I believe that the article is fundamentally wrong.
The bulk of the article is true. But companies are not lying when they say that legal risk is a reason not to send feedback.
Triplebyte is in the unusual position of being able to say, "Everyone who has enough technical skill gets through the interview." And that fact is sufficient to defuse their risk. But real companies don't have the luxury of ignoring non-technical aspects of the job.
Here are real reasons why I've seen people denied a job. "Nobody could understand his accent." "Accidental personal referenced summed him up as, 'Loves to make things crash and burn in production to see the pretty fireworks.'" "Nobody could believe the argument he got into at lunch."
In my books those are all valid reasons to not want to work with someone. However the first opens you up for an accusation of racism, the second would break a personal confidence, and the third had demonstrated sufficient irrationality that tiptoeing away was a great idea.
And you can't give feedback on technical issues, and not on the rest, because that amounts to a tacit acknowledgement that there was something non-technical. Leave the non-technical to your imagination and guess what happens?
I think your point that the actual companies have to judge culture fit is critical. TripleByte's interview is about as purely technical as you can get. Their promise to client companies is that the candidates who pass are technically sound to a baseline level. That leaves the companies to judge cultural fit, which is where all of that legal liability seeps in.
I've done the TripleByte interview before. Even got an offer through them (though I didn't take it). Their interview is almost entirely about fundamental skills plus a bit about your ability to communicate. There's very little in that interview where you could come up with lawsuit material.
All of that said, I think their technical interview is a pretty good one. Their interview feedback was accurate, and it definitely felt both more rigorous and more fair than the vast majority of the first rounds I've done.
This is absolutely correct. Companies can and should discriminate against anyone who wouldn't be a good culture fit for any number of reasons. I don't fault anyone who has ever refused to hire me for personal reasons. At the end of the day, a company is a group of people working together toward a common goal. Company is Latin for those you break bread with, and although companies aren't usually that close-knit (modern business lunches don't have the same level of trust and closeness as an ancient meal) the point is still the same: you're a team.
Well that sucks for the person if they were rejected because of their accent and no feedback was given. All that hard work in preparing for interviews and you don't even know for sure why they didn't pick you.
Facebook gives feedback. I interviewed twice and didn’t pass. They read the feedback report right off their screen to me.
So that makes me question the legal liability reason. Facebook is a bigger target than most for lawsuits. I think it’s just uncomfortable to tell people why you didn’t hire them.
On the point of legal risk, I’m concerned by the authors naïveté in believing that as long as you’re not actually discriminating based on race/sex/religion, you won’t be accused of it.
The more data you put out there, the more likely that someone will crunch it and find some statistical patterns that they will label “racism” or "sexism". Even if you’re innocent, you will get dragged through the mud in the press and maybe even in court. Not worth it. No matter what, you lose. And what’s the upside? You gave some random guy some feedback.
I am wondering why are the technical interviews are put before the personal interviews then? If none of the technical skills matter in light of the soft skills because some candidate has a hair color or accent which bothers a team member, why bother with checking technicality in the first place?
Most engineering interviewees fail to advance because of cultural/personality/communication issues and not technical competence. The amount of people I've washed out of the interview process because they've gone on some rant about windows vs linux, political ideology or just came off as unable to communicate in general.
This is also the hardest to communicate as it is something inherent to the candidate. It's not personal, but it gets personal at this point.
The accent thing could be viewed as not hiring someone on the grounds of disability. If you can't understand how someone speaks, you can always communicate via Slack or email.
The lunch one - if the argument was not related to work, then I can't see an issue. You don't have to talk personal stuff to the co-workers, so unless the conversation wasn't mandatory and wasn't initiated by the candidate, then no issue here.
"Can't understand their accent" _is_ discriminatory. Please don't ever recommend against a candidate for that.
Companies are definitely taking the easy way out. The reality is that most of them don't have a good hiring process, aren't consistent about hiring decisions, and tend to choose based on factors that have nothing to do with the job they're hiring for.
I was with you until you said that refraining from hiring someone because his accent was too difficult to understand. That's an insane reason - why pass on a good candidate for this reason? Can your company afford this?
If you are working closely with this person, it will be 3 months before his accent is sufficiently adjusted.
When I was a hiring manager, I used to always include a personal note that included suggestions and constructive criticism for the candidate. In a couple of cases, those people replied to me, demonstrated some actions towards those goals, and I hired them later, when I had more available positions.
And those that I didn't hire, I encountered them at other companies. It was flattering to hear them say they remembered me and had a positive impression of our recruiting process, even though they were rejected.
I've always believed that the recruiting process is a great way to sell one's company. Even if the candidate isn't a good match, that candidate may recommend peers to the role if they have a positive experience with you.
I interviewed for an internal position once and got similar feedback, by phone, from the HR person. She was on the phone with me for about an hour and, in all honesty, that rejection phone call made that one of the best interviews I've ever had.
I didn't get that job, but it gave me a lot of constructive advice and I ended up getting the next one I interviewed for.
> In a couple of cases, those people replied to me, demonstrated some actions towards those goals, and I hired them later, when I had more available positions.
I've seen this being automated in enterprise recruiting systems as "Candidate Relationship Management" using terms like "silver medalist" to identify and re-engage folks who didn't quite make the cut for positions they interviewed for but may be good fits for other open positions or for future pre-vetted candidates.
I appreciate people like you but unfortunately most companies' policy mandates not talking about the reasons due to some sort of legal risk of law suit.
>When I was a hiring manager, I used to always include a personal note that included suggestions and constructive criticism for the candidate
That's seriously awesome. I would so love that. For me most of the time they just stop responding, even right after "I'll get back to you by the end of the day!" type conversations.
I don't care if it is a no, I just want to get a message, and feedback would be even better.
One company I wanted to work at recently did exactly what I described .... all hyped up meeting, we all got along, good stuff, we'll get back to you by the end of the day. Then nothing, I called a bit later, emailed, nothing.... My impression was pretty negative.
I have a job now, I'm excited to start it, that other company, very negative feelings towards that other company ... if they just sent an email even to say no I'd feel better about it, but nothing.
I once sent 49 rejection letters (for an internship!): « Here are statistics about the 50 applications I’ve received. » Received big thanks from at least 50% of them.
If you/your company doesn't have a policy of sending personal feedback please consider doing this at least for junior people. Volunteer your after work time if needed.
Trying to find the first job is extremely stressful process. A junior person has no notion of his worth on the market. Each rejection even if only by a lack of any response ("I'm sorry, I'm afraid we are looking for a bit more experienced person" would suffice) can be like a kick on the face when you're just barely learning to walk and most likely is a burned bridge.
I've mentored my girlfriend for 3 years from almost 0 to getting her first job in a company run by a React Native core developer. She had the skill, great attitude, really solid work ethic and very analytical thinking. It'd trust her more with any task than significant number of my past and current senior coworkers. It's hard to prove and no one expects that so naturally her applications had been ignored or rejected. With each one I saw her confidence, self-esteem and enthusiasm crumb. With each positive reply/invitation she was invigorated until the next step came. I'm pretty sure for some the roller-coaster or even worse, being rejected over and over again can be a life defining experience.
Any reply is great, personal is even better. If you spend time describing what was missing from the expectations of your company (don't say "You don't know enough", say "We need someone with more knowledge") and sincerely wish the person well you can be sure they'll be grateful, remember you, work on the gaps and who knows... maybe some day become part of your team.
Please feel free to reach out if you want some example for inspiration.
Edit: Please don't do that against the policy of your company. But if there are no reasons against just ask if you could provide some feedback and resources for the rejection letter.
> If you/your company doesn't have a policy of sending personal feedback please consider doing this at least for junior people.
If you want to keep your job, don't follow this advice. Honestly, I would love nothing more than giving junior people (all people in fact) feedback on why they didn't get the job, but people will sue at even the slightest hint of any type of potentially litigious situation. It's even worse when the person is in a position of desperation ("I can't pay rent because I can't find a job...oh what this lawyer is going to take my case on a performance basis...heck ya, let's sue those assholes!"). Most of these cases get settled because no one wants to deal with them and it's easier to just pay the problem to go away, so they're easy wins.
Seriously, most good honest HR people WANT to give rejected candidates feedback, but asking them to benevolently provide feedback at the risk of their own job won't earn you many friends.
