0. Peroni, thank you for reading this. I've been a fan of your writing for years, and your take on hiring was one of the things that ultimately helped me make the decision to switch from coding to recruiting.
1. Yeah, over the course of a year, we got several thousand applications/resumes for this position. The interview rate was roughly 1 in 10.
2. We interviewed 300 people and made offers to 6, i.e. the hit rate was 1 in 50, or 2%. Moreover (and fortunately!), each individual filtering round and subsequent interview took much less than an hour.
Thanks for the kind words. I feel exceptionally guilty for my harsh feedback now.
I'm still bothered by the 1 in 50 ratio. Maybe I'm misinterpreting it. Does that 50 include people who get phone screened or is that 50 exclusively people you have met face to face?
If it's the former rather than the latter, then consider my incredulity null and void. If it's the latter then you should drop me an email as I would jump at the chance to help you to halve that number.
The 50 includes people who got phone screened. The onsite to offer ratio was something like 3 to 1, if memory serves. I will update the original post to make that clearer.
when you say 'typos matter', what you mean is that there was a correlation between 'typos' and whether Trialpay hired the candidate? The resumes with the least typos turned out to be the ones Trialpay hired (presumably because the technical team judged them to be the best candidates).
That's different from saying the candidates with the least 'typos' turned out to be the best engineers.
Making a predictive statement like that is probably a bit premature. All I'm saying here is that the group of people who got offers differed significantly from the group that didn't get offers when it came to how many typos and other errors they had.
Moreover, whether an offer is a good proxy for whether someone is a great engineer is unknown. As I mentioned in another comment, it would be awesome to track on-the-job performance and use that as the dependent variable.
1. Yeah, over the course of a year, we got several thousand applications/resumes for this position. The interview rate was roughly 1 in 10.
2. We interviewed 300 people and made offers to 6, i.e. the hit rate was 1 in 50, or 2%. Moreover (and fortunately!), each individual filtering round and subsequent interview took much less than an hour.