5 ms·

It's interesting to hear an internal perspective of how "great" Stripe's recruiting processes is. As an external applicant, I would say it was better than most

It's interesting to hear an internal perspective of how "great" Stripe's recruiting processes is. As an external applicant, I would say it was better than most, but still an internal recruiter shit-show. Week-long windows between email responses, dropped balls, and even no-shows for scheduled calls. Seeing this contrast makes me wonder if Stripe employees are just high on their own supply? Recruiting is hard. I can only imagine it gets harder at scale. I'd bet that Stripe's best recruiting is done through employee referrals... and that is probably building a mono-culture.

noirbot 7y ago
Obviously anecdotal, but when I interviewed with Stripe earlier this year I saw both sides of this - I had a recruiter ghost me for almost a month and a number of times important information about interviews got lost in an email chain. It was about as messy as I would expect from any company that size trying to arrange interviews. That said, the interview process itself, once it was set up, was one of the best interview processes that I've participated in. The PDF they send about the questions and scope of each interview helped me know how to prepare. Each interview had a specific goal and angle on determining if I was a good engineer, and at the end of the day, I felt like we all had a good idea of each other. I ultimately didn't get the offer, but because the process was robust, I didn't have a regret of "I could have done better" or "These questions were unfair and I should have gotten the job". I was confident that Stripe had a good measure of my skills and mindset, and that they'd simply decided I wasn't a good fit. It's hard to really ask for more than than from the process itself. I can't say if it's effective for them, but at least to me, it seemed like Stripe had thought more about the interview process than most companies I've ever been with or interviewed with. There's obviously going to be implementation issues and problems around the specific people who have to implement it, but the plan itself seems well conceived.
- decebalus1 7y ago
  I had an engineer leave my team (regrettable attrition, one of the best engineers I worked with) and accept a position at Stripe. I'm reading your description and impression of the interview process and it 100% matches what he told me about his experience. He managed to convince me to consider Stripe as my next career move.
AzuraJergen 7y ago
The reading didn't seem to over-emphasize greatness, it simply raised the prospect that they may be doing more things right than the average Sylicon company. That may or may not be true and a single annecdotal evidence brought fourth based on a very specific actions that have led a single individual to feel uncomfortable is hardly enough to downplay the points that have been raised.
SaberTail 7y ago
I'll agree that it was better than most. I still feel like they wasted my time. I told them my compensation expectations up front, went through the entire interview process, and then got an "non-negotiable" offer about 30% under what I told them. They tried to justify it based on a very optimistic valuation of their equity. I'm already working at a unicorn that skimps on salary with the promise of the equity being worth something, and it would have been a significant cut in take-home pay to accept their offer.
tidepod12 7y ago
I hate to pile on but I absolutely agree. It's always curious to me that I have seen multiple posts on HN parroting how great Stripe's recruiting is, when my experience was lackluster at best, and a shit show at worst. As an outsider, "effort" and "thoughtfulness" would have been the last words I would have used to describe Stripe's recruiting process. When I interviewed with them. I got the same amount of long periods of no contact and people showing up late (if showing up at all) to interview calls. The things the recruiter told me about the role and interview process completely contradicted the things that the team members told me. I was told that the third interview would be a coding interview, and then when the interviewer showed up (late to the interview, of course), it turned out I had prepared for nothing and the interview was actually just a behavioral. They weren't even able to tell me if the role was pre-sales (and commission based) or if the role was post-sales (and not commission based). The leadership team had apparently not decided yet, but still wanted to hire people for this role. This is a pretty fundamental characteristic about a job, and I honestly don't know how you can recruit for a position without even knowing the basic compensation structure. In the end, the recruiter told me that they wanted to move forward with scheduling the final round, then rescheduled my interview several times, then cancelled it outright (but assured me they still wanted to interview once they found a good time), and then eventually the recruiter totally ghosted me without scheduling the interview and never responded to further emails.
- xyzzy_plugh 7y ago
  Commissions and coding? What kind of role was this?
  - tidepod12 7y ago
    Yes, exactly my confusion. From what little they were able to tell me about the role, it was treated 100% as an engineering role and supposedly followed their engineering interview process (though one of the team members told me the role actually required very little programming), but was technically part of the sales team.
  - chrisrogers 7y ago
    Sales engineer by the sound of it
sfrench 7y ago
I previously worked at Stripe. Mark's post mirrors my experience internally as a hiring manager, and as a candidate. But as you said, at scale things get harder; I'm sure the experience does vary and some percentage of people come out with experiences that don't match the ideal. My own experience was that Stripe was able to take me from a prospect to a hire in less than 30 days. My interviews and calls were all on Friday, and I would hear back on Monday with results and schedule the next round for that very same week.
- danpalmer 7y ago
  30 days seems exceptionally long, unless that was driven by your timeline?
  - sfrench 7y ago
    Given I had a job while interviewing, I was driving it as fast as I was comfortable. But the part that was important to me as a candidate is that I was getting feedback within 1 business day, and getting the next step scheduled for later that same week.
- novok 7y ago
  I work at a far larger company that scaled from a smaller company. Most people do not show up to interviews late and the process is a 1hr phone screen + 1 day onsite + 30m decision meeting. From start to end, if the candidate was available, took about 1 week. That part is not a scaling issue, but a cultural issue where it's OK to be late or flake on interviews.
ditonal 7y ago
The bar for "recruiting" is laughably low in this industry. Many companies seriously consider "have a clueless tech sourcer 2 years out of an econ degree telemarket job openings with aggressive email spam funnel right into a hazing-style round of phone interviews and on-sites" to be "recruiting." It's very tough to take seriously the bemoaning about engineering hiring difficulty from the likes of pg and others when this is the case. To the extent companies are investing in the process, it seems to be look for more ways at how to reject people. Now companies want some technical project phone screen AND an algorithms on site AND a "design" review AND some sort of weird personality thing where they grill you on working with past managers and whether you mentored people. Find 99 reasons to ding you. By the way, the design review is usually run by someone 2 years out of school who works on their Jenkins configs and thinks the most important thing is that you magically read their mind and know the right "questions" to ask them. It's just barely tangentially related to actually working in the industry, which has the result it's actually biased against senior engineers, because ironically the standard for being hired as a senior engineer is actually being better at these interview games that juniors have more recently spent time preparing for. A lot of companies quite frankly look at what Google did, think "we're just as good as Google", and more or less copy what they do except add even more junk. These companies don't spend much of any time getting to know candidates, they will run some "events" that appeal to people with excessive free time, again mostly juniors. They haven't invested a hundredth of the massive PR push that Google has (Google literally got a box-office movie with Owen Wilson made to recruit), and they CERTAINLY don't want to offer Google-style RSU compensation packages. After all this "we have the best people" crap, "we have this rube golderberg style interview to filter out all the riff-raff" crap, they want to offer market salaries and some weak ISO package you will have zero chance of valuing accurately and leave 18 windows open for VCs to screw you. So, given all this, should you waste your time interviewing at companies like Stripe?

