Tip to shiny new CEOs: Ghosting a job candidate is not only grossly unprofessional, it's extremely rude at a personal level.
The candidate went to all the trouble of engaging with you; you owe them (at the very least) a timely and professional rejection email if you don't want to proceed.
Yes, a rejection letter, because that's what you're doing -- rejecting them. Ghosting is still a rejection; it's just a rude rejection. There is no way to candy coat that, and you shouldn't try. Grow a spine, and write that rejection letter in the kindest way you can.
Sometimes in dating, it seems that giving an explicit rejection early on can open yourself up to further undesired communication and wasted time/energy (i.e. rather than accept it and move on, they take it as an opportunity to engage further). I wonder if the same sort of thing happens in the job market? Perhaps this is the rationale (a subconscious one even) behind some of this "ghosting"?
I was actually told by one company I worked for previously to not respond to candidates I interviewed. Needless to say I'm not working for them anymore.
This is the first time I've seen a data visualization of the job search process for a software engineer and it's amazing to see the variability in responsiveness between companies.
This is actually the most surprising thing I've seen since we started Triplebyte. Originally I'd assumed that every company complaining about how difficult it is to hire engineers, would be moving every candidate through their process as quickly as possible. In practice we learnt to stop working with companies who were too dysfunctional to get back to candidates promptly - even if it's just to let them know they needed a few more days to make a decision.
We'll also often see dysfunctional companies switch to the extreme opposite end of the responsiveness spectrum once they've made an offer and start pushing candidates to make a decision immediately. Better to have been responsiveness throughout the process. I suspect companies still underestimate how much that makes a candidate more positively inclined towards them once they're at the decision making stage.
It'd be fun to build a tool that does this. I still have ~170 companies I applied to more than two months ago that I haven't heard back from yet. Funnier still is that in the end, the 3 offers I was fortunate enough to receive in the same timeline all had at most a timeline of 2 weeks from initial communication/application to offer. Rejections came either within a half second (auto somehow) to two weeks.
I've done interviews with a number of companies lately and yes, the experience is just all over the place. The most annoying are the companies which don't do what they advertise - like mentioning on their site they will give you feedback if you ask for it and then never responding to the question. Just don't offer it and it's going to be fine.
Surprisingly though, almost every recruitment company did send a proper rejection email. Internal HR - not so much. On the other hand internal recruitment is much simpler to prepare for. Recruiters often call back mentioning only their company and I have no idea which of the last 10 applications they happened to receive and what the position was about.
Having gone through this process recently, there's a lot of truth in this post. I experienced more companies "ghosting" during the process than slow turnaround times, but it is remarkable how short-sighted companies are during the recruiting phase. It's as if common courtesy has gone completely out the window in tech recruiting. Basic things like not missing phone interviews at times that have been previously scheduled or informing candidates politely that you've decided to move forward with other candidates can't even be taken for granted anymore. Candidates' initial experience with a company is typically through the recruiting organization and negative impressions during the recruiting phase are often applied to the company as a whole. I could see it being a competitive advantage to be known for having a good recruiting process even if it is very selective. For example, I have a very positive impression of DigitalOcean despite not receiving an offer because of the professional and courteous way they handled their interview process.
The "ghosting" is just something you have to get used to as a candidate. Most companies do it. It's likely there are far, far more candidates than jobs, and companies simply can't get back to each and every person. Also, a lot of times, the company can't make a clear yes/no decision and will stall and delay on a borderline candidate in order to try to luck into a better one.
I interviewed with Twitter a while back and it was astounding how little concern they had for my time. I had a few phone screens and two of them had to be rescheduled as the person never called me. Then they gave me a take home coding assignment that required coordinating with one of their engineers who then missed not one but two appointments.
I learned in my first two jobs (in restaurants) that the way the company treats its prospective hires is strongly correlated with how well the company is organized. I kept that in mind as I went out into the corporate world, and the rule has held (in my experience) for the last ~30 years. Good starts imply good companies and good experiences. Bad starts... can be safely dropped.
> I had the luxury of having a few weeks free due to gaps in my consulting schedule. This time block is something that is a rare case in a job search. Performing such an exhaustive search must be nearly impossible if you also have a full-time job.
(Emphasis added.)
The amount of time off required to do this is insane. Is this how most people do it?
