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Comment by Kwpolska | Hacker News Reader

This “list of resources” email seems intimidating. As a candidate, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Should I read all the blog posts and watch all 7 talks, each of which about 30 minutes long? The manager says they will ask what the candidate read or watched, which is unreasonable to me. I have a full-time job, and yours is not the only company I’m applying to, there is no time for me to read and watch everyone’s propaganda.

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And that's all assuming such email will pass through spam filters, that's awfully lot of links per text.

Honestly, this is kinda cringey.

You’re a stranger to me at this point. You think I should spend potentially hours of homework studying you, in the off chance that this phone screen will land a job?

I’d wager fewer than 1 in 5 phone screens lands a job on average. How many hours is a candidate expected to do homework for you? What are you doing as an equivalent investment in the candidate?

Maybe you should stop and reflect why no one is responding to this email and what that means…

A stranger that took time out of his busy schedule to offer to answer all your questions

I think it’s great. SingleStore and any database company that ships binaries and supports customers managing their own clusters running those binaries requires a very different programming environment and culture from your typical saas or consumer app. Just picking any two of those articles at random will help candidates understand that. I think “cringy” is a very unkind description of a genuine attempt to answer the most common candidate question - “what is it like here.”

Personally they would fail my initial screen for employers unless they were very upfront about paying a quite higher than market salary. If you send me that reading list and everyone else is just doing normal interviews without all the homework, you are asking for a lot more and I expect that trend to continue after you hire me, so I'll expect a lot more out of you. So far I haven't found anyone with these high expectations willing to pay more (got plenty of people who want me to drive into their office wearing a suit for less than what remote jobs are offering for example), generally the offers tend to be lower than normal companies with standard expectations. Another clue is the "we are looking for passionate people, they need to be excited" stuff, those things in tandem smell like a low baller.

If all jobs are equal and you just want a job then sure, I guess you have a point. There isn’t an introduction in the template but presumably it would be described over the phone as something like ‘I’m going to send you an email with some links to talks and blog posts about the company so that you can learn more about us’. Maybe enthusiastic candidates would read a bunch right away. Maybe they would wait until they had offers and we’re choosing where they wanted to work.

Roughly, I think many candidates are not in some desperate must-find-job-ASAP mode and therefore will be more interested in finding the job that is best for them. Giving them information so that they can better understand the company/team seems good to me.

I don’t understand what the alternative to this is for you – just accept the first job offered? Or ask lots of questions to try to work out what the company is like? Or rely on network/back-channel communication to only apply to the right jobs?

> I’d wager fewer than 1 in 5 phone screens lands a job on average.

It's definitely way lower than that in software. Consider the example in the article:

> we ended up doing 81 initial calls which is roughly 1.7 per working week. We hired 5 people from this pipeline!

That's about 6%.

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