The gist is that I had a friend apply, go through a few interviews, and then just get completely ghosted. After several emails and attempts to reach out, the hiring manager replied to his email with a two word reply when my friend asked about his application status. That reply was "no thanks".

I can't understand why a company wouldn't do that, even if they were overwhelmed with the challenge of hiring in general. The win is potentially exponential, if you get good people who come to work with people they already know how to work with.

Well designed astroturfing, nonetheless.

Edit: Astroturfing is the wrong word, perhaps. What I mean to say is vocalized better in the replies. These all should be taken with a substantial grain of salt. A rock of salt?

It's entirely possible both are true, since they're mostly unrelated, so I don't understand the accusation of astroturfing.

The people handling the recruiting functions are usually not the people you would be working with (unless you go into HR), and generally if HR starts ghosting you during the recruiting process it's because they're putting their efforts into the candidate they are trying to hire.

EDIT: Conversely, the opposite is also true. I used to work for a firm that was an absolute nightmare to work for, but the HR process was amazing.

I've worked in both. When the company with a good environment closes we were all let go. They mishandled my last paycheck so I'm still waiting. No way to get references. Had to contact government to get seperation papers. The bad environment place that stressed you out and then let your department go for something out of your control. The firing process felt good. They provided career support offered a reasonable settlement package. Easy to use as a reference as they provided a contact #

I'm definitely in agreement that a functioning HR/payroll department is a prerequisite for a good experience though. I had an employer that kept paying me after I left company, and they only stopped because I told them that this was the case. Obviously, afterwards, they sent me a letter saying they had "discovered" an overpayment, and I should send them back the money to exact cent, with no allowance for the cheque/mailing costs...

Afaik he originally became well known for his helpful posts and advice on Joel Spolsky's business of software forums before HN even existed. That's where I first came across him, useful info about SEO.

This is a long way of saying I thought he'd been hired as a developer advocate for their startup thing, Stripe Atlas, rather than a recruitment advisor.

Edit: It's on his blog that he was hired for Stripe Atlas https://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/09/09/im-joining-stripe-to-wo...

I'm well aware of who he is and what he's famous for though.

1. You are researching a company.

2. You own or work in hr at a company or have been told to post a review by management.

3. You are angry/unhappy at your current role or that you were let go. You go on to warn others / get even.

Rare is the person who is working a company and is happy who decides to visit glassdoor and tell everyone how happy they are. Have you done this? Know anyone who would follow this chain of events?

I think it would be much better said that we should take with a grain of salt anyone's assessment of their current job.

And of course, to the point you raise, we must always take that with a grain of salt. Nobody is going to come to the table with complete honesty about the problems at a company with their name right next to it.

Within reason, at least.

They said “ we don’t want you in our band “

It was oddly personal and upsetting. Lol

How tone deaf is hr sometimes

Is there literally not a single HR Portal that tracks status? That flags 'pending'? Notifications for '2 weeks no reply'?

The HR person can't grab the hiring manager and hand-hold the response?

An automated response would be just fine.

And just cordial as a minimum you know 'Thanks so much for turning out, but we can't move forward at this time'.

As a hiring manager, absolutely all portals/HR management software I have used up to this moment have this feature. Most of them highlight the application and put them in a visible 'No progress for X time' category; some even send separate e-mails for each long overdue candidate.

The truth is that - at least in the orgs I've been part of - the trend for HR is to be apathetic to the needs of the team they're hiring for and tone deaf in communication. Recruitment has been the least favourite bit of their job.

Over the years I have received Linkedin messages from a number of candidates whom I have referred to other teams/department after they interviewed for a position in mine. HR should've followed up with them; they didn't.

OTOH they were quite efficient with their response. It was a mutual "no" and they spared me the trouble by getting to me, with useful feedback, within 48 hours.

There is a lot of BS around the hiring process these days, but some parts of it are still in HR's control: namely the "before" and "after" of the actual interview day(s).

If that part is bad, it indicates rot in HR, which will be a problem every single time you interact with them.

