I can only see undergrads falling for this.
Maybe if you narrow down the job requirements (and the company mission) you would get less than 2.5k applicants and you wouldn't need to throw challenges to filter out people who value their time.
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, will spend half a day on your application for free.
I would love to find a better way to filter through 2500 applications. What markers do we rely on. AI has made the usual filters even more irrelevant.
- People who will be hired immediately on applying because they're amazing. These people generally don't apply through the usual pipeline, they contact people they know and offer to work with them. Sometimes they get headhunted.
- Everyone else. To these people it is a numbers game where they have maybe a 5% [0] chance of being hired on applying and so need to apply to maybe 20+ jobs. Any challenge is going to be a massive pain for them because it represents a big time investment for little marginal gain.
[0] In the article there are 15 applicants, assuming you only hire 1 there is a 5% chance right there even if they are all obviously qualified and acceptable hires. And then there are a lot of "fake" jobs where the company is not actually going to end up hiring anyone this month.
You have the people who will be directly hired through networking.
Then you have everyone else who will shotgun their resumes and other credentials. Some will have better schools and portfolios than others but it's still basically a numbers game. (And, given it's a numbers game, they may not invest much in a given opportunity unless it looks particularly interesting or a company puts skin in the game--e.g. flies them out for on-site interviews.)
- Ask people to nominate someone else they know as a good resource. - Reach out to the multiply independently recommended person - Ask they who they would recommend and why.
Time is the one resource that none of us can get more of. It is not saved, like money, to be spent on some future endeavors. It does not accumulate interest. It does not grow with market fluctuations. We get what we get and nothing more or less.
When an applicant has already taken the time to develop a resume that illustrates their skills along with a portfolio/repo that proves said skills, you callously dismiss that work and past experience by making them jump through hoops in your application process. This starts the conversation by telling the applicant you do not value their efforts thus far, whether you actually do or not. It's not a good foot to lead with.
Filtering through thousands of applicants is tough, no doubt, but if your company is successful enough to be receiving that many applicants for a position, then it is successful enough to hire and develop a robust HR or recruiting department that can vet these applications with actual human contact. Yes, this costs money, but if you want to make the omelette, you need to crack some eggs. If you cannot afford to take that path, then you cannot afford to grow, making it tougher to find quality applicants.
Yes. Because there are lots of people with nice looking resumes who code poorly and have at best superficial knowledge of technology.
Nevertheless, every take home I accept I assume the default action of the receiver is to forget the effort and time that went into in, rejecting with no feedback. Horrible, but based on reality.
It is what it is, but I'm on a mission (getting the job) and unfortunately I do not hold all the cards.
If only there was a way to prove one's worth without having to spin plates while reciting 1000 digits of Pi EVERY TIME.
As with anything of value this is also a supply and demand thing. Perhaps in India, junior candidates' time is simply worth less. The author mentions they got 2.5K applications, so obviously this will affect how picky the company can (and should) be.
A candidate who had applied for jobs before knows that his chances for getting a reply are in the low single digits. Now you are offering them to waste some time for probably the same. Only the most desperate will go through with this
Maybe. I'd say "motivated" rather than desperate. Desperation might motivate, but another motivation might be that this is a job that is a really good fit for me, or is a company I really want to work with. As opposed to a job I could do but isn't a good fit.
I don't know about India, but, in the US, companies have a credibility problem. I would guess that most of the job-seekers don't trust companies, and think the hiring processes are incompetent.
And we see numerous examples of companies saying they're doing something different with hiring, but these have also generally not left favorable impressions.
US people play along, to varying degrees, with hiring processes they don't trust or respect. But I suspect that their feelings are consequently mercenary and transactional.
Instead of inventing a bullshit pre-job you can make the world a better place. You also get a strong signal on who can deal with real world problems when they take more than 4 hours to solve.
> HIRING CHALLENGE: Find our recenter browser plugin (it is open-source). Understand what it is for and suggest an interesting and personally useful feature you can add to it. Go through the code and share a brief note on how you would go about building this feature, and why. Note: Send us an email once you have thought this through, have put together the design doc, and are ready to start coding.
I am not sure what you mean by better way of filtering. You already got only 15 candidates from 2500 applicants. Next step is to just check what they have done in the challenge which will further reduce the number of candidates. The problem would be if lets say 1000 applicants submit the challenge.
If the culture is at all similar there, then that first step in your process is instantly filtering for people who are extremely compliant with arbitrary processes and bureaucracy. Which in turn will be very likely to instantly filter out the self-directed learners you claim to want.
Stop trying to find the perfect person and find instead someone willing to work and improve themselves. Grow the staff you need.
BTW, I wrote a book on self-directed learning, and at one time was the youngest manager in Apple R&D, when I was 20.
Ok, you're right that the article is contradicting itself. However, the article is correct as well, our last hiring round had the challenge: "tell us your favorite color in your application". Out of hundreds of applications, we had maybe 5 who said anything about a color.
Job seekers are weaponizing applications, and are lamenting that the application process is being weaponized against them. It sucks on both sides of the table.
Concrete suggestions?
Our last hiring round we got probably 200 applicants. At least 95% seemed to just be automated submissions, no cover letter just a resume, despite our application asking specifically for a cover saying why you were a great fit. We had 3 of our most senior people reviewing these applications (our of a company of 8).
Most of the time we were digging through dense resumes trying to pick out the 1 or 2 things that matched our technology stack. We figure the cover is the place you tell us why we should talk to you if you only have 1-2 technology overlap, so most resumes we spent 30-60 seconds on and then ditched.
We interviewed 3 people out of that, and they were both really super junior. We were considering hiring one of them as a "maybe she could learn the position". Then I sent out one more round of "if you know anyone" to my personal network (which I had previously done a few months earlier), and got one personal reference to a guy we ended up hiring.
> Fewer than 100 filled a form with open-ended questions. About 15 went on to complete a reasonably simple real-world challenge. We are a nation with the cheapest internet and a billion internet users. Where are all the self-directed learners? The eclectic ekalavyas?
Apparently not jumping through corporate drone hoops, for a chance to talk with your company.
> And then to make it worse, our exam system is fundamentally broken. It’s like forcing Serena Williams and Magnus Carlsen (and Gukesh) to compete in 400m hurdles to figure out if they are fit for their respective sports.
Exactly.