noirbot 7y ago

Obviously anecdotal, but when I interviewed with Stripe earlier this year I saw both sides of this - I had a recruiter ghost me for almost a month and a number of times important information about interviews got lost in an email chain. It was about as messy as I would expect from any company that size trying to arrange interviews. That said, the interview process itself, once it was set up, was one of the best interview processes that I've participated in. The PDF they send about the questions and scope of each interview helped me know how to prepare. Each interview had a specific goal and angle on determining if I was a good engineer, and at the end of the day, I felt like we all had a good idea of each other. I ultimately didn't get the offer, but because the process was robust, I didn't have a regret of "I could have done better" or "These questions were unfair and I should have gotten the job". I was confident that Stripe had a good measure of my skills and mindset, and that they'd simply decided I wasn't a good fit. It's hard to really ask for more than than from the process itself. I can't say if it's effective for them, but at least to me, it seemed like Stripe had thought more about the interview process than most companies I've ever been with or interviewed with. There's obviously going to be implementation issues and problems around the specific people who have to implement it, but the plan itself seems well conceived.

decebalus1 7y ago
I had an engineer leave my team (regrettable attrition, one of the best engineers I worked with) and accept a position at Stripe. I'm reading your description and impression of the interview process and it 100% matches what he told me about his experience. He managed to convince me to consider Stripe as my next career move.

AzuraJergen 7y ago

The reading didn't seem to over-emphasize greatness, it simply raised the prospect that they may be doing more things right than the average Sylicon company. That may or may not be true and a single annecdotal evidence brought fourth based on a very specific actions that have led a single individual to feel uncomfortable is hardly enough to downplay the points that have been raised.

