How Stripe thinks about recruiting | Hacker News Reader

How Stripe thinks about recruiting

gigaom.com

31 pointsgdb45 comments

They don't think it's very important, apparently, as they completely ignored my application for a recruiting engineer they advertised here.

An automated courtesy email is the bare minimum of acceptable, and when they can't even get that right, platitudes of "only hire someone you'd hang out with on Sunday" ring hollow. I wouldn't hang out on Sunday with someone who completely ignores job applicants.

We respond individually to everyone who contacts us -- I'm really sorry we missed your application. Mind sending me an email so we can figure out what happened? I'm anurag@stripe.com.

I'm surprised so much effort was placed on the CTF competition yet it seems little thought was placed on collecting applicant information. The conversion funnel is as weak as its weakest link.

I sent two emails during the app process; I was a bit worried after the first one so I sent a second one about a week later.

Message ids: <CAETzaFkOzgx46pHttRy3TE6WU6TEfD0p4WmtM0ZhRz5OXVHmRQ@mail.gmail.com> (sent Mar 23) <CAETzaFmPjK7NDBS5X_B9R0qjiqEoWZNOZ=LKtFp=QhBUZe_8HA@mail.gmail.com> (sent Mar 29)

I'm sure you guys have hired someone else by now, but still, one of the suggestions I had in the email was a real ATS. :) That's absolutely something you should do (or at an absolute minimum, an autoreply that it was received -- then in the ads, you can say "If you don't get an automatic response, we didn't get your email")

As someone who filters resumes, this is something I haven't figured out how to handle and am quite curious about.

If the company can tell from your resume + cover letter that you aren't a good fit for the position, what would you want to hear back? Brutal honesty? Lame corporate speak? Silence?

Honesty.

Unfortunately, honesty is the last thing Silicon Valley's hiring system is set up for. Employers expect you to tell you what they want to hear, not the honest truth. This means that the people they tend to hire will either be someone who either is lucky enough to think just like them or is willing to tell them everything they want to hear. And God forbid you express any opinions that would make you a "bad cultural fit". Companies give people they don't hire polite platitudes to avoid hurt feelings and legal issues.

In short, if you expect honesty in a job search, you'll be disappointed.

Where I work, we put a lot of effort into giving honest, actionable feedback to anyone we interview or phone screen. (We don't do it if we choose not to phone screen someone, though.)

We tell you why we didn't proceed and what we think you could do to make a difference if you choose to try again in a few years.

This is for our own benefit as much as the job seeker's. We don't want to leave a sour or even neutral taste in someone's mouth just because it didn't work out. Someone who is a bad fit now might be a good fit in the future, as they change or as we change, or we might be wrong that they are a bad fit now.

My experience is that east coast companies are more upfront about all of this compared to west coast companies.

Honesty, though not necessarily brutal. When it’s possible to offer them, specific constructive criticisms are great. Critique can help a candidate improve themselves—or improve how they present themselves, in case they’re very well qualified but just awful at putting together a résumé. Just be polite about it.

As the gp says - silence is NOT acceptable. A form courtesy email with the word unfortunately appearing somewhere in it is the bare minimum.

Anything but silence.

With silence I don't know if you are still considering candidates, haven't gotten my resume, or whatever.

Other than a yes, we are interested, I would prefer honesty. You are welcome to make it brutal if that pleases you, but I can read through the lines if you feel you need to soften it up (I have gotten the nicest, most corporate speak, email saying basically that they consider me so completely unsuitable for the position that they would rather not hire anybody than hiring me, but they are still advertising it.).

1+ My email has also been ignored. Perhaps this reflects a problem with email. You don't want to send more than one or two emails since it might come off as spammy. But you do want to make sure you're not lost. Maybe there's a need for a email-read notification service similar to Outlook's.

I like that they use feminine "she" and "her" regarding their future employees.

Knowing that they're actively trying to build a balanced, healthy culture is very attractive.