Also, I agree that speed of communication is key. I want to be on site within 2-3 weeks if everything is going well. Take much longer than that, and I'll probably either have a job by the time you get back to me, or be too busy talking to people who actually want to talk to me.
As a younger engineer (about 2 years of experience), trying to break from my post-college job into a "real" software job in NYC, it took me almost a year. You're not worth a lot until you're proven with a big name on the resume.
I think it really depends a lot on the companies you interact with. If you're unlucky and hit a lot of companies with slow or unresponsive interview processes I can easily see 6 to 8 weeks of back and fourth.
The last time I went job hunting, I applied to about 12 places over the course of about 4 weeks. Of those 12: 4 offers, 3 rejections, 5 ghosts (basically anyone who doesn't get back to me within a week of an on-site).
I've been working in software for 8 years in SF and I'm told those numbers are pretty good, but I think there's a lot of variability in hit/miss rates for people depending on luck, professional network quality, and how people market themselves.
3. A company agrees to hire you and gives you a start date. The Friday before you're supposed to start, you send a quick email to confirm which of their several buildings you should show up at on Monday morning, and they reply, "Oops, we actually reorganized staff, and we no longer need you."
I agree with you about #1, but I think #2, while bad, isn't as bad as never responding at all. I mean, at least there's some kind of closure, belated though it may be.
When I was hiring, I always tried to loop people in and say no or scoot them through the process as fast as possible. Better for the company, better for me, better for the candidate.
"Unfortunately we're only able to work with people with legal status permitting employment in the US. We hope in the future to help set up visa sponsorships."
I appreciate that they cleared expectations upfront. I tried to sign up on Hired.com once, after going through effort of filling up their lengthy registration forms, which took me several hours, they conveniently told me that their services are not available in my country.
> I communicated with 23 different companies [...]
> to receive 4 offers to make a single choice
> I was rejected 9 times [...]
I liked the article but with today's hiring procedures I can tell you that these numbers are baby steps. I have spent so much time during the last two months doing technical and non-technical interviews that if I were to write an article like that it would take me days to complete it. To be fair, it gets harder when you are a foreigner trying to apply for a position in a company who wants your skills but that expects you to be 2x smarter to justify the immigration process.
I visit /r/cscareerquestions from time to time and it is sad to read the stories of recent graduates struggling to find their first job or even an internship. If that happens to American citizen with an university degree and fresh knowledge about algorithms and data structures, what can we (non-Americans with rusty algorithmic skills) expect? I would be happy to work remotely if it wasn't because many banks limit the transactions that come from foreign companies or simply don't let you create an account because you are from a risky country.
Is there more to the Google doc or has it been edited?
Never heard of Triplebyte, so I looked into them. According to their candidate FAQ:
"We save you time. ... Most candidates save hours that otherwise would be spent on phone screens. We turn an O(n) process into an O(1) process."
The phone screen is where I can screen the companies, so this system will not work in my case. I reject more companies before getting to any actual interviewing when it is clear our shared goals are not being met. Most companies just want a warm body, whereas I am very specific in what I want.
We save you the time of repeated technical phone screens across companies. Companies will do a pitch call with our candidates as the first step, where they pitch themselves to you and after that you decide if you'd like to move forward with them.
> The phone screen is where I can screen the companies
Fair enough but remember that you may be screening not the company itself but some frazzled engineer who curses herself for agreeing to perform 4-th phone screen a week instead of insisting on writing code. Your impression of the company may be misleading.
A related problem also hard to solve, how to find a job as a software engineer for a pleasant highly functional sane company. Let me know if there is a solution.
Personal referrals are the way to go. I don't think you can really assess a company for pleasant/sane working environment unless you know someone who works there (who you can actually trust to tell you if it's a shitshow).
Most likely this will be anything but pleasant, but if you are very careful about not accepting VC financing you may try to optimize for sanity... highly functional will come mostly as you learn from your own errors.
I've been thinking about this for a while. I think it would involve asking a highly focused set of questions to at least 3 different employees and see how much they correlate. I don't know what those questions are though :)
One question that I think correlates low with a highly functional sane tech company is "Does your CEO still write code for the product?" if the answer is yes and the company is larger than 20 people, odds are high that the company/CEO is not highly functional.