SaberTail 7y ago

I'll agree that it was better than most. I still feel like they wasted my time. I told them my compensation expectations up front, went through the entire interview process, and then got an "non-negotiable" offer about 30% under what I told them. They tried to justify it based on a very optimistic valuation of their equity. I'm already working at a unicorn that skimps on salary with the promise of the equity being worth something, and it would have been a significant cut in take-home pay to accept their offer.

tidepod12 7y ago

I hate to pile on but I absolutely agree. It's always curious to me that I have seen multiple posts on HN parroting how great Stripe's recruiting is, when my experience was lackluster at best, and a shit show at worst. As an outsider, "effort" and "thoughtfulness" would have been the last words I would have used to describe Stripe's recruiting process. When I interviewed with them. I got the same amount of long periods of no contact and people showing up late (if showing up at all) to interview calls. The things the recruiter told me about the role and interview process completely contradicted the things that the team members told me. I was told that the third interview would be a coding interview, and then when the interviewer showed up (late to the interview, of course), it turned out I had prepared for nothing and the interview was actually just a behavioral. They weren't even able to tell me if the role was pre-sales (and commission based) or if the role was post-sales (and not commission based). The leadership team had apparently not decided yet, but still wanted to hire people for this role. This is a pretty fundamental characteristic about a job, and I honestly don't know how you can recruit for a position without even knowing the basic compensation structure. In the end, the recruiter told me that they wanted to move forward with scheduling the final round, then rescheduled my interview several times, then cancelled it outright (but assured me they still wanted to interview once they found a good time), and then eventually the recruiter totally ghosted me without scheduling the interview and never responded to further emails.

xyzzy_plugh 7y ago
Commissions and coding? What kind of role was this?
- tidepod12 7y ago
  Yes, exactly my confusion. From what little they were able to tell me about the role, it was treated 100% as an engineering role and supposedly followed their engineering interview process (though one of the team members told me the role actually required very little programming), but was technically part of the sales team.
- chrisrogers 7y ago
  Sales engineer by the sound of it

sfrench 7y ago

I previously worked at Stripe. Mark's post mirrors my experience internally as a hiring manager, and as a candidate. But as you said, at scale things get harder; I'm sure the experience does vary and some percentage of people come out with experiences that don't match the ideal. My own experience was that Stripe was able to take me from a prospect to a hire in less than 30 days. My interviews and calls were all on Friday, and I would hear back on Monday with results and schedule the next round for that very same week.

danpalmer 7y ago
30 days seems exceptionally long, unless that was driven by your timeline?
- sfrench 7y ago
  Given I had a job while interviewing, I was driving it as fast as I was comfortable. But the part that was important to me as a candidate is that I was getting feedback within 1 business day, and getting the next step scheduled for later that same week.
novok 7y ago
I work at a far larger company that scaled from a smaller company. Most people do not show up to interviews late and the process is a 1hr phone screen + 1 day onsite + 30m decision meeting. From start to end, if the candidate was available, took about 1 week. That part is not a scaling issue, but a cultural issue where it's OK to be late or flake on interviews.

ditonal 7y ago

The bar for "recruiting" is laughably low in this industry. Many companies seriously consider "have a clueless tech sourcer 2 years out of an econ degree telemarket job openings with aggressive email spam funnel right into a hazing-style round of phone interviews and on-sites" to be "recruiting." It's very tough to take seriously the bemoaning about engineering hiring difficulty from the likes of pg and others when this is the case. To the extent companies are investing in the process, it seems to be look for more ways at how to reject people. Now companies want some technical project phone screen AND an algorithms on site AND a "design" review AND some sort of weird personality thing where they grill you on working with past managers and whether you mentored people. Find 99 reasons to ding you. By the way, the design review is usually run by someone 2 years out of school who works on their Jenkins configs and thinks the most important thing is that you magically read their mind and know the right "questions" to ask them. It's just barely tangentially related to actually working in the industry, which has the result it's actually biased against senior engineers, because ironically the standard for being hired as a senior engineer is actually being better at these interview games that juniors have more recently spent time preparing for. A lot of companies quite frankly look at what Google did, think "we're just as good as Google", and more or less copy what they do except add even more junk. These companies don't spend much of any time getting to know candidates, they will run some "events" that appeal to people with excessive free time, again mostly juniors. They haven't invested a hundredth of the massive PR push that Google has (Google literally got a box-office movie with Owen Wilson made to recruit), and they CERTAINLY don't want to offer Google-style RSU compensation packages. After all this "we have the best people" crap, "we have this rube golderberg style interview to filter out all the riff-raff" crap, they want to offer market salaries and some weak ISO package you will have zero chance of valuing accurately and leave 18 windows open for VCs to screw you. So, given all this, should you waste your time interviewing at companies like Stripe?