6 ms·

Stripe was founded over ten years ago, is worth tens of billions of dollars, thousands of employees, and has tons of software expertise. And the excuse for bad

Stripe was founded over ten years ago, is worth tens of billions of dollars, thousands of employees, and has tons of software expertise. And the excuse for bad candidate experience is a lack of resources.

ss3000 6y ago
Exactly, it's clearly not a lack of resources, but explicitly not prioritizating candidate experience for candidates you're not actively pursuing. Which, by the way I think is a totally valid decision to make, but let's not kid around and make it sound like your hands were tied.
- pc 6y ago
  There are two somewhat separate issues, I think. (1) The practical reality that a lot of people will have a suboptimal experience until we (both "we Stripe" and "we the industry") figure out more scalable ways to assess people. We'll do the best we can to identify promising people but a lot of people will get something somewhat functionally equivalent to a form rejection. You could argue that this is merely a prioritization decision -- we could keep hiring recruiters until everyone could be individually assessed -- but doing so would require a recruiting team of comparable magnitude to the rest of the Stripe organization and so the current state is an unfortunate compromise given the current constraints and given the decision to have an open application form (which is, I think, on net better for everyone). (2) Cases where people at Stripe mishandled the process. I know for a fact that some of the anecdotes shared in the thread are from many years ago, and I know that our process has improved since then (we have empirical data to this effect), but we're also acutely aware that we continue to make mistakes -- recruiting is a high-stakes and complex process with a lot of fallible moving parts. For whatever it's worth, we issue CSAT surveys to every candidate who interviews (about 6,000 onsite interviews in 2019), and track the results both at the aggregate Stripe level and at the individual recruiter level. And I get why some people here sound so annoyed -- what might be "another entry in a database" to a recruiter or hiring manager is "the future of my career" to someone on the other side. While it's always hard to know what to make of a set of anecdotes, and while our referral rate among Stripe employees is very high today, I'm nonetheless bothered by the number of cases shared here, and we're going to be digging in. (Specific anecdotes with more concrete dates or data are welcome at patrick@stripe.com.)
  - gault8121 6y ago
    Couldn't you "pen test" your own hiring process? Have some folks stage applications and see the process failures first hand. You might get better data from running these experiments yourself rather than through a survey.
    - com 6y ago
      You’re talking about a “secret shopper” test. They deliver very actionable findings, if there’s a will to improve.
  - borroka 6y ago
    "The practical reality that a lot of people will have a suboptimal experience until we (both "we Stripe" and "we the industry") figure out more scalable ways to assess people." It is not inevitable and there are company that do recruiting better and other worse. For example, asking for a cover letter at Stripe and then ghosting people liberally even after multiple rounds of interview does not sound tremendously good to my ear. That is a not a sub-optimal interview experience, like being in a coma is not a sub-optimal life experience. I understand that working with recruiters is hard (who ever said: I know a recruiter who is a genius? Or even the lesser: I know that recruiter, they are brilliant), but respecting candidates should be a priority of any organization.
    - pc 6y ago
      > For example, asking for a cover letter at Stripe and then ghosting people liberally even after multiple rounds of interview does not sound tremendously good to my ear. Absolutely. That is category 2!
    - mbesto 6y ago
      > but respecting candidates should be a priority of any organization. Sorry, but it's not. I'm not giving Stripe a pass here per se, but the priority of an org is to make money so that they can offer positions. Scaling recruiting is hard. Just like you might want an org who see thousands and thousands of applications every day to act more benevolently, the opposite also holds true.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
polote 6y ago
What do you want him to say publicly ? Do you want him to say that he doesn't care about developers he doesn't hire ? Even if that's what every business owner thinks, you can't tell it because you will sounds like an arrogant person. They don't have (and you should not expect them) to give a feedback to anyone who apply (as it is the case of the parent comment)
- ska 6y ago
  > Even if that's what every business owner thinks, you can't tell it because you will sounds like an arrogant person. It's not, in fact, what every business owner thinks.
- gavinray 6y ago
  I don't have a horse in this race, but I always get surprised when people critique responses from high-profile members of organizations. Have you ever seen a businessperson make a public statement on behalf of a company that espoused or accepted negative/neutral sentiment? I dunno why people even bother responding or reacting internally to these statements. There's not a human being behind them -- there's a corporate entity who has to answer to stakeholders with a spotlight being shined on them. It's purely politics and statesmanship, the human being is long gone, or only shows up in private settings after everyone's had several drinks. Except Elon Musk. That's a man you can, probably, take at his word.
  - dexterdog 6y ago
    Can we get a citation on that last one?
thewarrior 6y ago
Well the answer is that they get lots of applications from really good developers who also have top colleges on their resumes and top companies they've worked at. So they interview them first and can't get to the rest. This is obvious but can't be said publicly. This is also why people fight so hard to get prestigious companies and universities on their resume.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

ss3000 6y ago

Exactly, it's clearly not a lack of resources, but explicitly not prioritizating candidate experience for candidates you're not actively pursuing. Which, by the way I think is a totally valid decision to make, but let's not kid around and make it sound like your hands were tied.

