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The candidate's experience shows how flawed Bay Area recruiting is. This candidate was clearly strong, as they had a 100% offer rate on companies that they inte

The candidate's experience shows how flawed Bay Area recruiting is. This candidate was clearly strong, as they had a 100% offer rate on companies that they interviewed at and almost all of those companies are top tier(Apple, LinkedIn, Amazon, Facebook, Google). Yet 70% of the companies didn't even give the candidate a chance to interview. It's incredibly sad that a candidate that is able to get offers at Google, Facebook, and Apple can't even get 70% of the companies to let them in the door to interview. Interviewing is clearly broken.

busterarm 8y ago
A lot of companies post jobs that they aren't really looking to fill. Either they're trying to portray a picture externally that doesn't reflect the reality of their financial situation or in order to play shitty visa games. Also everyone knows recruiting is broken. This works in both directions too. The FAANGs can afford to make hiring mistakes and carry dead weight for a year. A lot of smaller companies cannot. I used to maybe get a 10% response from companies with a 90-100% success rate on in-person interviews. Now several years into my career it's maybe 40% & 60% (I've started ending interviews for dealbreakers). Things change depending on the role and where you are in your career.
gok 8y ago
It's possible the candidate was overqualified and some of those 70% knew it wasn't worth their time if there was a 99% chance they were going to Google or similar.
- learc83 8y ago
  The article said they went to a small no name school, had no impressive companies on their resume, and had only a few years of experience. I don't know what would make them think they were overqualified. Also almost all of the companies were top tier.
- Scarblac 8y ago
  With 2.5 years of experience and nothing that special on his resume? Sounds hard to believe.
crowdpleaser 8y ago
Agree with the caveat that it's a recruiting problem not an interviewing problem. I'm a data scientist and every firm I've ever interviewed with has told me about how important analytics is to them, how they take it seriously, how they're investing so much in it, etc. But the recruiters are amazingly incompetent and shockingly bad at getting their details right - I know there's a reason that the recruiters aren't data scientists themselves but I've terminated my candidacy at places off of phone screens because of such poor experiences with the recruiter. My favorite vignette comes from interviewing for a machine learning position. The recruiter asked me what software I used, I told her that I was more familiar with tensorflow than PyTorch but was familiar with both and prefered to use Keras as the interface to both when dealing with structured data. She wasn't familiar with any of those packages and went on to quiz me about the SAS procedures I was familiar with. I sometimes think of quitting my job and becoming a head hunter / recruiter. I don't think I'd be good at it, but willingness to use emails rather than phone calls and familiarity with the tech stack has to be a major differentiator, right?

busterarm 8y ago

A lot of companies post jobs that they aren't really looking to fill. Either they're trying to portray a picture externally that doesn't reflect the reality of their financial situation or in order to play shitty visa games. Also everyone knows recruiting is broken. This works in both directions too. The FAANGs can afford to make hiring mistakes and carry dead weight for a year. A lot of smaller companies cannot. I used to maybe get a 10% response from companies with a 90-100% success rate on in-person interviews. Now several years into my career it's maybe 40% & 60% (I've started ending interviews for dealbreakers). Things change depending on the role and where you are in your career.

gok 8y ago

It's possible the candidate was overqualified and some of those 70% knew it wasn't worth their time if there was a 99% chance they were going to Google or similar.

learc83 8y ago
The article said they went to a small no name school, had no impressive companies on their resume, and had only a few years of experience. I don't know what would make them think they were overqualified. Also almost all of the companies were top tier.
Scarblac 8y ago
With 2.5 years of experience and nothing that special on his resume? Sounds hard to believe.

crowdpleaser 8y ago

Agree with the caveat that it's a recruiting problem not an interviewing problem. I'm a data scientist and every firm I've ever interviewed with has told me about how important analytics is to them, how they take it seriously, how they're investing so much in it, etc. But the recruiters are amazingly incompetent and shockingly bad at getting their details right - I know there's a reason that the recruiters aren't data scientists themselves but I've terminated my candidacy at places off of phone screens because of such poor experiences with the recruiter. My favorite vignette comes from interviewing for a machine learning position. The recruiter asked me what software I used, I told her that I was more familiar with tensorflow than PyTorch but was familiar with both and prefered to use Keras as the interface to both when dealing with structured data. She wasn't familiar with any of those packages and went on to quiz me about the SAS procedures I was familiar with. I sometimes think of quitting my job and becoming a head hunter / recruiter. I don't think I'd be good at it, but willingness to use emails rather than phone calls and familiarity with the tech stack has to be a major differentiator, right?