Agree. I remember having applied to McKinsey many years ago as a graduate. I got rejected after the first round of interview, but one of the interviewers would call me to explain their rationale. I was very grateful but I can imagine that it must be painful when the candidate doesn't react well or sees that as an opportunity to put the foot back in the door.
I once got a detailed, feedback-driven rejection email, stating very clearly and professionally where I shined in my interview, and where I didn't. I was so appreciative of the message that I made sure to follow up with the manager working on my application and thanked them.
9 months later, I found myself in a bad management situation at another company, thinking about looking for another gig when the company that rejected me reached out asking if I'd be willing to come back and interview again. I did and accepted the offer.
By giving good and candid feedback, they wound up saving months of searching for a new dev when they reached back out knowing I was a good fit for what they needed at that time. I was essentially a lead they'd already warmed months prior. It made me wonder why more companies don't think of this.
When someone can’t answer an interview question about relational databases, it might be that they don’t know anything about relational databases.
I thought you all were better than this. Why are you asking questions about relational databases? Why not just have candidates accomplish the thing you're assessing with an actual relational database? I know you're work-sample-literate! But if your feedback emphasizes communication, doesn't that imply a lot about your process is subjective? After all, and to extend an analysis used in this blog post: it could be that the candidates couldn't effectively communicate knowledge about RDMBS's. Or, it could be that the interviewer wasn't effectively listening to what the candidate was saying.
I have been doing mysql database type things for 15 years solid. Once during a job interview at digg.com, someone [ok ok doxx removed] asked: "what is a having statement in sql?". I jumped in explained how you can filter aggregated sets performed by a 'group by' and rambled on and on. He stopped me and said, "You can use a having statement without a group by, are you sure you know how they work." I have never seen this or done this in practice, so I just stood there stumped. He rolled his eyes and ended the interview. 4 hours of an amazing interview going well: ruined. At least this guy went on to ruin digg.com. "Let's just re-write everything over again better" kinda guy.
Isn't a lot of the job of software engineering to quickly and concisely communicate complicated concepts? Might this actually be an accurate work sample? How else might you measure something like this?
Also the next few lines kinda address what you are saying:
> It also might be that they know them inside-and-out but aren’t used to answering questions on the fly, or that our question didn’t use the vocabulary they’re familiar with, or that they misheard the question and answered a different one. It made quite a difference just to phrase the feedback in a way which acknowledged all those possibilities.
Why not just have candidates accomplish the thing you're
assessing with an actual relational database?
My employer interviews like this, and I can tell you one reason it's not very common: It's a pain in the ass.
After all, it'd be unfair to judge someone on a platform they weren't familiar with - so now you gotta maintain a fleet of laptops with a really wide range of tools. And these have to sorta float outside the usual IT management system because they aren't really issued to a single person, and you gotta be online enough that people can google stuff, and you can't have hiring managers let other people use their login, that'd be bad security practice. And if you didn't confirm in advance what platform the candidate wanted to be tested on, you gotta haul three laptops to the interview. Oh, they're pretty good developer laptops and one went missing? We really ought to have people sign those out...
And even after that, you _still_ have to apply subjective measures like "were their variable names clear?" and judge them on communication - like if they see an opportunity to refactor the code for clarity, but they say they're focusing on completing the task before spending time on that.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do this, just that I can understand why many companies don't.
> I thought you all were better than this. Why are you asking questions about relational databases?
You write about hiring from the perspective of someone with hiring authority. TripleByte doesn't have hiring authority, or even sufficient reputation to get their candidates out of doing another technical interview at the companies to which they apply.
There are two problems you might solve:
- Joe Nerd needs a job. He knows everything about relational databases, but no interviewer has ever noticed this. His limp, effeminate handshake leaves them unimpressed.
- IBM needs a database engineer. They really want to hire someone, but they're having trouble filling the opening; their existing network of friends-of-current-employees is tapped out.
That is to say, you could try to optimize for finding people who will be good employees, and then bully companies into hiring those people, or you could try to optimize for finding people who will pass an existing hiring gauntlet, and then introduce them to companies where the magic will happen naturally.
The first approach solves the candidate's problem and would logically charge fees to the candidate. The second approach solves the company's problem and would logically charge fees to the company. TripleByte wants to get money from companies, and follows the second strategy.
But... they like to send messages as if they were following the first strategy, because that strategy solves the candidate's problem and those messages therefore attract candidates to TripleByte. I don't like this.
> Why are you asking questions about relational databases? Why not just have candidates accomplish the thing you're assessing with an actual relational database?
It's not the same thing. Browse around the various SQL tags in StackOverflow and you'll see plenty of candidates who can "accomplish" things using relational databases yet have positively no idea of how they work.
When shit hits the fan they're asking strangers to optimize their thorny queries. But a modicum of understanding of how a relational database works would have led them to a better way to do things to begin with.
I've done the TripleByte interview, so the decision to ask questions about relational databases instead of asking for a practical exercise makes sense in context.
It's because you can only fit so much into an already long interview (2 hours). A big chunk of that time is already spent on an exercise about reading/writing/debugging complex code. You can't fit everything in, so database stuff is moved to the non-coding section. Also, the questions aren't "guess the right answer" questions, the interviewer keeps digging with open ended questions to see how deep you can go.
> it could be that the candidates couldn't effectively communicate knowledge about RDMBS's. Or, it could be that the interviewer wasn't effectively listening to what the candidate was saying.
You could certainly get a bad interviewer, but that's a strawman here. If it's not TripleByte judging the candidate's communication skills, then it's the hiring team judging that. The suggestion was about how to give feedback about communication skills. And there are definitely stronger and weaker communicators, and it definitely makes a big difference in day to day work.
You're ignoring the sentence that came immediately after that one:
> It also might be that they know them inside-and-out but aren’t used to answering questions on the fly, or that our question didn’t use the vocabulary they’re familiar with, or that they misheard the question and answered a different one. [...] People are generally open to hearing that, one way or another, they didn’t manage to demonstrate that they understood a topic.
The author is actively acknowledging that being unable to answer a question about RDMSs doesn't mean they don't actually know anything about them.
And the point, I think, stands. An interview isn't a passive process where by some magic algorithm they determine good candidates from bad and the candidate just sits there hoping the right question will be asked. You have to actually communicate to the interviewer your knowledge and experience because they don't know.
Because sometimes understanding the base concept is important. I cannot possibly ask you to solve 1,000 scenarios in 45 minutes. But if you get the basic idea of how the concept works, I can be sure that when you encounter scenario #945, you'll have the basic grasp on the concept to at least know where to look, and when scenario #487 comes up, you'll know the basic idea of how to handle it.
Asking you just to do one thing in an interview risks accidentally hitting one of the ten-twenty things you do know how to do, leaving me with no proof that you can solve the other 980-ish possible problems.
Maybe good oral communication skills are part of these particular requirements? We don't know the details of the interview. But I don't understand why it should be wrong to ask a candidate a question that he should be able to answer and see how he reacts.
For some jobs it may even be appropriate to ask questions that the candidate cannot answer and see the reaction. Does he admit that he does not know? How does he phrase it? Is he making things up to cover for his lack of knowledge? And so on.
Getting rejected at Triplebyte was actually a pretty good investment time wise. Guess the whole thing costed me three hours in total and I got quite a list of things to improve and how. It was clear it was tailored towards the interview not just a larger generic mail.
There are tons of companies that give you a generic email after you completed an IQ test, a questionary, open questions and of course the 8hours+ homework. That's just perverse.
But they will. The interview process is stochastic; exactly the same performance from you will lead to different results on different attempts.
> Getting rejected at Triplebyte was actually a pretty good investment time wise. Guess the whole thing costed me three hours in total and I got quite a list of things to improve and how. It was clear it was tailored towards the interview not just a larger generic mail.
For another perspective, here's the entire feedback I got when they rejected my application:
> This was a tough decision and one that we were on the fence about. We really appreciate you taking the time to work on the take home project. We're aware this requires a substantial time commitment and we are really grateful that you invested the time in completing it. We thought you wrote a great, very full featured regular expression matcher. It was especially impressive how much you dug into the academics behind regular languages.
> However we made the decision because we felt that while going through the project together during the interview, we didn't see the fluency of programming when adding to it that we had hoped for. While we specifically designed the take home project track to help overcome the difficulties of coding under time pressure with someone watching, we do still need to see a certain level of programming during the interview. This didn't seem to be the case here, where making changes to the project seemed to be slower and more difficult than we'd have liked.
