5 ms·

Stop hazing your potential hires: Hiring at Spreedly

14 points by jusben1369 10y ago

TempleOSV409 10y ago
You are a serious dumb fuck in denial.
pmiller2 10y ago
This is the kind of post that makes me want to apply to their company. Too bad they're in North Carolina and I'm in California.
- briannevillano 10y ago
  We've been adding more remote peeps, so keep us in mind in over the next 6 mos - year. https://spreedly.com/jobs https://spreedly.com/jobs
  - pmiller2 10y ago
    Good to know! :)
outworlder 10y ago
That's refreshing. Just the other day I was asking at another HN thread how employed people are supposed to be going to full day interviews (sometimes in different states!). "take sick days". No, that's BS. The only situation that I think it would be worthwhile is if both parties were as certain as they could be at that point that the candidate would be actually selected. Then it would make sense to give the applicant some actual work and allow they to sit with their likely future peers. My memory may be failing me, but I seem to recall Joel Spolsky talking about doing this.
- chrisseaton 10y ago
  Why would you need to take sick days anyway? Just take a normal day off surely?
  - teh_klev 10y ago
    Possibly because in many countries such as the US ten days per year of paid annual leave is the norm. You'll burn through that fairly quick on full day interviews.
    - chrisseaton 10y ago
      Maybe as part of the offer the hiring company could re-imburse you as many holiday days as it took to get the job (including interviews at other companies). Or maybe companies should offer interview slots on a weekend (obviously give the interviewer time off in lieu).
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    One way or another, "sick days + vacation days" is strictly (and severely) bounded in most U.S. companies. You only have so many days in the year for dentists appointments, going with your kids to their appointments, etc. So the bottom line is that full day interviews are quite expensive to take for most people.
a_small_island 10y ago
Not sure what's so revolutionary here. Seems the process is this: 1) Call with "CTO", who answers any questions about the company. Sounds like a standard phone screen. 2) Work sample, the company now wants you to prove you are worthy of talking to them again. 3) Another phone call, this time with "hiring manager" to discuss "compensation" - which I will presume means they will ask you how much you're currently making or expect to make. Do they divulge their salary bands first? 4) Onsite. My assumption: once their team becomes bigger, the CTO call will be replaced by someone in HR and they will further standardize their process to the current market dynamics. And I still didn't read what was so revolutionary, maybe because they don't do "puzzles" and instead make you spend hours on "work samples"?
- ntalbott 10y ago
  Author here: you're right, nothing revolutionary here in technique. Most/all of our actual process is ripped straight out of http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/. But my experience, over the course of Spreedly interacting with 100+ candidates over the past few years, is that just doing pretty standard things well, with attention to detail, is in itself revolutionary. We hear story after story from candidates about other companies they have or are interviewing at that are completely disrespectful in how they're treating candidates. Whether this is cargo culting, lack of time to do things right, or a righteous belief that it's OK to treat candidates poorly, I can't say, but it's pretty disgraceful. So, I wrote this little thing both since I needed to write it down for my coworkers anyhow - this is how we do things, showing respect for candidates by keeping reciprocity, incrementalism, and relevance in view - but also in the hopes that it's one more brick in a wall of "you're worthy of respect" for candidates. The post itself wasn't about our actual process, though I did use examples from it; I hope to write about the actual process later. But I will note that my experience of phone screens is apparently very different from yours: I've experience them as a chance to pre-grill and filter candidates, and ours is 100% not that. I ask zero questions, but instead just talk about what we do and answer any and all questions candidates have. You're right that doing an intro call with each candidate isn't scaling, but we're not replacing me with HR, but instead have a live weekly intro call that candidates can join where I talk about the company and they can ask questions via text and I answer them on the spot. And for what it's worth: "the current market dynamics" in tech hiring SUCK. So long as I have any say, we'll be playing moneyball by ignoring them and instead just continuing to iterate based on what actually works.
SatvikBeri 10y ago
Yeah, agree with a lot of this. I've tried pretty hard to take the feedback I've seen on Hacker News and improve the hiring process for Data Scientists at my job–in particular, we make hire/no hire decisions based primarily on take-home assessments that are heavily based on our real work, have standardized our interview questions, invest time in answering applicants' questions early in the process, and try to minimize the number of onsite interviews. It's a bit challenging–no matter what you do, someone is going to be unhappy with your interview process–but it seems to work much better than the default of asking a bunch of algorithmic questions on a whiteboard.

