Comment by Harj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Harj | Hacker News Reader

This is the first time I've seen a data visualization of the job search process for a software engineer and it's amazing to see the variability in responsiveness between companies.

This is actually the most surprising thing I've seen since we started Triplebyte. Originally I'd assumed that every company complaining about how difficult it is to hire engineers, would be moving every candidate through their process as quickly as possible. In practice we learnt to stop working with companies who were too dysfunctional to get back to candidates promptly - even if it's just to let them know they needed a few more days to make a decision.

We'll also often see dysfunctional companies switch to the extreme opposite end of the responsiveness spectrum once they've made an offer and start pushing candidates to make a decision immediately. Better to have been responsiveness throughout the process. I suspect companies still underestimate how much that makes a candidate more positively inclined towards them once they're at the decision making stage.

What are reasonable time frames for a company then? What should we aim for with:

1) Phone Screens

2) Interview responses (moving to next interview?)

3) Final decisions

4) Negotiation/confirmations of receiving a response to an offer

They key thing is to minimize the amount of time a candidate is waiting back to hear from you on the next step. We see a strong correlation between the companies who have the highest closing rates on candidates (70% or more) and how responsive they are in every interaction. The best companies will respond to a candidate on next steps within 24 hours at every step of the process.

The best thing my boss way back when I was a recruiter told me - "Updating someone that there's no update yet is a hell of a lot better than not updating them because there's no update yet." In other words, a simple "the team is still discussing your interview but haven't made a decision yet" email can make all the difference in the world.

That being said, and I'm swaying off topic here, candidates should never pause or slow down their job search, no matter how far along they are with a company. A rejection can come in a million forms for a million reasons, and how much would it suck to be back at square one across the board if it happens?

I suspect this is highly related to the ghosting mentioned in the article and by pjlegato in a top-level comment [0]. This is so much the norm at this point, that no response is typically seen as an implicit rejection and the candidate mentally moves on.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12764521

Agreed; I've futilely tried to mentor a recent grad who is applying to jobs he has no qualification for and then sitting around waiting for them to follow up.

My opinion: If you do a phone screen with someone in a more or less 1on1 kind of setting and they can't tell you whether you passed that stage within an hour, their organization must be dysfunctional (they have the job of conducting the interview but not the authority to pass/fail you?) and, therefore, absolutely not worth working for.

The only lengthy part of the "interviewing" should be the negotiation, and by that point you are actually already kind of hired. Unless you blow it.

Things will be longer the bigger the company is because they have to involve legal and all this stupidity, but early stage YC companies don't get the benefit of the doubt here.

There's this hubris of cultural fit, which is code for "is this guy conformist enough that we can give him an arms length of desk space next to another 50 developers without him flipping?". Its true, cultural fit is super important. But that's at least in part due to the insanity that is software engineer working conditions. Give your people actual offices to perform actual work in and all your culture issues will vanish.

> If you do a phone screen with someone in a more or less 1on1 kind of setting and they can't tell you whether you passed that stage within an hour, their organization must be dysfunctional (they have the job of conducting the interview but not the authority to pass/fail you?) and, therefore, absolutely not worth working for.

The university I work for has a fairly standardized process for full time hires. We schedule and sit in on all phone screens, individually evaluate candidates, and then promote some of them on to the next step.

Sometimes we're in a position where more people "pass" the phone screen than we would want to bring in for onsites. There's an anxiety in immediately failing people we don't bring in, in case the batch we bring onsite does poorly.

So you either tell them that they're on the waiting list or you end up in the dysfunctional basket.

"cultural fit" is in practice a code word for "illegal discrimination".

Yes.

But people would do well to get over discrimination. (in the silicon valley software engineering job market. im not talking about minorities in poor neighborhoods having literally no chance of living the american dream. ok? thank you)

Maybe its illegal, but if you're a 45 year old professional with a family seeking a job where you can be highly effective for 8 hours and then go home and play with your kids, do you really want to join a startup that asks you to be in the office for 12 hours so you can play foosball for 6 and do stupid shit for the other 6?

Maybe at some point you have to somewhat appreciate being discriminated against. As silly as that may sound (because they are helping you stay away from pointless drama)

People who discriminate against "the old" in jobs where experience clearly enables you to do your job 10x better are just nuts. Don't sue them. Pity them. And then move on.

The "ghosting" is just something you have to get used to as a candidate?

Though the ideal upper bound seems to be about 3 weeks net turnaround (for steps 1-4, altogether) for smaller companies (perhaps longer for monster-sized companies), nearly any time can be "reasonable"... as long as you get back to people by the time you say you will, more or less, at each stage in the process.

It's the "by the time you say you will" part that these companies seem to be having inordinate difficulty holding up to. And what people on the receiving end tend to find to be quite grating to be on the receiving end of, over and over and over again.

What looks like a good, normal, expected pace to me:

Day 0 - Candidate apply

This week - Phone call

Next week - On site interviews

Next next week - Offer letter ready to sign

Of course, we have to be in touch right away after each step to arrange the details for the next step. That means we're in touch within 24-48 hours after each step.

It'd be fun to build a tool that does this. I still have ~170 companies I applied to more than two months ago that I haven't heard back from yet. Funnier still is that in the end, the 3 offers I was fortunate enough to receive in the same timeline all had at most a timeline of 2 weeks from initial communication/application to offer. Rejections came either within a half second (auto somehow) to two weeks.

I think we could use close.io as a job seeker's tool instead of a CRM and it could be interesting to use it from the other side of the intended parties.

170 companies?! At what point does a resume become spam?

Never, really, because each company would only see my resume once, and they're getting my resume through expected channels.

I don't have a Compsci degree to fall back on. I needed to be realistic about my chances getting in to a company. Each company received a crafted, custom cover letter. These were not spam applications.

170 companies and 3 offers? Why so many applications and so few offers? Were they just ignoring you?

My guess is that a number of the applications were done via job boards rather than at each company. In my experience as someone still looking for a first job, job board applications seem to have incredibly low yields.

Because I chose an offer within a month. So approximately half of those were sent within 2-3 weeks before I accepted an offer, and of that half I had to turn down a good deal of follow-ups.

Also, bootcamp-grad. I chose a shotgun approach. It worked.

EDIT: to clarify, I haven't heard back from 170. I applied to ~300.

I've done interviews with a number of companies lately and yes, the experience is just all over the place. The most annoying are the companies which don't do what they advertise - like mentioning on their site they will give you feedback if you ask for it and then never responding to the question. Just don't offer it and it's going to be fine.

Surprisingly though, almost every recruitment company did send a proper rejection email. Internal HR - not so much. On the other hand internal recruitment is much simpler to prepare for. Recruiters often call back mentioning only their company and I have no idea which of the last 10 applications they happened to receive and what the position was about.

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