Joel Spolsky nailed it with his article on why everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1%: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/01/27/news-58/

Basically, there's a ton of completely unqualified (or even under-qualified) applicants who apply to just about every job opening out there. If you've ever been on the other end of the table, posting a job opening and sifting through applicants, the situation becomes clear very quickly.

I'm actually surprised 250 make it past their initial screen. The rest of the numbers seem reasonable to me though.

No, I don't think you're underestimating their strength - I think it's more that you're vastly underestimating how expensive it can be to make a bad hire and how difficult it can be to fire someone in California, even at the individual contributor level.

A few companies do manage to do it, but as far as I can tell you have to set up your corporate culture, HR department etc. from the outset to be prepared and ready for firing people frequently, and that's not something many startups (other than maybe Netflix?) were/are really well prepared for...

Um, is it really that hard to fire someone in CA? It's an at-will state and you can get rid of someone that day for any reason under the sky (that isn't 'discriminatory').

Firing doesn't seem hard but I think your point does stand that the cost of having to do so is kind of great. Find, hire, onboard and train a new employee, one that you hope does better than the bad hire.

Would it be possible (and legal) to reduce the salary of an employee? In SF this could be an effective means to force an employees exit without actually firing them, due to cost of living.

It's more likely that there are a lot of false negatives in CircleCI's hiring funnel. The issue isn't "there aren't enough good developers." There are plenty of good developers. It's possible that this sample of 1000 developers came from really bad sources (there's not enough information provided to determine the quality of their sourcing). For example, referrals convert at a rate of 57% to the screen (compared to 13% when sourcing). Recruiting agencies convert at 59% (although you'll be giving away 10-30% of first year salary for that). It could be that this sample is purely inbound applicants, which convert the lowest at 13%. [1]

We have benchmarks to understand how well a company is converting at each step in their funnel. CircleCI is converting well in 2 of their funnels, but the other 2 are underperforming significantly per my other comment in this thread.

[1] http://qr.ae/TU1sB2

Undoubtedly there are many more than that. But they have the luxury of having 1000 people apply when they're only looking to hire 3. There might be 100 good devs, but that doesn't mean they want to or are able to hire that many.

Past a certain level of skill, it really does come down to specific experience, priorities, communication styles, etc. There are many worthwhile devs that simply have a less ideal package for that specific role, at that specific company, at that specific time.

My tiny company got dozens of applications just from an HN posting. If you place your ad on multiple job boards, then 1000 is a conservative estimate of how many applications you will get.

What is the signal/noise ratio on those applications? I'm assuming a lot of them can be immediately passed on, so if true, what about the apps is typically out of alignment with the role?

I was operating under the assumption that they are continuously hiring, but I guess it’s possible that they aren’t quite big enough for that yet.

Keep in mind that only 1/4 of those thousand passed an initial screen, which isn't even an interview step, but rather glossing over their resume to see if it fits the position. From there, only 117 passed a quick phone screen.

It still seems high, but I can imagine these average numbers being inflated by some important 'Lead Engineer' type of position, for which the extreme vetting is reasonable.

I think the majority of the candidates are capable, and a lot of them are probably quite excellent. But when you have that many candidates for so few positions, you have the luxury of really trying to go for the best people.