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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

I am not personally involved in rejecting candidates, but I have heard anecdotally that people have found what gets sent out to be nicer than what they've heard from others.

Have you gotten more feedback in other industries? To be honest, I thought that general standard is essentially silence. But it's been many years since I've worked in not-tech.

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Most companies are totally silent on what went wrong for legal reasons, although many will give you the courtesy of saying "no" instead of ghosting you once you have had an interview.

It does seem a little bit suboptimal to ask so much upfront from people who you would never hire. A company with a similarly large early screening form, Reservoir Labs, does a first resume screen before sending an invitation to respond to their screening questions. I would suggest that you do the same out of politeness to candidates.

We're not going to do a resume screen, because too often we have found that a resume does not accurately predict the quality of the materials (in both directions!). People are certainly welcome to not apply to Oxide; the world is large, and this company emphatically isn't the right fit for everyone! Indeed, part of the reason that we chose to make this process public is to allow people to better decide if it's worth the investment of time and energy -- or not!

I would advise caution at hiring someone who is excessively willing to go through an immense set of hoops just to get hired, as this might indicate a disproportionate willingness to work for you.

Honestly, it feels suspicious.

It’d probably be better to invest the (substantial) work done in reviewing the submission in a more structured interview process where the traits can be better assessed.

We do not evaluate people on “how much they want to work here” but instead on relevant skills. As mentioned in this thread (and on our jobs page) we get enough applicants that it takes 4-6 weeks to even read materials, on average, and so have to necessarily reject a large number of people. Simply wanting to work at Oxide is not a differentiator. Everyone who applies does!

> We do not evaluate people on “how much they want to work here”

Yes you do, implicitly.

Every workplace that has open job postings does, on some level. We do not particularly use “seems like they really want to” as a criteria.

If the hiring process is a significant burden to the candidate when compared to your competitors, it might become, even if not formally recognised.

This is why I asked if you can detect any interesting signals in your candidate’s profiles that diverge from the overall candidate pool (hard to get stats on the people who don’t apply, but I think you understand where I’m going).

For the record, I’d LOVE to see that kind of data.

You're conflating a couple of things here -- while we don't select for enthusiasm as such, we very much do select (both implicitly and explicitly) for intrinsic motivation. (So the signal of candidates that choose not to apply is not only hard to get, it's also not necessarily interesting.) In terms of where that intrinsic motivation comes from (which is perhaps what you're asking?), we have found that it can be found in a wide variety of places and backgrounds. And indeed, such as there's a common theme at all, it's that it doesn't necessarily follow from a resume.

You touched a very good point - in order to apply, the candidate must be very motivated to apply. Unlike, say, the hundreds of random resumes we (present employer) get every day (feels like a DDoS attack sometimes) - those candidates are motivated enough to fill out a form, but not enough to read the job posting.

> We do not evaluate people on “how much they want to work here”

If you make the candidacy process a significant burden to the candidate, I’m weary you might make it a similarly significant part of the selection criteria, just because otherwise good candidates who are less eager to work for the company might not have the time to apply to it. That the process rejects a large number of promising candidates is already predicted in the article.

Can you observe any signal on the candidate background that’d indicate they could be consistently eager to leave their present companies?

For sure making the _process_ public is a big plus!

(All companies should make their hiring process transparent and public).

More feedback? No. Less time demanded? Yes. And your company's application process is more demanding and more personal than most in your industry. Does a generic response show Oxide's values of candor, courage, empathy, and transparency?

We don't provide feedback on folks that we don't interview -- for reasons not dissimilar to Y Combinator's logic for the same policy.[0] I wouldn't phrase it quite the same way, but we are grossly oversubscribed as a company, and we as a result end up rejecting people who would probably succeed here.

[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/whynot

If someone demands hours of free labour for "code exercises" or whatever, the absolute bare minimum is that you put some portion of that back into meaningful code review.

So you should probably be spending _more_ time on the feedback for rejected candidates. Be specific, tie it back to your evaluation criteria that you wrote down before asking for the exercises to be completed.

We at Oxide don't ask for code exercises, but perhaps you're making a more general comment?

I read the parent as metaphorical; if we did code samples, code review would be expected, so since we do not, an equivalent review would be nice.

I get the sentiment but it’s very tricky; most places do a screen and then an interview and so review takes place during said interview, we are heavier allocated on “the screen” in a sense. It would be even more work in our circumstances to do so, since we have more people in that stage of the process than others.

Yes, I was making a more general comment (I think it does still apply whether there's actual code-exercises or not though).

If it's "too much work" for you, might be time to re-examine how much work you're asking for.

I also think these sorts of things select for candidates that have lots of time for "applying to places" (which will naturally select against people already in jobs, or who already value work/life balance).

Your process doesn't look as onerous as some I've seen for sure -- but perhaps you _should_ add a "screen" portion and thereby not ask for the "long form" work from candidates you'd reject anyway (also buying more time for meaningful feedback to those you do ask the work of).

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