I did the project (back when that was an option on TripleByte) and failed it. They said I could still try the pure technical interview option, but then ignored me when I asked for that (albeit more than a year later).
I'd settle for "do you at least send a rejection email of any kind to the candidate?" vs. the "dropping someone on the floor and not responding for weeks/months/ever". Even without detailed or personalized feedback, it's a huge improvement. Also if an internal person refers someone, you should let the internal person know if you're passing, I think (depends on other factors, though.)
"Ghosting" seems like a common phenomenon across different types of human interaction. There's dating, interviewing, and even pitching investors.
This was a common experience for me pitching my company last year:
1. Investor likes my co enough to schedule an in-person meeting
2. I meet investor in person to pitch
3. I send them a followup email
4. Radio silence
I'd read that investors like to keep you in limbo instead of passing, I just didn't realize these well-respected professionals would value someone highly enough to give them an hour of their day, but low enough to neglect all followup communication. In retrospect I don't think it's a big deal, but I felt bad about it at the time.
This is the biggest US/Europe cultural difference I've noticed. I can't speak for every country in Europe or every industry, but for every job in Europe I've personally applied for, I got a rejection letter if I wasn't offered the job. Sometimes just a minimal notification, but always something. Not in America though...
The best is for European academic jobs. Often there's a schedule up front for when they'll make a decision, usually a 2-stage thing like: we will shortlist candidates by Sept 15, interview in the following 3-4 weeks, and make a hiring decision by Oct 15. So if you didn't get shortlisted, you get informed early and don't have to wonder whether your resume is still under consideration or what. American universities, though, leave you guessing what their schedule is, may take months to get back to you even if they're interested, and usually don't send a rejection letter if they aren't.
Article author - I'm on the writing team at Triplebyte. Most of what we do is summarize candidates' technical performance for their introduction to companies, but we also send feedback to everyone who takes our two-hour interview. I took this responsibility over from our first engineer, who built a bunch of software to make the process faster - it lets me quickly autogenerate emails by clicking all the resources I want to include, and then highlights the things that require more careful review. (So the people who accuse me of being a robot are half-right, I guess.)
It's interesting that you pat yourself on the back about it, I think the whole Triplebyte interview process is poorly thought out, including your email comms.
I did your online code quiz and got sent an email about doing a 2-hour technical interview, without really knowing much about what the job I was supposed to be applying for was.
On the interview, since I didn't really want to waste 2-hours on something I didn't want to do, I asked the guy a few questions about the company only to learn he's actually a freelancer interviewer, has little direct relationship with triplebyte and doesn't really know anything about me.
I carried on for a 2-hour quick-fire interview with a guy that was obviously trying to fill in a questionnaire rather than actually gauge my ability, questions designed by people who likely have no real-world experience in the scenarios they describe ("how would you architect the amazon.com frontpage?" is not a 2-minute answer)
About 15 minutes in, I was sure that even if I had wanted the job in the first place I wouldn't have taken it; and I had forgotten about it when I got an incredibly patronising email explaining how, if I do some online code puzzles and study hard, I too can get a job. Gee, thanks.
Granted: a bored, funemployed, grumpy dev is probably not your target audience, and I'm sure this interview style works to filter out people fresh off college, but the email was definitely the most ridiculous part.
Isn't giving detailed feedback a liability nightmare? Everything I've ever heard on this is to say as little as possible.
It's certainly great as a candidate to get detailed feedback (would have really appreciated it back in the day as a co-op student), but I just wonder if the concerns over it have any merit or are overblown.
At least you get a response even if it is a rejection letter. I have heard - not experienced - that sometimes you just don't hear back from the company at all, which seems worse to me.
This happened to me. Several rounds of interviews with a well known colored-hat company, then... nothing. No response to follow-ups either.
What was especially frustrating to me was that up to that point, the tone of both the conversations and email exchanges was very positive and cordial. I would have expected a "Thanks, but no thanks" follow-up at least, especially considering I was an internal referral from a Sr. Mgr. But... nothing. Made my reconsider my view of that particular company.
It absolutely is worse to not hear back at all. As someone who has dealt with this recently, the one positive thing I can tell myself about the experience is that I would not work for a company that cannot be bothered to write a rejection letter.
It reminds me of a restaurant I worked at in my youth - because the owner and her daughter were so conflict averse - rather than fire someone, they would just slowly write them off the schedule. Sad.
I had this happen on hires I was responsible for, but on "continuously open positions" or when the position is left vacant and the headcount repurposed to another position.
I didn't find a useful or correct way to inform all the potential candidates about that change. That happened two times and I only sent the more generic e-mail we send for rejection telling the people that had had at least one face to face to apply for other positions if they were still interested in the company.
For the easier case of filling the headcount up with someone and not wanting the rest it's easier to send a rejection e-mail, it's just not what always happens with every job opening.
Yeah, I was referred to a company and went through the full interview process, ended with a cheerful sounding "talk to you soon" and then zip. No messages and no replies to my emails.
It took my friend there a week to find out that I'd been rejected.
I haven't had much interviewing experience lately, since I was at my last job for 5 years and at my current job for 6, but over the past 15 years or so, I came to the conclusion that not hearing back was the norm rather than the exception. I think it's ludicrously unprofessional, but that's typical these days.
I used to write rejection emails for companies at the end of YC interview days. It always sucked, especially when it was borderline decision (which it often was) but PG made doing these well an important part of internal YC culture. We couldn't leave until they were finished and each one was reviewed by another partner before sending.
In hindsight I'm glad we did this. In the years since I've had multiple people tell me the rejection was a positive turning point and the only honest feedback they'd received.
I'm going to go against the grain and say that interview feedback is overrated (at least for senior people). If you got offered the job, then there's your feedback. If not, the interviewing company isn't going to tell you any more than you could already discern yourself by playing back your answers and conversations with the interviewers. If you honestly feel you aced the interview, then other factors are in play - perhaps they realized they are overstaffed, layoffs are imminent/hiring freezes, or just a slightly better and more personable candidate came along.
One time I interviewed for a position that I wanted badly. I studied and prepped for the interview, then during the interview I nailed every question. I waited a week but never heard back. After a few weeks of silence and giving up hope, I searched the company on LinkedIn, and found the person they hired for the position. It turns out he had more backend experience, which is what they were looking for. It was a painful truth, but them sending me a rejection email telling me this wouldn't have helped me at all.
A rejection brings closure. If I spend four hours answering these silly Big O questions, the least the company could do is give me a definitive yes/no in a timely fashion.
I agree with you, except that the company should send out a rejection letter as soon as they can. If I were hiring, I would only send a non-generic response if the rejected candidate specifically asked me if I would be willing to give her or him constructive feedback, or otherwise indicate why they did not get the position.
the hours of interview time, scheduling, and travel shouldn't be discounted so easily. not that the company owes you anything, but surely some of the smartest business minds in the world can come up with a way to safely provide some feedback. i'd probably sign a waiver to at least get something for my time
Precisely. Often times a rejection isn't saying that the candidate didn't meet the job requirements or wouldn't do well in the position, it says that the employer found someone who fit the role even better or knew that they could given past hiring experience.
> When someone can’t answer an interview question about relational databases, it might be that ... they know them inside-and-out but aren’t used to answering questions on the fly, or that our question didn’t use the vocabulary they’re familiar with, or that they misheard the question and answered a different one.
Ultimately, that means your interviews have bias. (Even though it appears you try very, very, very hard to avoid bias.)
Honestly, I don't think interview feedback is a good idea. It just encourages gaming the system. I'd rather that feedback come through a neutral 3rd party. We just haven't set our field up to do that.
Why neutral 3rd party? Because of the above situation! The 3rd party could just say things like, "looks like this was just a bad interview. Don't read too deep into it, and keep trying." The 3rd party could also push back on the employer if the interview ran poorly.
> giving feedback effectively is an enormous amount of work
I take a lot of issue with this. Interviewing and doing code projects is also an enormous amount of work. If a company sends an 8 hour exercise to each candidate, then in aggregate the candidates are probably expending way more person hours than the total expended by the hiring company to settle on a new hire.
