archive.org/web/20051223160551/http://automattic.... a dozen in 2006 http://web.archive.org/web/20061225011025/http://automattic.com/about/ http://web.archive.org/web/20061225011025/http://automattic.... to the insanity of today https://automattic.com/map/ https://automattic.com/map/ and still Automattic is mostly a one-trick pony, it's 100% WordPress all the way down. Even when Matt had a chance to have a second program with bbPress and fix many of the nightmares with wordpress, he doubled-back and had them rewrite it into an insanely bloated plugin for wordpress instead.

fweespeech 11y ago
https://automattic.com/ https://automattic.com/ PollDaddy, Simperium, etc. aren't WP.
georgestephanis 11y ago
Eh, bbPress used to be on BackPress, which was a relatively unmaintained fork of the functional core of WordPress -- rather than having it run on unmaintained software or duplicating effort by pulling code across, it was changed to a plugin -- which is now much easier to set up and share users and content with your main site. It was a good change. Also, while WordPress.com is WordPress some of the way down, some of our other stuff is anything but. We've been migrating to much more API-driven functionality, and the current WordPress.com dashboard (codenamed Calypso) is purely Javascript, based in React, and fully open source. You can download and run it yourself if you like -- https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso And yes, as noted, Simperium/Simplenote, Cloudup, PollDaddy, Gravatar, others -- these aren't WordPress.
- ck2 11y ago
  bbPress originally was a standalone forum written by Matt over one Christmas and greatly improved by a few other folks over a few years. It was exponentially faster than wordpress and fixed a great deal of WP legacy nightmare. Then Matt ruined it by having them create backpress and porting it to that. Then he destroyed it by making it into a wordpress plugin and just kept the name even though it was completely different. (I'm somewhat of a bbpress standalone "expert" perhaps the last one for what little it is worth)

vincentbarr 11y ago

> At any point in time, Matt knows better than anyone else which roles in the company have the greatest need for additional resources. I'm skeptical of this statement. It seems to rest on many unreliable assumptions (e.g. at a busy company, it seems that a team lead may know better than the CEO when his team needs additional resources to deliver). Other than that, I love their approach to interviewing: casual, asynchronous communication. When people are actively seeking a new role, they may not be the best version of themselves. They may be stressed, feeling frustrated, dealing with a life event, and attempting to conduct a job search on the side. This gives such candidates a better chance to be able to put a better foot forward IMO.

georgestephanis 11y ago
> I'm skeptical of this statement. It seems to rest on many unreliable assumptions (e.g. at a busy company, it seems that a team lead may know better than the CEO when his team needs additional resources to deliver). As a team lead at Automattic, pretty much all of us have regular chats with Matt -- some on bi-weekly group hangouts, others casual private conversations in Slack -- but we all communicate our personnel needs and concerns to him, and sometimes the solution isn't "Hire a new person for X squad" -- it may be take someone looking for a team switch and shift them around internally. Having actually experienced this in practice, Matt really is stellar at making sure we have the people we need.

Animats 11y ago

Someone needs to program Watson to get itself hired via this system. AI will have arrived when AI systems can get hired for remote jobs, competing directly with humans.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
That's great. Should try a chatterbot first as a Turing test for HR department. If they think it's real, they're too robotic to work for.

josep2 11y ago

I interviewed, made it to the paid project stage and got cut loose. Since then I've contributed to a number of open source projects and built some great things in production. Would now be a good time to apply again?

dplgk 11y ago
yes