For my company, brutal reality is that 90% of job applicants that are male.

So for the narrow purposes of keeping my company diverse, I have adjust to view diversity of thought, method, and approach as more actionable than ensuring an even gentile-type distribution.

I don’t. Both he and she are gender-specific and (may) call unnecessary attention to themselves. Singular they would be better.

I find it just weird and unnatural. This over the top political corectness is repulsive.

I don't. I didn't have a high idea of Stripe to begin with, but I certainly can't respect a company that won't acknowledge that they are going to be hiring a lot more males than females and that most of the females they will be hiring will not be for developer positions but for support roles and maybe design.

There are properly more transgendered people involved in development than there are females. So they should stop lying and be honest about it.

I'm a woman and a developer at Stripe. I don't see how welcoming women as well as men into the engineering -- and every other -- team at our company can reasonably be called "lying" or "dishonest." No, we can't singlehandedly change the gender ratios in the valley, but we can and will try to make our hiring process as good and fair as possible.

I don't think Stripes hiring process is anything but fair. Given that, the next developer they will hire is likely to be male and there are more likely to be a higher percentage of females in the non-dev roles than in the dev roles.

What I find dishonest is that they pretend this is not the case. They pretend that they are most likely to hire females.

Which is wrong.

It's not pretending. It's signalling.

They're sending a strong signal that female applicants are going to be treated fairly - not that the next hire is likely to be female.

To use a non-sex based example.

My partner is wheelchair bound some of the time. Despite the theoretical legal requirements access to many places is a complete PITA. Having to phone up every time to find out whether you can get in or not, or whether we can actually sit together if we can get in, gets frustrating. When you get to the Nth occasion of visiting somewhere to discover that you can't get in because of some step or narrow door that nobody has considered it gets very annoying.

Now - some venues have things like pictures of people in wheelchairs at the venue, or strong visible inclusivity statements, or some other strong signal that there is going to be zero problem with access.

Guess which places we're more likely to visit - even if there are many other locations that are theoretically accessible, but don't signal it as well.

What Stripe have nicely done is signal to every smart female developer that "we are open to hiring you". Judging by the interview experiences of my female friends this strikes me as a rather clever move. It's going to get them a stack of applications from talented women who might not otherwise apply.

I'm sure that will more than outweigh the loss of any folk who see this as political correctness gone mad ;-)

I often wonder if posting messages like this actually defeats the purpose of your hiring requirements.

What I mean is you have set a standard, in your case 'the Sunday test,' by which you measure a candidate. Now by letting candidates be aware of this fact, some percentage of them are bound to game the system. Leaving you with the task of having to let them go since they don't measure up, which is less desirable than dismissing them outright.

If instead you kept this measure internal, even never giving it a name (this candidate has je ne sais quoi), would you still be able to build a team with the same desirable character? Would that team be able to identify new member with the same character as well?

C'mon, you really think you can assess whether you would want to hang out with somebody from a couple of short, isolated interactions? Most of my good friends only became so after extended periods of time and learning the nuances of each others' behavior, strengths, and weaknesses. In many cases, I realized that many people whom I thought were huge tools were extremely smart and fun to hang out with, but just had unique personalities.

Now there are times you meet somebody and they are a complete turnoff from the beginning, but I don't think there is anything unique to Stripe about not hiring those people. But in the gray area, this can't really be a major factor.

It's definitely not an easy problem. But it's also not easy to assess how well someone is able to solve technical problems. Recruiting is about recognizing what you find most important in employees, and then trying to find ways of measuring those properties. We'll always be imperfect and make mistakes in both personal and technical assessments, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

It depends on the interview process. Most interviews are arms-length, with some code on a whiteboard. You don't learn about people that way. You only learn whether they can answer your clever little questions. You've got to create a situation where people will let down their guard a bit. Most companies will never do this because it requires effort.

Sounds great if you're still able to find as many engineers as your need. But #1 essentially says, "we don't hire people who are shy or socially awkward," which seems to me like it would be screwing the pooch for most companies looking for talented engineers. I'm also highly interested to see how that strategy scales.

