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Why We Don't Invite Groups to Interviews
- ams6110 13y agoBack many years ago when I used to interview people for restaurant work we had a stock phrase that we would write on rejected applications: "others more qualified." It's as simple as that. Nothing especially wrong with the candidate, but we had better choices. Interesting to see the same dynamic in place in the gamut between mundane restaurant work and YC applications.
- hayksaakian 13y ago"others more qualified" is more re-assuring than 'there was something wrong' or 'we don't like you' so i'd take that boilerplate response over silence/nothing.
- pekk 13y agoAnd you would take that boilerplate response even if there actually was something wrong or they didn't like you. So there is every reason for them to put it on essentially every application which didn't involve felonies
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- hayksaakian 13y agoSure, but in that case they would be blatantly dishonest as opposed to lying by omission.
- pekk 13y agoThat's just how it is, if someone wants to discard your application they will usually say you were underqualified or someone else was more qualified regardless of the actual reason
- trentmb 13y agoSorry to pick on you here: but why is being a felon considered a negative, as opposed to being convicted of something that isn't a felony? Does the IRS tax your business differently if you employ a felon? I mean, I get it: someone did something shitty at one point and got caught and convicted. In an absolute sense they're 'less reliable' than someone that hasn't been convicted. I only ask because I've worked some blue jobs with ex-cons and felons (some of which were exceptionally bright) who were stuck where they were because of some dumb choice they made 10, 15, 20 years ago.
- icelancer 13y ago> Does the IRS tax your business differently if you employ a felon? Actually, yes. The IRS often gives you breaks if you employ ex-convicts. http://smallbusiness.chron.com/tax-breaks-employers-hire-felons-14421.html http://smallbusiness.chron.com/tax-breaks-employers-hire-fel... I have done this before and applied for the tax credit. The employee passed all his screens wonderfully and his ex-conviction history did not faze me at all.
- pekk 13y agoI have no problem with felons, but they aren't exactly a protected class for employment purposes.
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- username223 13y ago> gamut between mundane restaurant work and YC applications. Talk about splitting hairs... It's all service industry work.
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- sargun 13y agoYes, but how will potential candidates improve if they don't get feedback? Be a good person.
- catshirt 13y agothere is still valuable feedback to be had, no? why are some companies "particularly good" where others don't get accepted? "no reason" is paradoxical and i'm not really convinced it's a reason...
- emmett 13y agoYC chooses applicants by rank-ordering the list and interviewing the top N candidates. Thought experiment: What's the difference between candidate N and candidate N+1? Likely, they are nearly identically good. What could you possibly tell candidate N+1 about why they weren't selected? There are almost certainly no red flags, or any specific thing you can point to that caused them to fall under the line. Any feedback you gave candidate N+1 you'd also want to give to candidate N who did get the interview. If you're saying that YC should give generalized "how to be a better startup" advice to everyone who applies, I'm afraid the time requirements for that are unrealistic. There aren't obvious reasons why most applications are rejected, and giving more nuanced advice is really hard.
- natch 13y agoForget candidate N and the difficulty of discerning nuances. That's just pretending no information is available, so it's a made-up argument. Let's not pretend. Just tell them what the very top candidates had. And if they are a middle candidate and not a bottom one, also tell them what kept them out of the bottom. If they're in the bottom, tell them about the top and the middle. Clues for what is promising and what is not. We're talking about spending a few minutes sharing words that could positively alter the course of decades of people's lives, if they hear the right thing. Seems like a decent courtesy to pay the applicants, if there's no real reason not to.
- rdl 13y agoI wonder how much benefit the good-but-not-accepted groups would receive from a few minutes even up to an hour of time over the next few weeks (maybe after the main interviews are done). The benefit for YC would be if these groups then chose not to do something like TechStars, but continued to work on their idea and came back in +6 months. Realistically, if someone is rejected by YC, gets into TechStars and does it, they're unlikely to do YC. Assuming there are ~300 "on the bubble" groups on top of 200 interviewed groups (out of 2-3k total), it would cost YC basically a month of someone's time to follow up with them reasonably, and then maybe 5-10% of a person over the next 6 months.
- sytelus 13y agoSomewhere YC is doing ranking of applications. When ranking gets done some function does get applied to each group. It might be beneficial for YC to know how this function works so they can debug it. For instance the YC's ranking function can generate set of components that contributes to final rank. If YC wants to scale it is imperative to understand their own ranking ranking function. If we say that I have no idea why group A was considered better than group b then its not very scientific and there can be not much hope to improve something that we don't understand. Of course, it's different matter if this information is passed back to group because I suspect that would make ranking function more vulnerable to gaming.
- grayclhn 13y agoI would be surprised if they're ranking every applicant. When I've been on hiring or admissions committees, I use a threshold. There's no point in ranking candidates clearly below the bar relative to each other, and there's no point in ranking candidates clearly above the bar either. For applicants on the bubble, it's often easier to decide for each individual whether you should interview him or her or not, and let the final number of interviews be somewhat fluid, than to rank them against each other. Obviously, one could conduct an ex post ranking based on the decisions, but I wouldn't put a lot of weight on it. I do agree that one should try to go back and check how the decisions worked out in a systematic way, but it's not obvious that there's an easy way to do it (and by "easy" I mean "a way that anyone will adopt for long enough for it to be worthwhile.")
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- bretthopper 13y agoIt's fine if you don't want to tell people since there are legitimate reasons not to. But this is mostly a cop out. We know that YC application reviewers make notes and obviously do some sort of internal ranking. There may be cases where better startups just push slightly "worse" ones down, but there's obviously some startups that are passed over for specific reasons that YC knows about. I guarantee most of these reasons/notes would be very useful for an early startup. Too bad they'll never know.
