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One other aspect of "we only hire the best" that wasn't explored by this article is the practice -- especially common among unicorn companies -- of purposely ca
by leroy_masochist 10y ago
One other aspect of "we only hire the best" that wasn't explored by this article is the practice -- especially common among unicorn companies -- of purposely casting a far wider net than needed, so that their hiring yield on applicants is dauntingly low.
The recruiting process is deliberately set up to yield a lot of false negatives -- i.e., applicants who are qualified on both skill and fit who are rejected for some arbitrary bullshit reason.
I suspect it's largely an effort to mindfuck the employees who do make it through the process. I'm so lucky to be here! Only 3% of applicants even make it to a five-minute founder interview, and only half of them get hired!
- cortesoft 10y agoWell, lots of people have to be rejected for a the not-bullshit reason that there are only n jobs available at the company and n+x people applied. Even if they are all great, x number of people are going to be rejected.
- querulous 10y agothe point is that if you are interviewing 30 people for every hire you are spending way too much time and effort on interviewing. if you had better recruiting funnels you could easily get down to 2 or 3 interviews per hire
- vonmoltke 10y agoIf this were the case, there would not be so much whining from these same companies about talent shortages.
- superuser2 10y agoI'm not so sure. My understanding is the big tech companies hire engineers on a rolling basis and basically take everyone they like. They're not approaching it for the frame of satisfying a requisition for a specific role with the best of the N applicants for it on X date, they're picking up talent as quickly as possible and then sorting out where to place people after the hire/no-hire decision is made.
- mahyarm 10y agoIt's more like there is unlimited demand, and most managers could think of more things to do if they had more staff.
- ex_amazon_se 10y ago> The recruiting process is deliberately set up to yield a lot of false negatives Absolutely. There are a hundred bad candidates for every good one, but large companies reject good ones as well will bullshit justifications for a reason: rejection keep salaries down.
- technofiend 10y agoTry reading The Hard Thing About Hard Things and not rolling your eyes the 10th time Horowitz brags about hiring the best of the best of the best. If you took him literally no other company stood a chance against him since he had a lock on all of Silicon Valley's top talent. Perhaps it builds the perception in those hired they are in fact the best.