Possibly an artifact of the enormous number of startups that appeared in the past 15 years. I've been a 3rd and 10th employee of two, and both times there was n

Possibly an artifact of the enormous number of startups that appeared in the past 15 years. I've been a 3rd and 10th employee of two, and both times there was no application. There isn't even an HR department. You meet a few people and that's it. They're too busy doing their actual jobs to specialize in hiring and make this any kind of a real process you're familiar with from longer standing larger companies. And, for what it's worth, I was in the Army before I got into software and you don't apply to jobs in the Army, either. You certainly go through a long, drawn-out, highly formal structured process, but it isn't filling out a job history and sitting through rounds of interviews.