Very nice recruiting method. Subtle, but powerful because of it.
For YC, it was pretty damn slick, but made possible only because a close-knit bond between companies exists to an extent. I remember being super interested in self driving cars, really wanting to work at Cruise and getting their founders email from a YC Partner at the dinner. I was just out of my freshman year, and extremely nervous about emailing the cruise folks, and some of my coworkers at LeadGenius helped me draft intro emails. They were just really great people. My managers at LeadGenius (YC alums themselves) were the first people I told when I got into the fellowship. There were a lot of signals along the way that the folks involved in YC, from the partners to the founders, were __good__ people. I wanted to be part of that. And still am, and still do.
As job-seekers, we should start maintaining a black list of firms that treat prospective employees badly, and urge others to not apply.
I don’t even know how emailing you about it is supposed to help. If GP has been ghosted by you years ago, in what way does it help them to contact you now? All it does is provide an easy way for you to improve your hiring process while giving the other person nothing in return. The dynamic is similar to the unpaid internships we’re railing about in this thread.
I expressed my concerns about not hearing back from employers to Kartik -- I applied only because he reassured me that every application "in their system" (sic, iirc) gets a response.
"We don't do that", hah. If a founder wants to lie to prospective hires, that too when they are meeting them for the first time, it suggests that something is really rotten at the company. If you don't treat people nicely, well, there's a tonne of other firms in the area that are hiring...
I was accused of this same thing on a "Who is Hiring" thread a while back. I posted about looking specifically for senior front end engineers. What I got instead was close to 50 emails from boot camp grads, many of them data science.
If candidates feel the need to disregard what I say, why exactly do they deserve my time in return?
I agree that my tone was could have been better.
I don't buy the rest of your arguments, and would not comment on them for the sake of being misinterpreted again -- following the Golden rule of not feeding the trolls.
Thanks.