I no longer do unpaid work. Of course I’ll interview, but to show them how I code on their product and work in their processes, I will only accept a contract-to-hire offer. If more people did this I believe it would exert pressure on companies to not be so wanton with what they ask of candidates, and how expendably they treat them.
my triplebyte rejection was surprisingly insightful. I don't know whether it's cookie-cutter, entirely handwritten, or a combination of a few macros, but it makes sense to me.
>I heard back from many of the engineers I write to, and often, they were furious
Bingo. I've opted to share specific team feedback via phone and although candidate feedback was generally positive and thankful, once in awhile the reaction would be extremely negative. I now opt for the much more (emotionally) safe route.
Triplebyte is more incented to provide candidate feedback because if the candidate improves, Triplebye may be more likely to place them in the future. With companies, this incentive is less apparent.
Yeah, this sounds like as much of an issue as the legal risk to me. Imagine if you reject someone and they blog about the letter you sent them and the interview process, and the post makes Hacker News or Reddit.
Now you have to decide whether to fight in public with someone you didn't hire, normally bad form, or say nothing.
Interesting read/points about risk and candidates not being receptive to feedback. I've worked for companies that reason like this but personally, I believe the biggest challenge to overcome is for the person declining the candidate to articulate clear/concise constructive feedback over the PHONE vs sending an EMAIL.
My current firm (McKinsey & Company) expects every candidate in round 1 or final round interviews (either from the recruiter or hiring manager) to receive a call same day or within a day of interviewing with their interview results. If the results are a decline, feedback as to how and why we came to that decision is provided. It's painful for sure and no one likes to give bad news but the firm has been operating this way for years and I’ve found candidates appreciate knowing sooner rather then later.
Let's face it, there are a lot of bad hiring processes out there and not hearing back is the WORST when on the job hunt. At my firm, we rigorously evaluate candidates based on performance and will always do our best to ensure they are provided with feedback in a timely manner (note: I'm sure there have been slip ups in the past RE: same day/1 day after interviewing feedback but the firm expects every recruiters/interviewer to follow this process).
If they send feedback which tells candidates, truthfully, that they were rejected because they didn’t get very far on the coding project, then if anything a company reduces their legal risk: they have a transparent track record of evaluating candidates based only on their skills
I think the problem comes when he talks to his friend of another race/gender and that friend said "Yeah, I couldn't finish that either, but they still hired me". The company may have had a legit reason to overlook the coding project (like the second candidate had experience in some other technology), but when you tell candidate X that they didn't get the job because they didn't complete the coding exercise, but then you hire candidate Y despite him not completing it, it provides candidate X with some concrete evidence of discrimination.
I've applied to hundreds of internship positions by this point (I'm a senior looking for a full-time job starting this upcoming summer). During those hundreds of applications, I've only received explicit feedback (aside from getting offers, since getting an offer means I did good enough; I never got explicit feedback from any of those offers) a total of twice.
One was for a marketing company that's already gone public because I made it to the final round and really fell apart during the coding portion. I knew I screwed up and the recruiter confirmed that (without me asking) during the "thanks for applying, but no thanks" phone call.
The other time was for a medium-size startup. I had to ask the recruiter via email after I got the "no thanks" email, but she provided the info within minutes.
So, good article, but another point occurred to me while reading it that wasn't covered. I think that writing a good email explaining the rejection, might be a good exercise for the company doing the rejecting. "Well, why are we rejecting this person, exactly?" Of course, this will only be true if the email is honest (if diplomatic). It could serve as an institutionalized review of whether candidates are getting rejected for the right reason. Building feedback loops into a company's internal process can be a very powerful thing, even when there's no bonus or penalty involved for the person doing the writing.
I wonder, does Triplebyte have any kind of annual summary of why candidates are getting rejected?
I don't think a company should offer an interview if they're not willing to give proper feedback at the end of it.
When interviewing candidates, I have been more than happy to give detailed feedback if they've asked me to give it. I realise it's unconventional, so I get the feedback peer reviewed before sending it away. I'm pleased to see that there are other companies learning how to give better feedback.
Giving feedback is a small token of respect that a company can give in return for a candidates time.
In my experience, interviewees have been thankful and shared how hard it is to get feedback from their interviewers.
Companies hire the candidate they like best, they don't even spend mental energy 'rejecting' the other candidates. If you don't get hired, it says more about the candidate they chose and little about you.
I would really rate a company that provides honest and truthful feedback a notch on top of the others as this shows some form of the culture that they have in their organization.
You can do an automated response to 95% of the rejected ones, and for the rest which made the cut past the initial stage of applying, having a more human-centric approach on providing response is the way to go.
The good words that would come out vouching for the company I think is enough reason that hiring organizations should take the effort to provide a meaningful response to some applicants.
> Even Triplebyte only sends individualized feedback to candidates who've done a two-hour interview with us - we simply don't have the resources to do it for everyone who takes our online quiz.
Unless there's something interesting going on, it seems like it would be easy to give some kind of feedback based on the online quiz, even if it's only "You answered X out of Y questions correct on $TOPIC", repeated for however many topics were covered.
> The number one reason companies cite for not sending feedback is legal risk. Interestingly, I don’t think this is true. Companies put themselves at legal risk if they are rejecting candidates for illegitimate reasons, like race, gender, or a disability. If they send feedback which tells candidates, truthfully, that they were rejected because they didn’t get very far on the coding project, then if anything a company reduces their legal risk: they have a transparent track record of evaluating candidates based only on their skills.
Ah, but have you considered what would happen when you give this "transparent skills-based feedback" to 90% of your rejected candidates, but then a couple of them get rejected for reasons you don't want to specify, or could potentially be interpreted (by an aggressive litigation attorney) as illegal discrimination?
Some candidates get rejected because "nobody enjoyed talking to him", "he seemed weird", "alienated the interviewers", etc.
Are you going to write any of that in your transparent rejection letter?
I've occasionally had a moment of schadenfreude where, after interviewing at a place I hated, I could write something like this:
Dear <So-and-so>,
Thank you for considering me for <position>. I certainly enjoyed talking to you in person. Unfortunately, I feel that <company> is not a fit for my needs at this time. I wish you the very best of luck in your candidate search.
Perhaps I'm being too broad but I think that rejection emails suck because generally, as a society, we aren't valuing communication or we don't think we can afford the time for actual feedback.
It triggers one of those "how much better would the world be" feelings, if more people took more time to give each other genuine feedback. I mean, maybe giving good feedback (for candidates that took time to apply and clearly made effort) could help people learn, it might even ultimately address unemployment, homelessness, or other root cause problems.
I understand the legal concerns - and there would be candidates who would exploit the process of genuine feedback as well - but I think it would serve to help people more than it would hurt. It does require time and resources, so organizations / institutions would have to look at it as a sort of a social benefit cost or something. But I do wonder how much good it might really do.
you could also just give feedback in the cases where it is requested. As a fresh-faced out of college coder I was rejected from ThoughtWorks after spending 3 days on a coding question. Yes, I sucked - all I wanted to hear though was "we really wanted to see TDD, even though it was optional" or whatever. I asked for feedback, they didn't give it, I now and forever will have a negative impression of their company and will avoid them - and often people whom have worked for them - technicality be damned. You don't always need to give feedback, but a little compassion for those that are new would be nice.
I found the feedback from my Triplebyte rejection to be very helpful in directing my preparation for other interviews. It helped me get a job offer 3 days later from just the type of company and role that they screen for.
When I was getting my MBA, about <many> years ago, I suggested to our career placement folks that they work up a legal agreement with the companies who recruited with us, indemnifying them against any EEOC suits if they shared detailed feedback with us (most large companies go directly to business schools to hire on a yearly basis). They asked a half-dozen companies, and no company's legal team thought they could be confident such a document would stick. Pity, as, at that stage, we all had a lot of interviews to take, and a lot of support in getting new interviews.
I was lead dev in a company, I felt strongly that I don't want to reject people without providing them with clear feedback what they did well and didn't do well.
VP hated the idea and very quickly was abandoned. We got a lot of bad candidates tbh, so it was hard to tell them what they did wrong (they bombed pretty much).
I still think, done well, it provides great benefit to candidates being considered.
Thing that worked well for me, I had elaborate set of topics/knowledge I want my developers to know and be rated on, it wasn't arbitrary selection. Still, when someone bombs, it is hard to relay they did bad.
TripleBye articles are generally bad. They're a mishmash of random ideas that feel A/B tested for the highest possible SEO return.
I still remember reading through this: https://triplebyte.com/blog/a-taxonomy-of-programmers when it was first published trying to make sense of it.