pc 6y ago
There are two somewhat separate issues, I think. (1) The practical reality that a lot of people will have a suboptimal experience until we (both "we Stripe" and "we the industry") figure out more scalable ways to assess people. We'll do the best we can to identify promising people but a lot of people will get something somewhat functionally equivalent to a form rejection. You could argue that this is merely a prioritization decision -- we could keep hiring recruiters until everyone could be individually assessed -- but doing so would require a recruiting team of comparable magnitude to the rest of the Stripe organization and so the current state is an unfortunate compromise given the current constraints and given the decision to have an open application form (which is, I think, on net better for everyone). (2) Cases where people at Stripe mishandled the process. I know for a fact that some of the anecdotes shared in the thread are from many years ago, and I know that our process has improved since then (we have empirical data to this effect), but we're also acutely aware that we continue to make mistakes -- recruiting is a high-stakes and complex process with a lot of fallible moving parts. For whatever it's worth, we issue CSAT surveys to every candidate who interviews (about 6,000 onsite interviews in 2019), and track the results both at the aggregate Stripe level and at the individual recruiter level. And I get why some people here sound so annoyed -- what might be "another entry in a database" to a recruiter or hiring manager is "the future of my career" to someone on the other side. While it's always hard to know what to make of a set of anecdotes, and while our referral rate among Stripe employees is very high today, I'm nonetheless bothered by the number of cases shared here, and we're going to be digging in. (Specific anecdotes with more concrete dates or data are welcome at patrick@stripe.com.)
- gault8121 6y ago
  Couldn't you "pen test" your own hiring process? Have some folks stage applications and see the process failures first hand. You might get better data from running these experiments yourself rather than through a survey.
  - com 6y ago
    You’re talking about a “secret shopper” test. They deliver very actionable findings, if there’s a will to improve.
- borroka 6y ago
  "The practical reality that a lot of people will have a suboptimal experience until we (both "we Stripe" and "we the industry") figure out more scalable ways to assess people." It is not inevitable and there are company that do recruiting better and other worse. For example, asking for a cover letter at Stripe and then ghosting people liberally even after multiple rounds of interview does not sound tremendously good to my ear. That is a not a sub-optimal interview experience, like being in a coma is not a sub-optimal life experience. I understand that working with recruiters is hard (who ever said: I know a recruiter who is a genius? Or even the lesser: I know that recruiter, they are brilliant), but respecting candidates should be a priority of any organization.
  - pc 6y ago
    > For example, asking for a cover letter at Stripe and then ghosting people liberally even after multiple rounds of interview does not sound tremendously good to my ear. Absolutely. That is category 2!
  - mbesto 6y ago
    > but respecting candidates should be a priority of any organization. Sorry, but it's not. I'm not giving Stripe a pass here per se, but the priority of an org is to make money so that they can offer positions. Scaling recruiting is hard. Just like you might want an org who see thousands and thousands of applications every day to act more benevolently, the opposite also holds true.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

polote 6y ago

What do you want him to say publicly ? Do you want him to say that he doesn't care about developers he doesn't hire ? Even if that's what every business owner thinks, you can't tell it because you will sounds like an arrogant person. They don't have (and you should not expect them) to give a feedback to anyone who apply (as it is the case of the parent comment)

ska 6y ago
> Even if that's what every business owner thinks, you can't tell it because you will sounds like an arrogant person. It's not, in fact, what every business owner thinks.
gavinray 6y ago
I don't have a horse in this race, but I always get surprised when people critique responses from high-profile members of organizations. Have you ever seen a businessperson make a public statement on behalf of a company that espoused or accepted negative/neutral sentiment? I dunno why people even bother responding or reacting internally to these statements. There's not a human being behind them -- there's a corporate entity who has to answer to stakeholders with a spotlight being shined on them. It's purely politics and statesmanship, the human being is long gone, or only shows up in private settings after everyone's had several drinks. Except Elon Musk. That's a man you can, probably, take at his word.
- dexterdog 6y ago
  Can we get a citation on that last one?

thewarrior 6y ago

Well the answer is that they get lots of applications from really good developers who also have top colleges on their resumes and top companies they've worked at. So they interview them first and can't get to the rest. This is obvious but can't be said publicly. This is also why people fight so hard to get prestigious companies and universities on their resume.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]