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How Stripe thinks about recruiting
- andrewljohnson 14y agoIt's tough for me to stomach #1, because you clearly have to pass on a lot of brilliant people. I can see how this would generate the other advantage he describes though. Overall, great article - gives me a lot to consider at this particular time in our company's life.
- stanleydrew 14y agoSpeaking from my experience doing a fair bit of interviewing and hiring at Twilio, I think #1 becomes less important as a company grows. He is absolutely right that for a team the size of Stripe's, enjoying working with every other team member is critical. But I'm interested in his thoughts on that requirement after they have 100 engineers, which they surely will. Perhaps at that scale, the Sunday test only applies to the smaller team or project group the candidate will be joining.
- benjohnson 14y agoIgnoring #1 caused my company to split and I lost half my income. In my experience, I would say #1 is paramount - not only for loving your job, but for profitability.
- gergles 14y agoThey don't think it's very important, apparently, as they completely ignored my application for a recruiting engineer they advertised here. An automated courtesy email is the bare minimum of acceptable, and when they can't even get that right, platitudes of "only hire someone you'd hang out with on Sunday" ring hollow. I wouldn't hang out on Sunday with someone who completely ignores job applicants.
- anurag 14y agoWe respond individually to everyone who contacts us -- I'm really sorry we missed your application. Mind sending me an email so we can figure out what happened? I'm anurag@stripe.com.
- igorsyl 14y agoI'm surprised so much effort was placed on the CTF competition yet it seems little thought was placed on collecting applicant information. The conversion funnel is as weak as its weakest link.
- gergles 14y agoI sent two emails during the app process; I was a bit worried after the first one so I sent a second one about a week later. Message ids: <CAETzaFkOzgx46pHttRy3TE6WU6TEfD0p4WmtM0ZhRz5OXVHmRQ@mail.gmail.com> (sent Mar 23) <CAETzaFmPjK7NDBS5X_B9R0qjiqEoWZNOZ=LKtFp=QhBUZe_8HA@mail.gmail.com> (sent Mar 29) I'm sure you guys have hired someone else by now, but still, one of the suggestions I had in the email was a real ATS. :) That's absolutely something you should do (or at an absolute minimum, an autoreply that it was received -- then in the ads, you can say "If you don't get an automatic response, we didn't get your email")
- trefn 14y agoAs someone who filters resumes, this is something I haven't figured out how to handle and am quite curious about. If the company can tell from your resume + cover letter that you aren't a good fit for the position, what would you want to hear back? Brutal honesty? Lame corporate speak? Silence?
- furyofantares 14y agoHonesty.
- j_baker 14y agoUnfortunately, honesty is the last thing Silicon Valley's hiring system is set up for. Employers expect you to tell you what they want to hear, not the honest truth. This means that the people they tend to hire will either be someone who either is lucky enough to think just like them or is willing to tell them everything they want to hear. And God forbid you express any opinions that would make you a "bad cultural fit". Companies give people they don't hire polite platitudes to avoid hurt feelings and legal issues. In short, if you expect honesty in a job search, you'll be disappointed.
- furyofantares 14y agoWhere I work, we put a lot of effort into giving honest, actionable feedback to anyone we interview or phone screen. (We don't do it if we choose not to phone screen someone, though.) We tell you why we didn't proceed and what we think you could do to make a difference if you choose to try again in a few years. This is for our own benefit as much as the job seeker's. We don't want to leave a sour or even neutral taste in someone's mouth just because it didn't work out. Someone who is a bad fit now might be a good fit in the future, as they change or as we change, or we might be wrong that they are a bad fit now.
- igorsyl 14y agoMy experience is that east coast companies are more upfront about all of this compared to west coast companies.
- igorsyl 14y ago1+ My email has also been ignored. Perhaps this reflects a problem with email. You don't want to send more than one or two emails since it might come off as spammy. But you do want to make sure you're not lost. Maybe there's a need for a email-read notification service similar to Outlook's.
- spitfire 14y agoI like that they use feminine "she" and "her" regarding their future employees. Knowing that they're actively trying to build a balanced, healthy culture is very attractive.
- benjohnson 14y agoFor my company, brutal reality is that 90% of job applicants that are male. So for the narrow purposes of keeping my company diverse, I have adjust to view diversity of thought, method, and approach as more actionable than ensuring an even gentile-type distribution.
- evincarofautumn 14y agoI don’t. Both he and she are gender-specific and (may) call unnecessary attention to themselves. Singular they would be better.
- johnhartigun 14y agoI find it just weird and unnatural. This over the top political corectness is repulsive.
- tomjen3 14y agoI don't. I didn't have a high idea of Stripe to begin with, but I certainly can't respect a company that won't acknowledge that they are going to be hiring a lot more males than females and that most of the females they will be hiring will not be for developer positions but for support roles and maybe design. There are properly more transgendered people involved in development than there are females. So they should stop lying and be honest about it.