Seriously, we need something written on why rejection sucks?
Rejection sucks because we all like to imagine that we are good enough and the only reason we applied is because we believed we are good enough so it stinks to be told that we are not good enough.
Doesn't matter how you phrase the email, might be nice to give a feedback, but for anyone who receives it, it stings. The only difference is that some folks have a positive mindset, they get over the sting and work towards getting better. Feedback or not.
Hmmm, so on standardised tests I typically score in the top two percentile. (yes I'm fabulous). But the best developer I ever worked with was a Russian guy who interviewed terribly. He was great at code, he was even great as a team lead. But he sucked at interviews. I never interviewed him so I can't say why that is but...if there's more than a few of these guys out there, there's room for (major) improvement in the interview business.
Id rather get a rejection email than just not hear back. If you dont bother responding with a rejection after an interview you are a coward. And shouldnt be interviewing people.
The other reason specificity is a legal issue is that it provides data that can be disputed. For example, if you reject someone black and say the reason they were rejected because hey didn’t get far enough in the coding test — you’d better not hire the white guy who only got just as far (which might happen for a variety of reasons).
It’s almost the same reason you stay quiet when held by police. Even something seemingly innocuous may end being used against you in the future.
I WISH I could get rejection emails. I'll talk to a recruiter at a company, exchange emails, even meet them .... 99.9% of the time if they're not offering I get NOTHING. They just don't respond.
I don't care that they're not hiring me, I'd just like some feedback. FEEDBACK PLEASE, anything that really matters that I can improve on or such.
It is to the point that even automated rejection letters seem nicer than the usual "ghosting".
I was once told by a recruiter that she absolutely guaran-damn-teed that she would call me after the interview process and let me know the employer's decision. Guaran-damn-teed.
After my in-person interview, about a month passed with no contact from her. I figured I didn't get the job. But I wanted to call her anyway, just because. She said, "Oh, I thought I sent you an email about it. Yeah, they don't want you."
I will often tell candidates on the phone screen that I don't want to go forward for XYZ reasons (always technical). At one point one of the guys I gave feedback to like this turned the call into an occupational therapy session whining about the chicken/egg experience problem, how all these companies want him to know the "trivia" of CS fundamentals, etc.
Believe me, it's a lot easier to just send a form rejection.
Hard to care about the specific content of rejection emails when the average applicant will get hundreds of them before landing a position. It's like getting mad at the rain in Seattle winter. Though I do admit, the more effusive they seem to be about turning me down, the more offended I am as a professional. Then I forget about it 5 seconds later and move on to my next applications.
> I work at Triplebyte, and over the last year I’ve written over 3,000 detailed, individual rejection emails.
Wait, what? That means you're interviewing on average 12 people every single working day of the year. Even for someone who's job title was "Technical Recruiter" that would be a TON, let alone for someone who is a Team Lead and presumably has other duties. How is that possible?
It's possible his job is JUST to write these rejection letters. He gets feedback forms from all the interviewers, compiles them, reviews them, condenses them, touches them up, then sends them out.
That could easily be a full-time job for a large company.
In my experience, most of the feedback I've gotten has been trite and superficial. It's not surprising, since most interview processes are not designed to measure quality but rather to measure interest.
I once got feedback that I wasn't technically qualified, and when I asked how they knew that, they said that I hadn't spent enough time on leetcode studying the answers.
> Even Triplebyte only sends individualized feedback to candidates who've done a two-hour interview with us - we simply don't have the resources to do it for everyone who takes our online quiz.
I'm surprised by this. I would think that Triplebyte could automate the feedback for applicants who took the online quiz but didn't make the cut.
> I recently talked with an employment lawyer about this, and he didn’t think that specific feedback on technical performance put companies at risk. So legal risk, despite being frequently cited, seems unlikely to be the real driver of policies here.
This was either written very poorly or lacks serious basis to conclude thoughts about employee feedback (of which drives the thesis of the whole article).
First - "I talked to a lawyer and he didn't think it was a risk", does not sound very much like legal advice. Is there precedence for civil cases that were thrown out due to the basis of "just giving technical feedback"? How often do firms that provide "just technical feedback" get sued and how often do they settle those suits?
Second - I think most people want feedback on "how they interviewed" and not "were they the right fit for the job". This is where you get into a gray area of legality, because anything you might say may get misconstrued as discrimination. "Oh you think I was too nervous during my interview...well I have X condition that makes me like that and you can't reject me for that"
Third - feedback on technical skills? To what avail does this hold for the candidate? Example:
Potential Employer: "You couldn't reverse a string, so work on string reversals."
Potential Candidate: "Ok, I'll go learn a string reversal so I can ace my next interview"
Feedback on interviews is imperfect because the hiring process is imperfect.
Actually this is in my opinion the main advantage of headhunters. They will typically call the recruiter after the interview and seek feedback. And it is easier to provide feedback to the headhunter than to the interviewee directly.
I recently bombed a Triplebyte interview. I didn't realize how badly until I got the feedback email. It honestly hurt, but it was really useful. I definitely respect their approach.
Often time, it's just that after interviewing 20 candidates, we realize that this candidate is amongst the worst and telling him/her that isn't helpful.
Triple byte interviewers don’t know what they were interviewing all they have is bunch of questions they keep on asking without any opportunity to answer
I read the title as, you suck at your job therefore the emails suck. :)
Reminds of a recent prudential billboard. "We spend more time reading billboards than planning for retirement." Great, if you aren't doing your job of planning then I'll use someone else!
> The number one reason companies cite for not sending feedback is legal risk. Interestingly, I don’t think this is true. Companies put themselves at legal risk if they are rejecting candidates for illegitimate reasons, like race, gender, or a disability. If they send feedback which tells candidates, truthfully, that they were rejected because they didn’t get very far on the coding project, then if anything a company reduces their legal risk: they have a transparent track record of evaluating candidates based only on their skills. I recently talked with an employment lawyer about this, and he didn’t think that specific feedback on technical performance put companies at risk. So legal risk, despite being frequently cited, seems unlikely to be the real driver of policies here.
I think the problem here is that it exposes you legally even if you're not discriminating. If your explanation can in any way be argued as euphemism, or analogous to discrimination against a protected class, then you could face trouble. Maybe the risk is overblown, but the form of exposure you're talking about may not be the main one, far as I reckon.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
btilly|7 years ago
The bulk of the article is true. But companies are not lying when they say that legal risk is a reason not to send feedback.
Triplebyte is in the unusual position of being able to say, "Everyone who has enough technical skill gets through the interview." And that fact is sufficient to defuse their risk. But real companies don't have the luxury of ignoring non-technical aspects of the job.
Here are real reasons why I've seen people denied a job. "Nobody could understand his accent." "Accidental personal referenced summed him up as, 'Loves to make things crash and burn in production to see the pretty fireworks.'" "Nobody could believe the argument he got into at lunch."
In my books those are all valid reasons to not want to work with someone. However the first opens you up for an accusation of racism, the second would break a personal confidence, and the third had demonstrated sufficient irrationality that tiptoeing away was a great idea.
And you can't give feedback on technical issues, and not on the rest, because that amounts to a tacit acknowledgement that there was something non-technical. Leave the non-technical to your imagination and guess what happens?
munchbunny|7 years ago
I've done the TripleByte interview before. Even got an offer through them (though I didn't take it). Their interview is almost entirely about fundamental skills plus a bit about your ability to communicate. There's very little in that interview where you could come up with lawsuit material.
All of that said, I think their technical interview is a pretty good one. Their interview feedback was accurate, and it definitely felt both more rigorous and more fair than the vast majority of the first rounds I've done.
sdegutis|7 years ago
hm10|7 years ago
silverlake|7 years ago
So that makes me question the legal liability reason. Facebook is a bigger target than most for lawsuits. I think it’s just uncomfortable to tell people why you didn’t hire them.
wildmusings|7 years ago
The more data you put out there, the more likely that someone will crunch it and find some statistical patterns that they will label “racism” or "sexism". Even if you’re innocent, you will get dragged through the mud in the press and maybe even in court. Not worth it. No matter what, you lose. And what’s the upside? You gave some random guy some feedback.
