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Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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