I have nothing against Stripe, just commenting on the general case.

However I realise it was just a bad person in a big company so I did not let it reflect badly on my use of the product.

This was for a pretty senior position.

Why not just tell the candidate that they aren't getting an offer? Why make up elaborate stories about headcount? Why say you're going to follow up? It's clearly not a bandwidth issue since they took the time to respond anyway.

Even something like "We've filled all positions. Your application was strong, but not strong enough. It's unlikely we'll reach back out."

That's 1000x better than getting ghosted after being told they WOULD reach back out. Complete bullshit on their part and a total lack of integrity. There's really no excuse for it.

> A week later, instead of the offer, they just said they ran out of headcount. Never heard back from them again (even though they said they'll reach out when they get headcount back).

Saying you'll get back to a candidate, especially when that candidate has already been told to expect an offer, and then ghosting is not polite. Any framing of this as acceptable behavior, be it polite or impolite, is unacceptable. You can say "oh that's just the way it is" and there's some truth to that, but that doesn't mean it isn't pure fucking bullshit and deserving of condemnation.

I had terrible interview experiences (rudeness, ghosting, and making zero sense) with Lyft, Airbnb, Twitter, but if they make the right offer, I might say yes (although I have quite a strong memory).

They came back to him to tell him his application was rejected. That was obviously the end of it.

I don't understand the anger here.

They lied, full stop, don't apologize for how "polite" it is (and it's not polite, it's disrespectful).

It's like if your doctor tried to be polite to you by not mentioning some serious disease because he was afraid it would make you feel bad. It might indeed make the candidate feel bad to hear about their (perceived) deficiencies - but if they do hear about it then they can do something about it!

Telling the candidate that you'll reach back out, and then not doing that, is complete bullshit.

- You have a referral

- You went to MIT, Stanford, Caltech, CMU, Cal

- You're coming from FAANG or similar

The frontdoor is a waste of time.

Even with the above odds are against you, but at least you have someone to ask about progress/move things along for you.

I live in a place with a fairly small population, and I got offers at 3/3 programming jobs I've applied for since my first in 2017.

I should have said 'most bay area software companies' and even that could probably be qualified by 'competitive' or 'famous'.

Two reasons for that are:

1) I went to a state school (NC State)

2) The FANG in question was Amazon, which I don't think they "count". I have friends that applied when they decided to leave Amazon and they didn't get interviews either.

If your FAANG was Amazon I'm guessing you're in the same boat.

[0] https://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/06/great-story-from-s...

Ironically, this is almost the exact same attitude I got in my poor experience interviewing with Stripe. Interviewers were constantly late to our calls and mixed up who would be interviewing me more than once. Despite that, I still was told I was going to receive an offer... only to be ghosted for weeks. Once the recruiter finally reached back out, they said the position had been cancelled but they would find me another position. Spoiler: I never heard back from them, and they ignored all of my further communications.

Throughout all of this, I was apologized to several times (credit is due there, I guess) and each time the excuse was "ha ha sorry things are such a mess, that's just how things are when you work at a start up!" First of all, "haha we're a startup" is not a valid excuse for being late to meetings and ignoring communication.

Second: you're a company worth tens of billions of dollars, have thousands of employees in offices around the globe, and were founded a decade ago. You are not a startup. You are not a "small team". Stop using it as an excuse.

Pretending to act like a startup has become a cover for being sloppy at big companies. People want to pick and choose what it means to work like a startup, and usually they choose the aspects that give them flimsy excuses for bad behavior.

In reality, my experience with actual small startups has been that people are better at arriving to meetings on time and following through with commitments because small teams mean everyone knows each other. If you don't show up to the meeting, we can see you across the small office and hold you accountable.

It's the big companies where accountability starts to disintegrate. People know they can get away with dropping balls all over the place as long as they get their OKRs finished for quarterly review. Things start to slip through the cracks because that person you're dealing with is just another e-mail address, not your close coworker who sits on the other side of the room.

This is also why people fight so hard to get prestigious companies and universities on their resume.