This is the world we live in, unfortunately.
fogetti|7 years ago
jorblumesea|7 years ago
This is also the hardest to communicate as it is something inherent to the candidate. It's not personal, but it gets personal at this point.
unknown|7 years ago
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binmanthrowaway|7 years ago
The lunch one - if the argument was not related to work, then I can't see an issue. You don't have to talk personal stuff to the co-workers, so unless the conversation wasn't mandatory and wasn't initiated by the candidate, then no issue here.
Only really valid cause is the firework.
wst_|7 years ago
dhnsmakala|7 years ago
Curious what the lunch argument was too
mrkurt|7 years ago
Companies are definitely taking the easy way out. The reality is that most of them don't have a good hiring process, aren't consistent about hiring decisions, and tend to choose based on factors that have nothing to do with the job they're hiring for.
jMyles|7 years ago
If you are working closely with this person, it will be 3 months before his accent is sufficiently adjusted.
This is a stupid reason to pass.
mikeleeorg|7 years ago
And those that I didn't hire, I encountered them at other companies. It was flattering to hear them say they remembered me and had a positive impression of our recruiting process, even though they were rejected.
I've always believed that the recruiting process is a great way to sell one's company. Even if the candidate isn't a good match, that candidate may recommend peers to the role if they have a positive experience with you.
Mister_Snuggles|7 years ago
I didn't get that job, but it gave me a lot of constructive advice and I ended up getting the next one I interviewed for.
r00fus|7 years ago
I've seen this being automated in enterprise recruiting systems as "Candidate Relationship Management" using terms like "silver medalist" to identify and re-engage folks who didn't quite make the cut for positions they interviewed for but may be good fits for other open positions or for future pre-vetted candidates.
I applaud you for making things more human!
fermienrico|7 years ago
duxup|7 years ago
That's seriously awesome. I would so love that. For me most of the time they just stop responding, even right after "I'll get back to you by the end of the day!" type conversations.
I don't care if it is a no, I just want to get a message, and feedback would be even better.
One company I wanted to work at recently did exactly what I described .... all hyped up meeting, we all got along, good stuff, we'll get back to you by the end of the day. Then nothing, I called a bit later, emailed, nothing.... My impression was pretty negative.
I have a job now, I'm excited to start it, that other company, very negative feelings towards that other company ... if they just sent an email even to say no I'd feel better about it, but nothing.
bproven|7 years ago
tajen|7 years ago
werbel|7 years ago
Trying to find the first job is extremely stressful process. A junior person has no notion of his worth on the market. Each rejection even if only by a lack of any response ("I'm sorry, I'm afraid we are looking for a bit more experienced person" would suffice) can be like a kick on the face when you're just barely learning to walk and most likely is a burned bridge.
I've mentored my girlfriend for 3 years from almost 0 to getting her first job in a company run by a React Native core developer. She had the skill, great attitude, really solid work ethic and very analytical thinking. It'd trust her more with any task than significant number of my past and current senior coworkers. It's hard to prove and no one expects that so naturally her applications had been ignored or rejected. With each one I saw her confidence, self-esteem and enthusiasm crumb. With each positive reply/invitation she was invigorated until the next step came. I'm pretty sure for some the roller-coaster or even worse, being rejected over and over again can be a life defining experience.
Any reply is great, personal is even better. If you spend time describing what was missing from the expectations of your company (don't say "You don't know enough", say "We need someone with more knowledge") and sincerely wish the person well you can be sure they'll be grateful, remember you, work on the gaps and who knows... maybe some day become part of your team.
Please feel free to reach out if you want some example for inspiration.
Edit: Please don't do that against the policy of your company. But if there are no reasons against just ask if you could provide some feedback and resources for the rejection letter.
mbesto|7 years ago
If you want to keep your job, don't follow this advice. Honestly, I would love nothing more than giving junior people (all people in fact) feedback on why they didn't get the job, but people will sue at even the slightest hint of any type of potentially litigious situation. It's even worse when the person is in a position of desperation ("I can't pay rent because I can't find a job...oh what this lawyer is going to take my case on a performance basis...heck ya, let's sue those assholes!"). Most of these cases get settled because no one wants to deal with them and it's easier to just pay the problem to go away, so they're easy wins.
Seriously, most good honest HR people WANT to give rejected candidates feedback, but asking them to benevolently provide feedback at the risk of their own job won't earn you many friends.
lixtra|7 years ago
But at the same time requested to not give any feedback because of fear from litigation. Sad world.
cm2187|7 years ago
save_ferris|7 years ago
9 months later, I found myself in a bad management situation at another company, thinking about looking for another gig when the company that rejected me reached out asking if I'd be willing to come back and interview again. I did and accepted the offer.
By giving good and candid feedback, they wound up saving months of searching for a new dev when they reached back out knowing I was a good fit for what they needed at that time. I was essentially a lead they'd already warmed months prior. It made me wonder why more companies don't think of this.
tptacek|7 years ago
I thought you all were better than this. Why are you asking questions about relational databases? Why not just have candidates accomplish the thing you're assessing with an actual relational database? I know you're work-sample-literate! But if your feedback emphasizes communication, doesn't that imply a lot about your process is subjective? After all, and to extend an analysis used in this blog post: it could be that the candidates couldn't effectively communicate knowledge about RDMBS's. Or, it could be that the interviewer wasn't effectively listening to what the candidate was saying.
ransom1538|7 years ago
wdewind|7 years ago
Also the next few lines kinda address what you are saying:
> It also might be that they know them inside-and-out but aren’t used to answering questions on the fly, or that our question didn’t use the vocabulary they’re familiar with, or that they misheard the question and answered a different one. It made quite a difference just to phrase the feedback in a way which acknowledged all those possibilities.
michaelt|7 years ago
After all, it'd be unfair to judge someone on a platform they weren't familiar with - so now you gotta maintain a fleet of laptops with a really wide range of tools. And these have to sorta float outside the usual IT management system because they aren't really issued to a single person, and you gotta be online enough that people can google stuff, and you can't have hiring managers let other people use their login, that'd be bad security practice. And if you didn't confirm in advance what platform the candidate wanted to be tested on, you gotta haul three laptops to the interview. Oh, they're pretty good developer laptops and one went missing? We really ought to have people sign those out...
And even after that, you _still_ have to apply subjective measures like "were their variable names clear?" and judge them on communication - like if they see an opportunity to refactor the code for clarity, but they say they're focusing on completing the task before spending time on that.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do this, just that I can understand why many companies don't.
thaumasiotes|7 years ago
You write about hiring from the perspective of someone with hiring authority. TripleByte doesn't have hiring authority, or even sufficient reputation to get their candidates out of doing another technical interview at the companies to which they apply.
There are two problems you might solve:
- Joe Nerd needs a job. He knows everything about relational databases, but no interviewer has ever noticed this. His limp, effeminate handshake leaves them unimpressed.
- IBM needs a database engineer. They really want to hire someone, but they're having trouble filling the opening; their existing network of friends-of-current-employees is tapped out.
That is to say, you could try to optimize for finding people who will be good employees, and then bully companies into hiring those people, or you could try to optimize for finding people who will pass an existing hiring gauntlet, and then introduce them to companies where the magic will happen naturally.
The first approach solves the candidate's problem and would logically charge fees to the candidate. The second approach solves the company's problem and would logically charge fees to the company. TripleByte wants to get money from companies, and follows the second strategy.
But... they like to send messages as if they were following the first strategy, because that strategy solves the candidate's problem and those messages therefore attract candidates to TripleByte. I don't like this.
chrisseaton|7 years ago
There you go, now it's a work-sample for your senior developer.
ddebernardy|7 years ago
It's not the same thing. Browse around the various SQL tags in StackOverflow and you'll see plenty of candidates who can "accomplish" things using relational databases yet have positively no idea of how they work.
When shit hits the fan they're asking strangers to optimize their thorny queries. But a modicum of understanding of how a relational database works would have led them to a better way to do things to begin with.
munchbunny|7 years ago
It's because you can only fit so much into an already long interview (2 hours). A big chunk of that time is already spent on an exercise about reading/writing/debugging complex code. You can't fit everything in, so database stuff is moved to the non-coding section. Also, the questions aren't "guess the right answer" questions, the interviewer keeps digging with open ended questions to see how deep you can go.
> it could be that the candidates couldn't effectively communicate knowledge about RDMBS's. Or, it could be that the interviewer wasn't effectively listening to what the candidate was saying.