I find it interesting that the author doesn't mention anything about the product as priority during his job search. No mention of tech stack, product-market-fit, growth potential, or being convinced that a product is filling a genuine need. These are the things that I would prioritize when considering a job search. The author mentions as a priority responsiveness of the recruiter. Also:
- How nice are the employees?
- What’s the vibe in the office? Noisy? Quiet?
- Do employees look happy?
- How’s the food?
- and so on and so on…
Its usually our job to deal with the circumstances and to actively change them. We are not "good employees". We call bullshit and we get to call bullshit.
We are not hired to help our bosses achieve things, we are hired to save their asses. We are hired because someone goofed up. We are hired because something went wrong and its our job to patch it up.
We come in with the expectation of getting things back on track. We are meant to blend in with the "regular employees" but we never will, because we are free agents. We can walk away from this job and we WILL walk away if what had been promised does not happen. We will walk away unscathed because we have other gigs in the pipeline anyway.
We do not conform. We come in with a plan, which we communicate in pretty clear terms - with the expectation that the person who hires us will, to some extent, play by our rules. Because that's what they brought us in for.
That's the mindset. In some way, we are mercenaries. What remains is whether the people and amenities are nice.
At my current gig, I'm fixing telecommunications software - highly concurrent stuff. Etching out another 20% of performance is actually important here. Today I've had an email about working for someone who wants to set up a new crypto currency and from someone who needs to port their badly engineered python code to awesome pretty shiny new Elixir code. They all know my rate and its certainly not cheap, but I'm going to reject most of them anyway. The average gig is 9 months but there won't be a week during which I don't have some kind of request in my inbox. And its all done remote. Most of my clients haven't even seen my face.
Whether they've got product market fit is simply irrelevant. I pick the jobs that are intellectually challenging, because that's what I want to work on. Their business logic is irrelevant to me. Their stack is irrelevant to me. If their stack sucks, I'll tell them to switch technologies or I won't be available anyway.
Sometimes I entertain the idea of working for some startup. Getting involved. But the reality is: 40 hour salary with a 60 hour expectation - no interesting work (we need to get this frontend thing fixed so heres your react native good luck not dying of boredom) - cramped office space; and I don't mean "crappy" office space, I mean cramped. Where you can't have a thought without someone being an idiot right next to you for no particular reason, etc. It just doesn't make any sense to be an employee in 2016.
Author here. I didn't mention those things because they were a baseline during my search. Product-market fit, growth potential, and solving a genuine problem are table stakes for me.
The bulleted list was everything to worry about after those foundational goals are met.
I've got an unpublished blog post of 100+ questions to ask before joining a company, and the points you brought up are definitely in there.
I wish there was a One Day hiring process. From initial phone screen to offer all in one day. Wondering if interviews taking so many weeks is just a logistics failure.
I assume this post is geared towards all those just starting their career?
Once you have a few years of software dev experience or even less jobs just come to you (I love recruiters .. use them to get the best deal).
If your smart with each new job you can give yourself a nice/big raise. Like 20 to 40k more with each new job especially govt. contracting gigs and at the big silly valley tech companies too.
With the similarities between job searches and dating, I wonder if a Tinder for Jobs can work. By lowering the barrier to entry it could get more of the passive not-really-looking-but-curious workers into the mix.
Wish the author tried job search platforms, since I'm curious how they compare to old fashioned recruiting. Job platforms are those where the candidate is the customer.
[+] [-] pjlegato|9 years ago|reply
The candidate went to all the trouble of engaging with you; you owe them (at the very least) a timely and professional rejection email if you don't want to proceed.
Yes, a rejection letter, because that's what you're doing -- rejecting them. Ghosting is still a rejection; it's just a rude rejection. There is no way to candy coat that, and you shouldn't try. Grow a spine, and write that rejection letter in the kindest way you can.
[+] [-] brbsix|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deedubaya|9 years ago|reply
It's _a lot_ to keep track of and fire off emails to non-good candidates. Especially if you're having applicants apply to [email protected].
Software can solve this problem....
[+] [-] rhizome|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsbechtel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endur|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Harj|9 years ago|reply
This is actually the most surprising thing I've seen since we started Triplebyte. Originally I'd assumed that every company complaining about how difficult it is to hire engineers, would be moving every candidate through their process as quickly as possible. In practice we learnt to stop working with companies who were too dysfunctional to get back to candidates promptly - even if it's just to let them know they needed a few more days to make a decision.