(1) The practical reality that a lot of people will have a suboptimal experience until we (both "we Stripe" and "we the industry") figure out more scalable ways to assess people. We'll do the best we can to identify promising people but a lot of people will get something somewhat functionally equivalent to a form rejection. You could argue that this is merely a prioritization decision -- we could keep hiring recruiters until everyone could be individually assessed -- but doing so would require a recruiting team of comparable magnitude to the rest of the Stripe organization and so the current state is an unfortunate compromise given the current constraints and given the decision to have an open application form (which is, I think, on net better for everyone).

(2) Cases where people at Stripe mishandled the process. I know for a fact that some of the anecdotes shared in the thread are from many years ago, and I know that our process has improved since then (we have empirical data to this effect), but we're also acutely aware that we continue to make mistakes -- recruiting is a high-stakes and complex process with a lot of fallible moving parts. For whatever it's worth, we issue CSAT surveys to every candidate who interviews (about 6,000 onsite interviews in 2019), and track the results both at the aggregate Stripe level and at the individual recruiter level. And I get why some people here sound so annoyed -- what might be "another entry in a database" to a recruiter or hiring manager is "the future of my career" to someone on the other side. While it's always hard to know what to make of a set of anecdotes, and while our referral rate among Stripe employees is very high today, I'm nonetheless bothered by the number of cases shared here, and we're going to be digging in. (Specific anecdotes with more concrete dates or data are welcome at [email protected].)

I interviewed in 2019 and never got a CSAT. The recruiter (and rest of the team) completely ghosted me after telling me an offer was coming. No further communication, and certainly no CSAT.

It seems that could be a huge hole and your entire CSAT program is subject to confirmation bias if you are not even sending them to the people who are most likely to respond with a negative experience. I'm not sure I would trust this "empirical data" you have.

It is not inevitable and there are company that do recruiting better and other worse. For example, asking for a cover letter at Stripe and then ghosting people liberally even after multiple rounds of interview does not sound tremendously good to my ear. That is a not a sub-optimal interview experience, like being in a coma is not a sub-optimal life experience.

I understand that working with recruiters is hard (who ever said: I know a recruiter who is a genius? Or even the lesser: I know that recruiter, they are brilliant), but respecting candidates should be a priority of any organization.

Generally speaking, the same sort of superlatives used for high IQ aren't used to describe high EQ, but we probably should.

I have interacted with a few recruiters (not at Stripe, I've never applied there) who were off-the-charts in their ability to make people feel comfortable and at ease, occasionally even in the face of truly horrendous processes and systems failures.

Also, it's an interesting signal when you get ghosted by the hiring manager (bosses boss of the team lead I would have been reporting to) and the recruiter re-initiates communication to apologize and get things back on track.

I still never got that job, but that was basically because "Remote OK" really meant "Remote OK in theory because we like the idea of paying a lower salary, but in practice it's only 'OK' for overqualified candidates that we can't convince to relocate, or maybe a relative of ours", and definitely not the recruiter's fault (it turns out that the hiring manager wasn't a good fit for the organization. Go figure.).

I did get some really good chocolate chip cookies as a consolation prize, though.

For example, the most common behavior with these recruiting companies (and I am fully employed and paid very well) is that they take 30 minutes of my time with the usual general questions, then they make me chat with some sort of hiring manager of the target company, then they send an email "I will let you know in a few days", and they never write back. I send an email saying "so?" and I never get an answer. Then, I find out they moved into real estate. Ten, 15 times over a few years (why I continued answering? The hiring companies were quite interesting, one in Vegas, some in the East Coast where I don't have much of a network, they could, with emphasis on the conditional tense, be useful).

We can say that they are just a little piece of a bad process, or that it is the hiring manager/company fault, or "yes, but you did not have to deal with certain rude candidates" (and I have seen plenty of those rude candidates, there I certainly offer my solidarity). And if we go on with the circumnavigation of people, we find a justification for any sort of less-than-good behavior. If telling lies is part and parcel of one's job, they (recruiters/hiring managers/C-level) are still liars, they don't get a pass in my book.

