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Here is what they ask: Hi XXXXX! Thank you for reaching out to us, may I ask you how you found us and what peaks your interest in XXXXXX ? You have built some

Here is what they ask: Hi XXXXX! Thank you for reaching out to us, may I ask you how you found us and what peaks your interest in XXXXXX ? You have built some impressive tools, and I think we can offer you a set of great challenges in your daily work. You can find a brief intro to XXXX: https://XXXXX.XXX/onepager.pdf https://XXXXX.XXX/onepager.pdf I will briefly outline the steps of our hiring process so you have all necessary information and know what is going to happen. Luckily, it's not that complicated. As a startup, we can allow our hiring process to be a lot simpler and faster than what you will find at most big companies! We just want to evaluate a few core competences, the rest we can teach you. Step 0: CV Could you please share your CV, including: - date of birth - phone number - physical address - citizenship - marital status - IBAN - Copy of your passport After we collected all information we will start the evaluation process. Please note that if there is some personal information which you prefer not to share yet, that is ok! We hope that you can send this to us before the interview in step 2. Furthermore, any confidential information can be encrypted using my PGP key: https://XXXXX.XXX/pgp.asc https://XXXXX.XXX/pgp.asc Step 1: Challenge We first give all of our candidates a challenge. This challenge is by far our most important means of evaluation, so your effort will be greatly appreciated. Instead of a whiteboard interview, we have chosen for our test to be more similar to the type of work that you will be doing at summitto on a daily basis. That way you know what is awaiting you and we know that you are up for the challenges ahead. Although most of our applicants have been able to finish their challenges in a weekend, we do not set a time limit on any of our challenges, and the time is not taken into account in our evaluation. For us, communicating well and achieving good results are more important than the speed at which you can achieve them. We prefer quality over quantity, same as in our daily business! Step 2: Interview If the results of the challenge are promising, the interview will only be a formality in which you can talk to our team members during two to three interviews. This is really just a social check to see if we like each other and to see whether we can work together for many hours a day in the same room ;) but no more tests or coding required! Step 3: offer You made it. The challenge looks great, we match on a personal level, and you've managed to excite us about your talent. We'll send you an offer as soon as possible, normally within a week, and we will discuss which items and equipment we can order to get you all settled in our office. We're looking forward to working together with you! Secure regards,

deleted 8y ago
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summitto 8y ago
This is not how we wanted to be featured on Hacker News but here it is. First of all let me start by saying: yes, we are legally required to ask all those questions in the Netherlands at a certain point, and to delete all of the data if we don't hire you. Do we have to ask all of this information in the first mail? No! In fact, our only goal was to have an efficient hiring process. Improving privacy is our company's mission, so we took the author of this post very serious, even before we came across this. Although we always made clear this information is optional and can be shared at later stages as well, we did not realize that it could be interpreted by our candidates as if he/she might get rejected if they refuse to share information. We do not want anyone to feel pressured. We therefore went back to the drawing board and changed our procedure. Fortunately we only sent this mail to a handful of people before we realized that this is not the right approach. In the end, what we really wanted to know was: "Are you allowed to work in the EU?" But then we realized why stop there? We improved our process to ensure candidates are only asked to share a minimum amount of data! Feel free to check it out: https://summitto.com/hiringprocess https://summitto.com/hiringprocess As other commenters have already stated, most information we ask is standard and in ~70% of the cases already answered in CVs we receive anyway because most of our applicants come from Germany, the Netherlands or Belgium. We learned now that as we target a global audience those "standard" questions are not a worldwide standard. Some of you were suspicious that we base our hiring decisions on this information. Let me state this very clearly: this requested information was never used to evaluate applicants. Summitto evaluates you only on your coding skills, and nothing else. We point to the fact in our first mail to the author of this post: "Please note that if there is some personal information which you prefer not to share yet, that is ok!" Moreover, we clearly stated this again in a second mail to the author of this post as well. Regarding the IBAN account number: this information is essential to reimburse any flight expenses and of course to pay your salary. For the US citizens in this thread: no, sharing your bank account number in the EU is not comparable to how it works in the US banking system. IBAN numbers are not private or easily exploitable data. Still, we have now scrapped this question from our first email. Although we truly appreciate the author's criticism in this post regarding the threat of theoretically losing his/her privacy, we would like to point out the irony that by complaining without properly anonymizing the data he/she actually violated ours. We value the privacy of all of our candidates. We encourage them to protect the data they send using PGP, so it is encrypted in transit and at rest. Any data which belongs to applicants which were not hired is deleted within 30 days after the last contact.

deleted 8y ago

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summitto 8y ago

This is not how we wanted to be featured on Hacker News but here it is. First of all let me start by saying: yes, we are legally required to ask all those questions in the Netherlands at a certain point, and to delete all of the data if we don't hire you. Do we have to ask all of this information in the first mail? No! In fact, our only goal was to have an efficient hiring process. Improving privacy is our company's mission, so we took the author of this post very serious, even before we came across this. Although we always made clear this information is optional and can be shared at later stages as well, we did not realize that it could be interpreted by our candidates as if he/she might get rejected if they refuse to share information. We do not want anyone to feel pressured. We therefore went back to the drawing board and changed our procedure. Fortunately we only sent this mail to a handful of people before we realized that this is not the right approach. In the end, what we really wanted to know was: "Are you allowed to work in the EU?" But then we realized why stop there? We improved our process to ensure candidates are only asked to share a minimum amount of data! Feel free to check it out: https://summitto.com/hiringprocess https://summitto.com/hiringprocess As other commenters have already stated, most information we ask is standard and in ~70% of the cases already answered in CVs we receive anyway because most of our applicants come from Germany, the Netherlands or Belgium. We learned now that as we target a global audience those "standard" questions are not a worldwide standard. Some of you were suspicious that we base our hiring decisions on this information. Let me state this very clearly: this requested information was never used to evaluate applicants. Summitto evaluates you only on your coding skills, and nothing else. We point to the fact in our first mail to the author of this post: "Please note that if there is some personal information which you prefer not to share yet, that is ok!" Moreover, we clearly stated this again in a second mail to the author of this post as well. Regarding the IBAN account number: this information is essential to reimburse any flight expenses and of course to pay your salary. For the US citizens in this thread: no, sharing your bank account number in the EU is not comparable to how it works in the US banking system. IBAN numbers are not private or easily exploitable data. Still, we have now scrapped this question from our first email. Although we truly appreciate the author's criticism in this post regarding the threat of theoretically losing his/her privacy, we would like to point out the irony that by complaining without properly anonymizing the data he/she actually violated ours. We value the privacy of all of our candidates. We encourage them to protect the data they send using PGP, so it is encrypted in transit and at rest. Any data which belongs to applicants which were not hired is deleted within 30 days after the last contact.