We'll also often see dysfunctional companies switch to the extreme opposite end of the responsiveness spectrum once they've made an offer and start pushing candidates to make a decision immediately. Better to have been responsiveness throughout the process. I suspect companies still underestimate how much that makes a candidate more positively inclined towards them once they're at the decision making stage.
[+] [-] DanFeldman|9 years ago|reply
1) Phone Screens
2) Interview responses (moving to next interview?)
3) Final decisions
4) Negotiation/confirmations of receiving a response to an offer
[+] [-] komali2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] viraptor|9 years ago|reply
Surprisingly though, almost every recruitment company did send a proper rejection email. Internal HR - not so much. On the other hand internal recruitment is much simpler to prepare for. Recruiters often call back mentioning only their company and I have no idea which of the last 10 applications they happened to receive and what the position was about.
[+] [-] dhd415|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryandrake|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jghn|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjmorris|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] IndianAstronaut|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmiller2|9 years ago|reply
This, for me, was the key section of the article:
> I had the luxury of having a few weeks free due to gaps in my consulting schedule. This time block is something that is a rare case in a job search. Performing such an exhaustive search must be nearly impossible if you also have a full-time job.
(Emphasis added.)
The amount of time off required to do this is insane. Is this how most people do it?
Also, I agree that speed of communication is key. I want to be on site within 2-3 weeks if everything is going well. Take much longer than that, and I'll probably either have a job by the time you get back to me, or be too busy talking to people who actually want to talk to me.
[+] [-] vdnkh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d4mi3n|9 years ago|reply
The last time I went job hunting, I applied to about 12 places over the course of about 4 weeks. Of those 12: 4 offers, 3 rejections, 5 ghosts (basically anyone who doesn't get back to me within a week of an on-site).
I've been working in software for 8 years in SF and I'm told those numbers are pretty good, but I think there's a lot of variability in hit/miss rates for people depending on luck, professional network quality, and how people market themselves.
[+] [-] znpy|9 years ago|reply
1. A company ghosts and the comes back months after (when you already took another offer) and says: "wassup, you still down for that thing?"
2. A company ghosts and comes back a month and a half later saying "oh btw we hired a guy". Yeah thanks I figured it out.
[+] [-] tjr|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mooreds|9 years ago|reply
When I was hiring, I always tried to loop people in and say no or scoot them through the process as fast as possible. Better for the company, better for me, better for the candidate.
[+] [-] cyorir|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] um304|9 years ago|reply
"Unfortunately we're only able to work with people with legal status permitting employment in the US. We hope in the future to help set up visa sponsorships."
I appreciate that they cleared expectations upfront. I tried to sign up on Hired.com once, after going through effort of filling up their lengthy registration forms, which took me several hours, they conveniently told me that their services are not available in my country.
[+] [-] Harj|9 years ago|reply
In the meantime, we're working on making companies more aware of the H1-B transfer options (http://blog.triplebyte.com/gaming-the-h-1b-system-for-good) and the recent OPT visa STEM extenstion (https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/students-and-exc...).
[+] [-] guessmyname|9 years ago|reply
> I communicated with 23 different companies [...]
> to receive 4 offers to make a single choice
> I was rejected 9 times [...]
I liked the article but with today's hiring procedures I can tell you that these numbers are baby steps. I have spent so much time during the last two months doing technical and non-technical interviews that if I were to write an article like that it would take me days to complete it. To be fair, it gets harder when you are a foreigner trying to apply for a position in a company who wants your skills but that expects you to be 2x smarter to justify the immigration process.
I visit /r/cscareerquestions from time to time and it is sad to read the stories of recent graduates struggling to find their first job or even an internship. If that happens to American citizen with an university degree and fresh knowledge about algorithms and data structures, what can we (non-Americans with rusty algorithmic skills) expect? I would be happy to work remotely if it wasn't because many banks limit the transactions that come from foreign companies or simply don't let you create an account because you are from a risky country.
[+] [-] donretag|9 years ago|reply
Never heard of Triplebyte, so I looked into them. According to their candidate FAQ:
"We save you time. ... Most candidates save hours that otherwise would be spent on phone screens. We turn an O(n) process into an O(1) process."