- sheena 14y agoI'm a woman and a developer at Stripe. I don't see how welcoming women as well as men into the engineering -- and every other -- team at our company can reasonably be called "lying" or "dishonest." No, we can't singlehandedly change the gender ratios in the valley, but we can and will try to make our hiring process as good and fair as possible.
- j_baker 14y agoI'm not sure how I feel about everyone getting a veto. It sounds like a surefire way to ensure only the least offensive candidates who are unlikely to challenge the status quo get hired.
- jusben1369 14y agoYes, when you add in the "Sunday test" it seems as though an unintended consequence of this approach over time is a lack of diversity (in thought, not biological or cultural) and healthy tension.
- gdb 14y agoI think that's definitely a danger, but by being very cognizant of the peril you can work hard to make sure that candidates you reject are being rejected for the right reasons. We work very actively to recruit a diversity of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, and I feel that this has been extremely valuable to us to date.
- jusben1369 14y agoWell I applaude you gdb - Stripe is a very well regarded startup so you're doing a lot of things right. Doesn't your "Veto" though negate the ability to ensure they're rejected for the right reasons? If you feel as though a Veto is for the wrong reason do you challenge the "Vetoer" and get it overturned etc?
- gdb 14y agoThe latter. By veto, we mean that we won't hire someone over a current employee's strong objections. But we always debate and push back on those objections, and more than once we've had people change their minds after this kind of discussion.
- adrianhoward 14y agoIt doesn't work that way in my experience as long as your existing team is good. Good teams like challenges. They just don't like asshats. As soon as you have a few folk who find new hires to be threatening - then a global veto can start you heading in a bad direction.
- dkrich 14y agoC'mon, you really think you can assess whether you would want to hang out with somebody from a couple of short, isolated interactions? Most of my good friends only became so after extended periods of time and learning the nuances of each others' behavior, strengths, and weaknesses. In many cases, I realized that many people whom I thought were huge tools were extremely smart and fun to hang out with, but just had unique personalities. Now there are times you meet somebody and they are a complete turnoff from the beginning, but I don't think there is anything unique to Stripe about not hiring those people. But in the gray area, this can't really be a major factor.
- gdb 14y agoIt's definitely not an easy problem. But it's also not easy to assess how well someone is able to solve technical problems. Recruiting is about recognizing what you find most important in employees, and then trying to find ways of measuring those properties. We'll always be imperfect and make mistakes in both personal and technical assessments, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
- softbuilder 14y agoIt depends on the interview process. Most interviews are arms-length, with some code on a whiteboard. You don't learn about people that way. You only learn whether they can answer your clever little questions. You've got to create a situation where people will let down their guard a bit. Most companies will never do this because it requires effort.
- prophetjohn 14y agoSounds great if you're still able to find as many engineers as your need. But #1 essentially says, "we don't hire people who are shy or socially awkward," which seems to me like it would be screwing the pooch for most companies looking for talented engineers. I'm also highly interested to see how that strategy scales.
- j_baker 14y agoI don't think that's necessarily true. I can think of a number of socially awkward, shy people I'd enjoy spending a Sunday with. I can also think of a (probably larger) group of gregarious, outgoing people persons who I'd rather not work with at all. I think the biggest problem with the Sunday test is that there seems to be little accounting for the fact that you can't (neè shouldn't) expect everyone to get along all the time. Sure, I want to work with someone I get along with. But I also want someone who's willing to be difficult to get along with when I'm about to drive the car off a cliff.
- prophetjohn 14y agoThat may be true and maybe I'm taking a biased point-of-view as someone who is shy/socially awkward, but I'm pretty sure that people who fit that description are going to have a hard time distinguishing themselves in an interview as someone who is going to draw a crowd on a Sunday. Unless the kind of folks you like to hang out with on a Sunday are the kind who are quiet, keep to themselves and can help you debug your code. But if that's the case, then you're just looking for good engineers who aren't jerks. That's not how I read #1.
- ch 14y agoI often wonder if posting messages like this actually defeats the purpose of your hiring requirements. What I mean is you have set a standard, in your case 'the Sunday test,' by which you measure a candidate. Now by letting candidates be aware of this fact, some percentage of them are bound to game the system. Leaving you with the task of having to let them go since they don't measure up, which is less desirable than dismissing them outright. If instead you kept this measure internal, even never giving it a name (this candidate has je ne sais quoi), would you still be able to build a team with the same desirable character? Would that team be able to identify new member with the same character as well?
- DTrejo 14y agoHad a phone screen with them at one point — I was surprised they took the time to talk on the phone when they hadn't even looked over my github or website. Ended up being a waste of both my time and theirs, and their follow-up email was very strange.
- softbuilder 14y agoThis is depressingly common. No one seems to take interviewing as seriously as they should.
- gdb 14y agoWe always look over websites and github when available, because it provides a pretty good signal and makes for the most useful phone screen. Happy to discuss your case over email, if you'd like -- I'm gdb@stripe.com.
- scottbruin 14y agoWhat strikes me is how similar these guidelines are to what we practiced for my fraternity's recruitment in its best days.