14 points by jusben1369 10y ago

You are a serious dumb fuck in denial.

This is the kind of post that makes me want to apply to their company. Too bad they're in North Carolina and I'm in California.

briannevillano 10y ago
We've been adding more remote peeps, so keep us in mind in over the next 6 mos - year. https://spreedly.com/jobs https://spreedly.com/jobs
- pmiller2 10y ago
  Good to know! :)

outworlder 10y ago

That's refreshing. Just the other day I was asking at another HN thread how employed people are supposed to be going to full day interviews (sometimes in different states!). "take sick days". No, that's BS. The only situation that I think it would be worthwhile is if both parties were as certain as they could be at that point that the candidate would be actually selected. Then it would make sense to give the applicant some actual work and allow they to sit with their likely future peers. My memory may be failing me, but I seem to recall Joel Spolsky talking about doing this.

chrisseaton 10y ago
Why would you need to take sick days anyway? Just take a normal day off surely?
- teh_klev 10y ago
  Possibly because in many countries such as the US ten days per year of paid annual leave is the norm. You'll burn through that fairly quick on full day interviews.
  - chrisseaton 10y ago
    Maybe as part of the offer the hiring company could re-imburse you as many holiday days as it took to get the job (including interviews at other companies). Or maybe companies should offer interview slots on a weekend (obviously give the interviewer time off in lieu).
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  One way or another, "sick days + vacation days" is strictly (and severely) bounded in most U.S. companies. You only have so many days in the year for dentists appointments, going with your kids to their appointments, etc. So the bottom line is that full day interviews are quite expensive to take for most people.

a_small_island 10y ago

Not sure what's so revolutionary here. Seems the process is this: 1) Call with "CTO", who answers any questions about the company. Sounds like a standard phone screen. 2) Work sample, the company now wants you to prove you are worthy of talking to them again. 3) Another phone call, this time with "hiring manager" to discuss "compensation" - which I will presume means they will ask you how much you're currently making or expect to make. Do they divulge their salary bands first? 4) Onsite. My assumption: once their team becomes bigger, the CTO call will be replaced by someone in HR and they will further standardize their process to the current market dynamics. And I still didn't read what was so revolutionary, maybe because they don't do "puzzles" and instead make you spend hours on "work samples"?

ntalbott 10y ago
Author here: you're right, nothing revolutionary here in technique. Most/all of our actual process is ripped straight out of http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/ http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/. But my experience, over the course of Spreedly interacting with 100+ candidates over the past few years, is that just doing pretty standard things well, with attention to detail, is in itself revolutionary. We hear story after story from candidates about other companies they have or are interviewing at that are completely disrespectful in how they're treating candidates. Whether this is cargo culting, lack of time to do things right, or a righteous belief that it's OK to treat candidates poorly, I can't say, but it's pretty disgraceful. So, I wrote this little thing both since I needed to write it down for my coworkers anyhow - this is how we do things, showing respect for candidates by keeping reciprocity, incrementalism, and relevance in view - but also in the hopes that it's one more brick in a wall of "you're worthy of respect" for candidates. The post itself wasn't about our actual process, though I did use examples from it; I hope to write about the actual process later. But I will note that my experience of phone screens is apparently very different from yours: I've experience them as a chance to pre-grill and filter candidates, and ours is 100% not that. I ask zero questions, but instead just talk about what we do and answer any and all questions candidates have. You're right that doing an intro call with each candidate isn't scaling, but we're not replacing me with HR, but instead have a live weekly intro call that candidates can join where I talk about the company and they can ask questions via text and I answer them on the spot. And for what it's worth: "the current market dynamics" in tech hiring SUCK. So long as I have any say, we'll be playing moneyball by ignoring them and instead just continuing to iterate based on what actually works.

SatvikBeri 10y ago

Yeah, agree with a lot of this. I've tried pretty hard to take the feedback I've seen on Hacker News and improve the hiring process for Data Scientists at my job–in particular, we make hire/no hire decisions based primarily on take-home assessments that are heavily based on our real work, have standardized our interview questions, invest time in answering applicants' questions early in the process, and try to minimize the number of onsite interviews. It's a bit challenging–no matter what you do, someone is going to be unhappy with your interview process–but it seems to work much better than the default of asking a bunch of algorithmic questions on a whiteboard.