You could certainly get a bad interviewer, but that's a strawman here. If it's not TripleByte judging the candidate's communication skills, then it's the hiring team judging that. The suggestion was about how to give feedback about communication skills. And there are definitely stronger and weaker communicators, and it definitely makes a big difference in day to day work.
c3534l|7 years ago
> It also might be that they know them inside-and-out but aren’t used to answering questions on the fly, or that our question didn’t use the vocabulary they’re familiar with, or that they misheard the question and answered a different one. [...] People are generally open to hearing that, one way or another, they didn’t manage to demonstrate that they understood a topic.
The author is actively acknowledging that being unable to answer a question about RDMSs doesn't mean they don't actually know anything about them.
And the point, I think, stands. An interview isn't a passive process where by some magic algorithm they determine good candidates from bad and the candidate just sits there hoping the right question will be asked. You have to actually communicate to the interviewer your knowledge and experience because they don't know.
dmitrygr|7 years ago
Asking you just to do one thing in an interview risks accidentally hitting one of the ten-twenty things you do know how to do, leaving me with no proof that you can solve the other 980-ish possible problems.
gmueckl|7 years ago
For some jobs it may even be appropriate to ask questions that the candidate cannot answer and see the reaction. Does he admit that he does not know? How does he phrase it? Is he making things up to cover for his lack of knowledge? And so on.
humbleMouse|7 years ago
Why wouldn't you ask questions about relational databases? I would expect any decent dev to know the fundamentals of relational databases.
dep_b|7 years ago
There are tons of companies that give you a generic email after you completed an IQ test, a questionary, open questions and of course the 8hours+ homework. That's just perverse.
"Try again in three months"
Why? I wouldn't do anything different.
thaumasiotes|7 years ago
> Why? I wouldn't do anything different.
But they will. The interview process is stochastic; exactly the same performance from you will lead to different results on different attempts.
> Getting rejected at Triplebyte was actually a pretty good investment time wise. Guess the whole thing costed me three hours in total and I got quite a list of things to improve and how. It was clear it was tailored towards the interview not just a larger generic mail.
For another perspective, here's the entire feedback I got when they rejected my application:
> This was a tough decision and one that we were on the fence about. We really appreciate you taking the time to work on the take home project. We're aware this requires a substantial time commitment and we are really grateful that you invested the time in completing it. We thought you wrote a great, very full featured regular expression matcher. It was especially impressive how much you dug into the academics behind regular languages.
> However we made the decision because we felt that while going through the project together during the interview, we didn't see the fluency of programming when adding to it that we had hoped for. While we specifically designed the take home project track to help overcome the difficulties of coding under time pressure with someone watching, we do still need to see a certain level of programming during the interview. This didn't seem to be the case here, where making changes to the project seemed to be slower and more difficult than we'd have liked.
SilasX|7 years ago
agumonkey|7 years ago
rdl|7 years ago
Liron|7 years ago
This was a common experience for me pitching my company last year:
1. Investor likes my co enough to schedule an in-person meeting
2. I meet investor in person to pitch
3. I send them a followup email
4. Radio silence
I'd read that investors like to keep you in limbo instead of passing, I just didn't realize these well-respected professionals would value someone highly enough to give them an hour of their day, but low enough to neglect all followup communication. In retrospect I don't think it's a big deal, but I felt bad about it at the time.
_delirium|7 years ago
The best is for European academic jobs. Often there's a schedule up front for when they'll make a decision, usually a 2-stage thing like: we will shortlist candidates by Sept 15, interview in the following 3-4 weeks, and make a hiring decision by Oct 15. So if you didn't get shortlisted, you get informed early and don't have to wonder whether your resume is still under consideration or what. American universities, though, leave you guessing what their schedule is, may take months to get back to you even if they're interested, and usually don't send a rejection letter if they aren't.
nosseo|7 years ago
mpeg|7 years ago
I did your online code quiz and got sent an email about doing a 2-hour technical interview, without really knowing much about what the job I was supposed to be applying for was.
On the interview, since I didn't really want to waste 2-hours on something I didn't want to do, I asked the guy a few questions about the company only to learn he's actually a freelancer interviewer, has little direct relationship with triplebyte and doesn't really know anything about me.
I carried on for a 2-hour quick-fire interview with a guy that was obviously trying to fill in a questionnaire rather than actually gauge my ability, questions designed by people who likely have no real-world experience in the scenarios they describe ("how would you architect the amazon.com frontpage?" is not a 2-minute answer)
About 15 minutes in, I was sure that even if I had wanted the job in the first place I wouldn't have taken it; and I had forgotten about it when I got an incredibly patronising email explaining how, if I do some online code puzzles and study hard, I too can get a job. Gee, thanks.
Granted: a bored, funemployed, grumpy dev is probably not your target audience, and I'm sure this interview style works to filter out people fresh off college, but the email was definitely the most ridiculous part.
unknown|7 years ago
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unknown|7 years ago
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faitswulff|7 years ago
account2|7 years ago
What are your recommended resources for technical improvements in coding interviews?
mikepurvis|7 years ago
It's certainly great as a candidate to get detailed feedback (would have really appreciated it back in the day as a co-op student), but I just wonder if the concerns over it have any merit or are overblown.
Insanity|7 years ago
hunterjrj|7 years ago
What was especially frustrating to me was that up to that point, the tone of both the conversations and email exchanges was very positive and cordial. I would have expected a "Thanks, but no thanks" follow-up at least, especially considering I was an internal referral from a Sr. Mgr. But... nothing. Made my reconsider my view of that particular company.
lastofus|7 years ago
After 2 full days on-site with said company, I got radio silence. Not even a quick "thanks but no" email.
nosseo|7 years ago
wrecursion|7 years ago
It reminds me of a restaurant I worked at in my youth - because the owner and her daughter were so conflict averse - rather than fire someone, they would just slowly write them off the schedule. Sad.
britch|7 years ago
pvarangot|7 years ago
I didn't find a useful or correct way to inform all the potential candidates about that change. That happened two times and I only sent the more generic e-mail we send for rejection telling the people that had had at least one face to face to apply for other positions if they were still interested in the company.
For the easier case of filling the headcount up with someone and not wanting the rest it's easier to send a rejection e-mail, it's just not what always happens with every job opening.
mcguire|7 years ago
lexicality|7 years ago
It took my friend there a week to find out that I'd been rejected.
ConceptJunkie|7 years ago
psychometry|7 years ago
dbcurtis|7 years ago
Harj|7 years ago
In hindsight I'm glad we did this. In the years since I've had multiple people tell me the rejection was a positive turning point and the only honest feedback they'd received.
joeax|7 years ago
One time I interviewed for a position that I wanted badly. I studied and prepped for the interview, then during the interview I nailed every question. I waited a week but never heard back. After a few weeks of silence and giving up hope, I searched the company on LinkedIn, and found the person they hired for the position. It turns out he had more backend experience, which is what they were looking for. It was a painful truth, but them sending me a rejection email telling me this wouldn't have helped me at all.
aantix|7 years ago
namanyayg|7 years ago
herodotus|7 years ago
nfRfqX5n|7 years ago
m104|7 years ago
gwbas1c|7 years ago
Ultimately, that means your interviews have bias. (Even though it appears you try very, very, very hard to avoid bias.)
Honestly, I don't think interview feedback is a good idea. It just encourages gaming the system. I'd rather that feedback come through a neutral 3rd party. We just haven't set our field up to do that.
Why neutral 3rd party? Because of the above situation! The 3rd party could just say things like, "looks like this was just a bad interview. Don't read too deep into it, and keep trying." The 3rd party could also push back on the employer if the interview ran poorly.
And no, recruiters are not neutral 3rd parties.
sixstringtheory|7 years ago
I take a lot of issue with this. Interviewing and doing code projects is also an enormous amount of work. If a company sends an 8 hour exercise to each candidate, then in aggregate the candidates are probably expending way more person hours than the total expended by the hiring company to settle on a new hire.
I no longer do unpaid work. Of course I’ll interview, but to show them how I code on their product and work in their processes, I will only accept a contract-to-hire offer. If more people did this I believe it would exert pressure on companies to not be so wanton with what they ask of candidates, and how expendably they treat them.
eat_veggies|7 years ago
https://pastebin.com/AGPyzmgU
Dwolb|7 years ago
Bingo. I've opted to share specific team feedback via phone and although candidate feedback was generally positive and thankful, once in awhile the reaction would be extremely negative. I now opt for the much more (emotionally) safe route.
