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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

Only 3/1000 will receive offers. Does this strike anyone else as an extremely flawed and stringent filter? They claim to only want to hire the best, but in my opinion, they will end up hiring the lucky, with similar opinions and skillsets to the interviewers.

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Reminds me of the joke about throwing away half the candidates arbitrarily because you wouldn't want to hire someone that has bad luck.

It does seem pretty strict, but without some sort of baseline this might be rather normal. I've never worked in recruiting or seen hard numbers on this sort of thing before so I have nothing to compare it to.

After reading this, it sounds like applying to CircleCi would be a waste of one's time.

That seems a bit harsh, even if CircleCI scores below average on some steps in their funnel. You know going into any company's hiring process that they're going to extend an offer about 1-2% of the time from the very top of their funnel. That doesn't mean you'll go around talking to 100 companies before you get an offer, but the numbers on the company's side will almost always look grim to a candidate.

The typical stages of a hiring funnel look like this: new candidate to screen, screen to onsite, onsite to offer, offer to acceptance. The respective ratios for each stage are: 17%, 32%, 31%, and 69%. On average, you'll look at about 88 candidates to make 1 hire. [1]

For CircleCI, their new candidate to screen is 25%. This is higher than the 17% average. Their screen stage looks considerably larger than I've seen at most companies: it's 4 different steps. From the 250 candidates, it looks like 7 go into an onsite. That's about 3% which is significantly below the 32% benchmark. Of those 7, 3 will receive offers (it's not mentioned how many accept those offers). So the onsite to offer is 42%, which is higher than the 31% average. We can't determine the offer acceptance from the data.

I think it's great they're looking at the funnel and conversion rates. Most recruiters aren't able to tell you these figures which is a red flag. The only way to improve those metrics is to know them first and then measure how changes impact each stage.

[1] https://medium.com/@jmtame/surprising-insights-from-talking-...

No, it sounds like they were hiring for 3 positions, so they only chose 3.

Isn't it just a product of many people applying to few positions? CircleCI is a strong brand, not all companies can afford to be so choosy.

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