Stop hazing your potential hires: Hiring at Spreedly | Hacker News Reader

Stop hazing your potential hires: Hiring at Spreedly

engineering.spreedly.com

14 pointsjusben136914 comments

Not sure what's so revolutionary here.

Seems the process is this:

1) Call with "CTO", who answers any questions about the company. Sounds like a standard phone screen.

2) Work sample, the company now wants you to prove you are worthy of talking to them again.

3) Another phone call, this time with "hiring manager" to discuss "compensation" - which I will presume means they will ask you how much you're currently making or expect to make. Do they divulge their salary bands first?

4) Onsite.

My assumption: once their team becomes bigger, the CTO call will be replaced by someone in HR and they will further standardize their process to the current market dynamics. And I still didn't read what was so revolutionary, maybe because they don't do "puzzles" and instead make you spend hours on "work samples"?

Author here: you're right, nothing revolutionary here in technique. Most/all of our actual process is ripped straight out of http://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/. But my experience, over the course of Spreedly interacting with 100+ candidates over the past few years, is that just doing pretty standard things well, with attention to detail, is in itself revolutionary. We hear story after story from candidates about other companies they have or are interviewing at that are completely disrespectful in how they're treating candidates. Whether this is cargo culting, lack of time to do things right, or a righteous belief that it's OK to treat candidates poorly, I can't say, but it's pretty disgraceful.

So, I wrote this little thing both since I needed to write it down for my coworkers anyhow - this is how we do things, showing respect for candidates by keeping reciprocity, incrementalism, and relevance in view - but also in the hopes that it's one more brick in a wall of "you're worthy of respect" for candidates.

The post itself wasn't about our actual process, though I did use examples from it; I hope to write about the actual process later. But I will note that my experience of phone screens is apparently very different from yours: I've experience them as a chance to pre-grill and filter candidates, and ours is 100% not that. I ask zero questions, but instead just talk about what we do and answer any and all questions candidates have. You're right that doing an intro call with each candidate isn't scaling, but we're not replacing me with HR, but instead have a live weekly intro call that candidates can join where I talk about the company and they can ask questions via text and I answer them on the spot.

And for what it's worth: "the current market dynamics" in tech hiring SUCK. So long as I have any say, we'll be playing moneyball by ignoring them and instead just continuing to iterate based on what actually works.

just doing pretty standard things well, with attention to detail, is in itself revolutionary

This is exactly it! The challenge in hiring isn't coming up with a good process, it's making sure that process is actually executed well across the company.

Fair enough. I respect your point of view. I hope you engrain this mentality in your team for future hires and/or when they start their own companies. It's a solid perspective, sorry for being critical.

How do you deal with feedback for the candidate? Are there legal concerns for disclosing too much?

I hope it has a lasting impact beyond Spreedly, too. The impact of founding a company shouldn't just be on customers; if we act in an upright manner, hopefully employees, vendors, partners, the families of all of the above, and a cascade of future endeavors will be positively improved.

RE feedback, we try to give it and make it meaningful, so for instance the pre-defined, objective grading criteria we use for work samples lends itself well to us being able to highlight why someone isn't a good match.

There may be a slight possibility that giving clear feedback opens us up to some sort of liability, but (a) a respectful process ends up documenting itself really well as a side effect (how else are you going to keep up with all the details?), (b) a respectful process hopefully leaves even candidates who weren't a fit feeling like they got a fair shot and thus not inclined to come after us for a perceived slight, (c) I think the fear around giving feedback is more about how uncomfortable it makes us feel vs. an actual legal risk, and (d) I hate not getting feedback when I fail and as a founder and executive I have the clout to take some risk and do what's right.

That's refreshing.

Just the other day I was asking at another HN thread how employed people are supposed to be going to full day interviews (sometimes in different states!). "take sick days". No, that's BS.

The only situation that I think it would be worthwhile is if both parties were as certain as they could be at that point that the candidate would be actually selected. Then it would make sense to give the applicant some actual work and allow they to sit with their likely future peers.

My memory may be failing me, but I seem to recall Joel Spolsky talking about doing this.

Why would you need to take sick days anyway? Just take a normal day off surely?

One way or another, "sick days + vacation days" is strictly (and severely) bounded in most U.S. companies. You only have so many days in the year for dentists appointments, going with your kids to their appointments, etc.

So the bottom line is that full day interviews are quite expensive to take for most people.

Possibly because in many countries such as the US ten days per year of paid annual leave is the norm. You'll burn through that fairly quick on full day interviews.

Maybe as part of the offer the hiring company could re-imburse you as many holiday days as it took to get the job (including interviews at other companies).

Or maybe companies should offer interview slots on a weekend (obviously give the interviewer time off in lieu).

Yeah, agree with a lot of this. I've tried pretty hard to take the feedback I've seen on Hacker News and improve the hiring process for Data Scientists at my job–in particular, we make hire/no hire decisions based primarily on take-home assessments that are heavily based on our real work, have standardized our interview questions, invest time in answering applicants' questions early in the process, and try to minimize the number of onsite interviews.

It's a bit challenging–no matter what you do, someone is going to be unhappy with your interview process–but it seems to work much better than the default of asking a bunch of algorithmic questions on a whiteboard.

This is the kind of post that makes me want to apply to their company. Too bad they're in North Carolina and I'm in California.

We've been adding more remote peeps, so keep us in mind in over the next 6 mos - year. https://spreedly.com/jobs

Good to know! :)

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