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I apologize to anyone who thought our post was callous; definitely not what we intended. Let me try to better articulate what we were trying to convey... If y

I apologize to anyone who thought our post was callous; definitely not what we intended. Let me try to better articulate what we were trying to convey... If you post a developer job on Monster, you're likely to get over 500 resumes. Over 95% of them (I'm using that number literally, not figuratively) are from people who shouldn't have applied if they'd read the job description carefully. Reading through those resumes takes a vast amount of time. It makes it harder to identify the qualified applicants because they're more likely to get lost in the shuffle. It isn't fair to them. We have only three full-time developers at SeatGeek. There's a finite number of hours per week we can dedicate to reading resumes. It isn't that I think people incapable of passing our test are "worthless", as samd says below, that's a gross mis-characterization. But we want to focus our hiring efforts on folks who are highly capable applicants, and if we read the resume of everyone who responded to a typical Monster post, then we wouldn't have the resources to do that.

samd 16y ago
I think we all agree that it can be very useful to filter applicants by making them solve some puzzle, and there's nothing wrong with that. What bothered me was that it sounded like you were mocking people for trying but failing to solve your puzzle, and relishing in the fact that you didn't have to consider their application. Trying is a good thing, even if it ends in failure, and it should be encouraged. It might even turn out that the sort of person who spends an afternoon trying to solve a challenging puzzle makes a great employee after a bit of training.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  We all don't agree - I disagree. I think it's the job of the future employer to "waste their time" finding and filtering people rather than getting applicants to waste their time applying. I've solved quite few puzzles in my day. What irked me was getting chosen for my solutions and then getting rejected for other, arbitrary criteria. An employer generally has more leverage in a transaction like this, let them put in some effort in compensation.

samd 16y ago

I think we all agree that it can be very useful to filter applicants by making them solve some puzzle, and there's nothing wrong with that. What bothered me was that it sounded like you were mocking people for trying but failing to solve your puzzle, and relishing in the fact that you didn't have to consider their application. Trying is a good thing, even if it ends in failure, and it should be encouraged. It might even turn out that the sort of person who spends an afternoon trying to solve a challenging puzzle makes a great employee after a bit of training.

joe_the_user 16y ago
We all don't agree - I disagree. I think it's the job of the future employer to "waste their time" finding and filtering people rather than getting applicants to waste their time applying. I've solved quite few puzzles in my day. What irked me was getting chosen for my solutions and then getting rejected for other, arbitrary criteria. An employer generally has more leverage in a transaction like this, let them put in some effort in compensation.