Triplebyte is more incented to provide candidate feedback because if the candidate improves, Triplebye may be more likely to place them in the future. With companies, this incentive is less apparent.
smelendez|7 years ago
Now you have to decide whether to fight in public with someone you didn't hire, normally bad form, or say nothing.
RoryRecruiter|7 years ago
My current firm (McKinsey & Company) expects every candidate in round 1 or final round interviews (either from the recruiter or hiring manager) to receive a call same day or within a day of interviewing with their interview results. If the results are a decline, feedback as to how and why we came to that decision is provided. It's painful for sure and no one likes to give bad news but the firm has been operating this way for years and I’ve found candidates appreciate knowing sooner rather then later.
Let's face it, there are a lot of bad hiring processes out there and not hearing back is the WORST when on the job hunt. At my firm, we rigorously evaluate candidates based on performance and will always do our best to ensure they are provided with feedback in a timely manner (note: I'm sure there have been slip ups in the past RE: same day/1 day after interviewing feedback but the firm expects every recruiters/interviewer to follow this process).
Johnny555|7 years ago
I think the problem comes when he talks to his friend of another race/gender and that friend said "Yeah, I couldn't finish that either, but they still hired me". The company may have had a legit reason to overlook the coding project (like the second candidate had experience in some other technology), but when you tell candidate X that they didn't get the job because they didn't complete the coding exercise, but then you hire candidate Y despite him not completing it, it provides candidate X with some concrete evidence of discrimination.
kevindong|7 years ago
One was for a marketing company that's already gone public because I made it to the final round and really fell apart during the coding portion. I knew I screwed up and the recruiter confirmed that (without me asking) during the "thanks for applying, but no thanks" phone call.
The other time was for a medium-size startup. I had to ask the recruiter via email after I got the "no thanks" email, but she provided the info within minutes.
stone-monkey|7 years ago
rossdavidh|7 years ago
I wonder, does Triplebyte have any kind of annual summary of why candidates are getting rejected?
brendonjohn|7 years ago
When interviewing candidates, I have been more than happy to give detailed feedback if they've asked me to give it. I realise it's unconventional, so I get the feedback peer reviewed before sending it away. I'm pleased to see that there are other companies learning how to give better feedback.
Giving feedback is a small token of respect that a company can give in return for a candidates time.
In my experience, interviewees have been thankful and shared how hard it is to get feedback from their interviewers.
paulsutter|7 years ago
AngeloAnolin|7 years ago
You can do an automated response to 95% of the rejected ones, and for the rest which made the cut past the initial stage of applying, having a more human-centric approach on providing response is the way to go.
The good words that would come out vouching for the company I think is enough reason that hiring organizations should take the effort to provide a meaningful response to some applicants.
pmiller2|7 years ago
> Even Triplebyte only sends individualized feedback to candidates who've done a two-hour interview with us - we simply don't have the resources to do it for everyone who takes our online quiz.
Unless there's something interesting going on, it seems like it would be easy to give some kind of feedback based on the online quiz, even if it's only "You answered X out of Y questions correct on $TOPIC", repeated for however many topics were covered.
dunpeal|7 years ago
Ah, but have you considered what would happen when you give this "transparent skills-based feedback" to 90% of your rejected candidates, but then a couple of them get rejected for reasons you don't want to specify, or could potentially be interpreted (by an aggressive litigation attorney) as illegal discrimination?
Some candidates get rejected because "nobody enjoyed talking to him", "he seemed weird", "alienated the interviewers", etc.
Are you going to write any of that in your transparent rejection letter?
bitwize|7 years ago
Dear <So-and-so>,
Thank you for considering me for <position>. I certainly enjoyed talking to you in person. Unfortunately, I feel that <company> is not a fit for my needs at this time. I wish you the very best of luck in your candidate search.
Sincerely, etc.
sixdimensional|7 years ago
It triggers one of those "how much better would the world be" feelings, if more people took more time to give each other genuine feedback. I mean, maybe giving good feedback (for candidates that took time to apply and clearly made effort) could help people learn, it might even ultimately address unemployment, homelessness, or other root cause problems.
I understand the legal concerns - and there would be candidates who would exploit the process of genuine feedback as well - but I think it would serve to help people more than it would hurt. It does require time and resources, so organizations / institutions would have to look at it as a sort of a social benefit cost or something. But I do wonder how much good it might really do.
whydoineedthis|7 years ago
s0uthPaw88|7 years ago
kaizendad|7 years ago
desireco42|7 years ago
VP hated the idea and very quickly was abandoned. We got a lot of bad candidates tbh, so it was hard to tell them what they did wrong (they bombed pretty much).
I still think, done well, it provides great benefit to candidates being considered.
Thing that worked well for me, I had elaborate set of topics/knowledge I want my developers to know and be rated on, it wasn't arbitrary selection. Still, when someone bombs, it is hard to relay they did bad.
rezashirazian|7 years ago
segmondy|7 years ago
Rejection sucks because we all like to imagine that we are good enough and the only reason we applied is because we believed we are good enough so it stinks to be told that we are not good enough.
Doesn't matter how you phrase the email, might be nice to give a feedback, but for anyone who receives it, it stings. The only difference is that some folks have a positive mindset, they get over the sting and work towards getting better. Feedback or not.
sunstone|7 years ago
paulie_a|7 years ago
kenjackson|7 years ago
It’s almost the same reason you stay quiet when held by police. Even something seemingly innocuous may end being used against you in the future.
duxup|7 years ago
I don't care that they're not hiring me, I'd just like some feedback. FEEDBACK PLEASE, anything that really matters that I can improve on or such.
It is to the point that even automated rejection letters seem nicer than the usual "ghosting".
HillaryBriss|7 years ago
After my in-person interview, about a month passed with no contact from her. I figured I didn't get the job. But I wanted to call her anyway, just because. She said, "Oh, I thought I sent you an email about it. Yeah, they don't want you."
thidr0|7 years ago
Believe me, it's a lot easier to just send a form rejection.
starpilot|7 years ago
apetresc|7 years ago
Wait, what? That means you're interviewing on average 12 people every single working day of the year. Even for someone who's job title was "Technical Recruiter" that would be a TON, let alone for someone who is a Team Lead and presumably has other duties. How is that possible?
nosseo|7 years ago
kulahan|7 years ago
That could easily be a full-time job for a large company.
andrewprock|7 years ago
I once got feedback that I wasn't technically qualified, and when I asked how they knew that, they said that I hadn't spent enough time on leetcode studying the answers.
HillaryBriss|7 years ago
I'm surprised by this. I would think that Triplebyte could automate the feedback for applicants who took the online quiz but didn't make the cut.
mbesto|7 years ago
This was either written very poorly or lacks serious basis to conclude thoughts about employee feedback (of which drives the thesis of the whole article).
First - "I talked to a lawyer and he didn't think it was a risk", does not sound very much like legal advice. Is there precedence for civil cases that were thrown out due to the basis of "just giving technical feedback"? How often do firms that provide "just technical feedback" get sued and how often do they settle those suits?
Second - I think most people want feedback on "how they interviewed" and not "were they the right fit for the job". This is where you get into a gray area of legality, because anything you might say may get misconstrued as discrimination. "Oh you think I was too nervous during my interview...well I have X condition that makes me like that and you can't reject me for that"
Third - feedback on technical skills? To what avail does this hold for the candidate? Example:
Potential Employer: "You couldn't reverse a string, so work on string reversals."
Potential Candidate: "Ok, I'll go learn a string reversal so I can ace my next interview"
Feedback on interviews is imperfect because the hiring process is imperfect.
cm2187|7 years ago
industriousthou|7 years ago
bbq42|7 years ago
insiderinsider|7 years ago
arunmp|7 years ago
jiveturkey|7 years ago
Reminds of a recent prudential billboard. "We spend more time reading billboards than planning for retirement." Great, if you aren't doing your job of planning then I'll use someone else!
Markoff|7 years ago
burntrelish1273|7 years ago
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lizhang|7 years ago
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draw_down|7 years ago
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microcolonel|7 years ago
I think the problem here is that it exposes you legally even if you're not discriminating. If your explanation can in any way be argued as euphemism, or analogous to discrimination against a protected class, then you could face trouble. Maybe the risk is overblown, but the form of exposure you're talking about may not be the main one, far as I reckon.