It sounds like you found a decent recruiter and it is quite telling that a recruiter re-initiating a conversation and apologizing, things I happen to do also in my job, is now an "off-the-charts" EQ genius. That's the 101 for anyone with a modicum of professionalism. I am sure there are great recruiters around like there are plenty of needles in haystacks.

Ah, sorry about that, I didn't mean to conflate the two quite so directly. I also didn't make it clear that I was ghosted by the hiring manager after the recruiter handed me off to them. The recruiter wasn't supposed to even be involved from that point forward, but they followed up anyway. However, you can ignore the anecdote as an unnecessary distraction if you like.

Anyway, sure, recruiters get a bad rap, in the same way as used-car salespeople do. I wasn't really arguing that the reputation the profession has is entirely undeserved. I was just saying that good and even great recruiters do actually exist. For many of the working-environment reasons you've mentioned, they often don't stay in the role of recruiting ICs, or even for relatively senior roles. They have better opportunities in recruiting-adjacent fields like executive search services, life-coaching, and so on.

Absolutely. That is category 2!

Sorry, but it's not. I'm not giving Stripe a pass here per se, but the priority of an org is to make money so that they can offer positions.

Scaling recruiting is hard. Just like you might want an org who see thousands and thousands of applications every day to act more benevolently, the opposite also holds true.

"Scaling recruiting is hard". Sure, plenty of things are hard when scaling, but calling back candidates after multiple rounds of interviews (just to highlight one common complaint) is not. That is a cultural problem.

They don't have (and you should not expect them) to give a feedback to anyone who apply (as it is the case of the parent comment)

It's not, in fact, what every business owner thinks.

Have you ever seen a businessperson make a public statement on behalf of a company that espoused or accepted negative/neutral sentiment?

I dunno why people even bother responding or reacting internally to these statements. There's not a human being behind them -- there's a corporate entity who has to answer to stakeholders with a spotlight being shined on them.

It's purely politics and statesmanship, the human being is long gone, or only shows up in private settings after everyone's had several drinks.

Except Elon Musk. That's a man you can, probably, take at his word.

I was job hunting earlier this year due to my last company (a fintech start up) shutting down and Stripe was the only company that just handed me an immediate "No" without even a recruiter call. I know one other engineer who is more mid level and she said she had applied and never even got a response.

I harbor no ill will toward them, but I'm really curious what their hiring criteria is and why it seems so different that most of the other major companies out there.

Imagine you have enough high-quality candidates such that you could have every single employee interviewing candidates all day every day, doing no other work. What do you do?

In the real world, most engineers top out at one or two phone screens a week, and/or one or two on-site interviews a week. Sometimes more. Each is 45 minutes at least, usually an hour. Each involves writing deliberate, thoughtful feedback and a professional assessment. Candidates that do well lead to decision meetings that take more time for all the interviewers to discuss -- candidates that do poorly can circuit-break.

Then there is scheduling! Is there physical space available for the candidate to interview? Can we get all the necessary interviewers? What if one or more of them can't make it (sick, etc.)? What if the candidate needs to reschedule? Time zones? Holidays?

Imagine Stripe has 100 recruiters (this is at least accurate within an order of magnitude). What does the back-of-the-napkin math look like for their maximum interviewing bandwidth?

Hiring is a really hard problem, even for well-equipped organizations. Even the best in the world do it badly sometimes. And the anecdote cases tend to shout the loudest. Maybe you had a typo on your resume. Maybe other candidates looked better. Maybe there is a nasty rumor about you. Maybe the recruiter was having a bad day. Or maybe you were just unlucky and arbitrarily cut.

This is generally how our industry works, though, which is that it's not worth it to go through loop for a job unless you were referred by someone on the inside.

When you do that kind of blog posts, you try to improve the image of the company externally so that more people want to work there. It could help with more people applying but also increase the acceptance rate of the offers.

When you have a lot of people applying then you just cherry pick the best ones