We had 110,000 applications to Canonical last year, which is a lot to process for a company of 800. We offer a very high-quality remote-first employment experience, with international travel twice a year for up to two weeks so teams can plan, bond and play. That's attractive to a lot of people.
Candidates these days apply for between 5 and 75 roles in a batch, and I'm pretty focused on selecting for people who genuinely care about open source and the role we can play in making it a level playing field with high quality developer and production experiences.
About 30% of the people who are moved to written interview submit them, so it does serve to separate out those who understand our mission and are excited about it, from those who just clicked on our link along with 50 others.
The written interview also helps reduce culture and gender bias in our hiring.
Given that we hire globally we know that the people reading the candidate resume may not have context on the resume norms and expectations in the culture and place that the candidate comes from. We ask them to move any plausible candidate to written interview, and then we generally have the written interview reviewed twice by two separate people, in an anonymized fashion so the reviewer can only assess what's there, with no bias from resume.