The phone screen is where I can screen the companies, so this system will not work in my case. I reject more companies before getting to any actual interviewing when it is clear our shared goals are not being met. Most companies just want a warm body, whereas I am very specific in what I want.
[+] [-] Harj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dunkelheit|9 years ago|reply
Fair enough but remember that you may be screening not the company itself but some frazzled engineer who curses herself for agreeing to perform 4-th phone screen a week instead of insisting on writing code. Your impression of the company may be misleading.
[+] [-] coldcode|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skookum|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bonniemuffin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crpatino|9 years ago|reply
Most likely this will be anything but pleasant, but if you are very careful about not accepting VC financing you may try to optimize for sanity... highly functional will come mostly as you learn from your own errors.
[+] [-] rdoherty|9 years ago|reply
One question that I think correlates low with a highly functional sane tech company is "Does your CEO still write code for the product?" if the answer is yes and the company is larger than 20 people, odds are high that the company/CEO is not highly functional.
[+] [-] user5994461|9 years ago|reply
You know what to do when each of the 3 interviewers of your on-site give a blank stare to this question :D
[+] [-] logfromblammo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sambrand|9 years ago|reply
- How nice are the employees? - What’s the vibe in the office? Noisy? Quiet? - Do employees look happy? - How’s the food? - and so on and so on…
Is this typical?
[+] [-] wayn3|9 years ago|reply
Its usually our job to deal with the circumstances and to actively change them. We are not "good employees". We call bullshit and we get to call bullshit.
We are not hired to help our bosses achieve things, we are hired to save their asses. We are hired because someone goofed up. We are hired because something went wrong and its our job to patch it up.
We come in with the expectation of getting things back on track. We are meant to blend in with the "regular employees" but we never will, because we are free agents. We can walk away from this job and we WILL walk away if what had been promised does not happen. We will walk away unscathed because we have other gigs in the pipeline anyway.
We do not conform. We come in with a plan, which we communicate in pretty clear terms - with the expectation that the person who hires us will, to some extent, play by our rules. Because that's what they brought us in for.
That's the mindset. In some way, we are mercenaries. What remains is whether the people and amenities are nice.
At my current gig, I'm fixing telecommunications software - highly concurrent stuff. Etching out another 20% of performance is actually important here. Today I've had an email about working for someone who wants to set up a new crypto currency and from someone who needs to port their badly engineered python code to awesome pretty shiny new Elixir code. They all know my rate and its certainly not cheap, but I'm going to reject most of them anyway. The average gig is 9 months but there won't be a week during which I don't have some kind of request in my inbox. And its all done remote. Most of my clients haven't even seen my face.
Whether they've got product market fit is simply irrelevant. I pick the jobs that are intellectually challenging, because that's what I want to work on. Their business logic is irrelevant to me. Their stack is irrelevant to me. If their stack sucks, I'll tell them to switch technologies or I won't be available anyway.
Sometimes I entertain the idea of working for some startup. Getting involved. But the reality is: 40 hour salary with a 60 hour expectation - no interesting work (we need to get this frontend thing fixed so heres your react native good luck not dying of boredom) - cramped office space; and I don't mean "crappy" office space, I mean cramped. Where you can't have a thought without someone being an idiot right next to you for no particular reason, etc. It just doesn't make any sense to be an employee in 2016.
[+] [-] kellysutton|9 years ago|reply
The bulleted list was everything to worry about after those foundational goals are met.
I've got an unpublished blog post of 100+ questions to ask before joining a company, and the points you brought up are definitely in there.
[+] [-] low_key|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kellysutton|9 years ago|reply
Nope.
I just genuinely enjoyed my experience with Triplebyte and Gusto enough to write about it.
[+] [-] FT_intern|9 years ago|reply
Is this not a violation of the equal opportunity act?
[+] [-] jacalata|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|9 years ago|reply
Somehow I can then overlay tagging for projects but it seems doable
[+] [-] 31reasons|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LargeCompanies|9 years ago|reply
Once you have a few years of software dev experience or even less jobs just come to you (I love recruiters .. use them to get the best deal).
If your smart with each new job you can give yourself a nice/big raise. Like 20 to 40k more with each new job especially govt. contracting gigs and at the big silly valley tech companies too.
[+] [-] cheriot|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] welder|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmiller2|9 years ago|reply