- fblp 13y agoHere's a free idea for a future YC application: "We've made the easiest way for reviewers of web submitted applicants to write notes on those applications and share them with their colleagues and applicants. Our customers include the most exclusive universities, accelerators and employers who were once mysterious and opaque about their consuming application processes. They've found that once they start using our service their applicants, team and other stakeholders learn more and make better decisions faster. They get more high quality applications as both parties get more value out of the application process."
- bo1024 13y agoI think the issue of feedback is a bit different from that of reasons why a group isn't selected. What YC seems to be saying here is more like, even if the group had done everything "right" for their project, that project/idea just doesn't seem to have the potential of another group's. (In the opinion YC). So you could ask for feedback separately from asking why you weren't selected. The potential issue there is that groups will still interpret it that way and say things like "YC said they rejected us because of this, but that's a ridiculous reason to reject...."
- avenger123 13y agoIf YC states a specific reason, then what? Does YC now have the responsibility to engage in a dialogue outlining the details for the reason. It wouldn't be fair to write a single paragraph and say, "oh, we think your team dynamics suck, so we are rejecting you." What does that mean? Team dynamics compared to what? Do you write a more detailed response? Multiply that response by the number of rejections and all of a sudden you are left with a lot of new work that needs to get done. The reasons for rejection may make real sense for the reviewers but may have layers of context that can't easily be dictated in a simple email. I'm sure this is some of the thinking that is involved with why it's easier to not give specific reasons. If a team takes the YC rejection as confirmation that their startup isn't going to go anywhere then they never believed in the startup.
- anandp29 13y agoSo just to confirm, if we didn't receive an email or any notification on Hacker News, we were not selected, correct? Not sure if we were supposed to receive a 'Sorry' email.
- shrikrishna 13y agoThey haven't sent out the mail yet. You will get a mail (be sure to have your mail id in the profile with which you applied) even if you are rejected
- jasonkolb 13y agoI think most people would appreciate some feedback on something they work hard for, even if it's just an "atta boy, looks good, keep on going--sorry it didn't work out", or even better some productive feedback ("you need to narrow your focus" or "market already saturated"). I have never applied for YC, but I have applied to other things in life that seem like a black hole from the outside. Just an acknowledgement of something that surely took a lot of time would be a nice gesture. I mean, I'm sure you're nice folks, right? Would you ignore applicants if you met them on the street?
- BrandonM 13y agoI imagine that the types of feedback you're suggesting, such as "market already saturated", would only be half of the story. A founder who is making such a mistake is automatically making a second mistake: not being good enough to realize the mistake in the first place. A founder who fixes the one mistake pointed out by YC would be missing the big picture, likely making numerous other mistakes. I don't think that most applicants want to hear the truth, which is effectively, "Based on problems X, Y, and Z that we can see after a cursory analysis, we can only assume that you're not smart enough for other program, else you would have realized those problems yourself."
- tvo 13y agoMy entrepreneurial experience so far has been about making a lot of mistakes and learning from them. I think for a lot (but not all) of issues in startups and in life, "not being good enough" or "not smart enough" really just means "not having enough exposure or practice". Based on this view, constructive, specific feedback goes a long way in helping dedicated founders improve so that they too, can add value to society via their startup. I realize it is unfair to expect this from YC, considering they also have finite bandwidth. I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable fee for this type of feedback from YC and I suspect a lot of founders wouldn't either.
- BrandonM 13y agoI agree that entrepreneurship is a great opportunity to make and learn from mistakes in execution. It's also an opportunity to try completely new things that may or may not work. Other sorts of mistakes, though--like being ignorant of existing players, failing to explain why someone would use your product, or having no remote plan to profitability--are more troublesome. They indicate a lack of business acumen or even common sense that will make success incredibly unlikely. As with execution mistakes, you can learn these things through experience, too. However, I would not want to invest my time and money teaching them to someone unwilling or unable to learn those lessons on their own. Which gets back to my original point... Who wants to hear, "You seem to lack common sense"?
- biot 13y agoThe title can be parsed ambiguously. At first, I was surprised as I read it as: "We Don't Invite Groups to Interviews. Here's Why." and expected an article focusing on interviewing one team member at a time. It's perhaps better stated as "Why Some Groups Aren't Invited To Interviews".
- sumedh 13y agoThe title is confusing. I thought I accidentally clicked the wrong link.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- bobowzki 13y agoI know this is nitpicking... but that box needs padding.
- mattm 13y agoThis is just one of those things you learn in life. You'll never find out the real reason someone rejected you. It doesn't matter if it's a girl or an interviewer. That's just how it is. The only thing to do is to take your best guess and improve on that next time. Oftentimes, the people doing the rejecting may not even know the real reason. Sure, everyone can come up with something that sounds rational but how do you know it's not because you looked at them weird the first time you met because you were nervous?
- Theodores 13y agoI think there are better analogies than girl/interview rejection scenarios. More like TV gameshow where there are lots of applicants and only a few get chosen to make it onto the show. The producers have reasons of their own that have no bearing on how good you are. So rejection is not to be taken personally in a soul destroying way. Just a lesson to learn, no feedback needed.
- ecolner 13y agoI think the only useful case for an explanation is if your application was defective per the outline, but I doubt that's the main reject reason anyway.
- Istof 13y agoHopefully the one who wrote this article is not a moderator on https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/. Very misleading title.