I don't think that's necessarily true. I can think of a number of socially awkward, shy people I'd enjoy spending a Sunday with. I can also think of a (probably larger) group of gregarious, outgoing people persons who I'd rather not work with at all.

I think the biggest problem with the Sunday test is that there seems to be little accounting for the fact that you can't (neè shouldn't) expect everyone to get along all the time. Sure, I want to work with someone I get along with. But I also want someone who's willing to be difficult to get along with when I'm about to drive the car off a cliff.

That may be true and maybe I'm taking a biased point-of-view as someone who is shy/socially awkward, but I'm pretty sure that people who fit that description are going to have a hard time distinguishing themselves in an interview as someone who is going to draw a crowd on a Sunday. Unless the kind of folks you like to hang out with on a Sunday are the kind who are quiet, keep to themselves and can help you debug your code. But if that's the case, then you're just looking for good engineers who aren't jerks. That's not how I read #1.

I'm not sure how I feel about everyone getting a veto. It sounds like a surefire way to ensure only the least offensive candidates who are unlikely to challenge the status quo get hired.

Yes, when you add in the "Sunday test" it seems as though an unintended consequence of this approach over time is a lack of diversity (in thought, not biological or cultural) and healthy tension.

I think that's definitely a danger, but by being very cognizant of the peril you can work hard to make sure that candidates you reject are being rejected for the right reasons. We work very actively to recruit a diversity of backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, and I feel that this has been extremely valuable to us to date.

Well I applaude you gdb - Stripe is a very well regarded startup so you're doing a lot of things right. Doesn't your "Veto" though negate the ability to ensure they're rejected for the right reasons? If you feel as though a Veto is for the wrong reason do you challenge the "Vetoer" and get it overturned etc?

The latter. By veto, we mean that we won't hire someone over a current employee's strong objections. But we always debate and push back on those objections, and more than once we've had people change their minds after this kind of discussion.

It doesn't work that way in my experience as long as your existing team is good. Good teams like challenges. They just don't like asshats.

As soon as you have a few folk who find new hires to be threatening - then a global veto can start you heading in a bad direction.

I'll buy that when I see it. Having good team members isn't a magical way to bypass human psychology. Good people have insecurities, want to work with people who won't threaten them, and dislike change just like everyone else. But it does give you a convenient way to rationalize all those things away.

"Hiring non threatening people is for companies who don't hire good people like we do."

The real solution? Admit that humans are imperfect and make allowances for it. Double check their hiring decisions to make sure they're doing the right thing and not just rejecting people they feel threatened by, or accepting only people below them.

This is a well-known problem among organizational psychologists: http://changingminds.org/disciplines/hr/selection/selection_...

I'll buy that when I see it.

Fair enough. I've seen it so I think it can work (and this was when I wasn't "on the team" so I don't think I was invested in that decision in a way that would have biased me in the same direction).

Agreed - but I don't think anybody was suggesting arbitrary decision with no checks and balances. Saying "we’ve been careful to preserve the principle that a single person’s strong objections are sufficient to result in not hiring a candidate" doesn't imply that there isn't discussion around and argument with those objections.

I'm aware of the selection spiral - had to deal with it a few times :-) I'd say that having the whole team can actually help since it's harder to disguise individual biases.

If we're going for some kind of anonymous vote black balling type situation - yeah sure. That's just asking for trouble.

I think it depends. In a rational team, the unilateral vetoer carefully explains their reasoning, and they know their belief has to be reasonably strong. (Otherwise they'd just step aside, after mentioning some objections.)

But unfortunately, this article doesn't give the least clue of how their hiring process actually works. Does the candidate present in front of the entire team? If so, then (pretending I'm on the Stripe team) my teammates know whether my objection is totally outside reality, because they saw the exact same thing I did. Then I'll be under pressure to justify it.

Either that or they'll feel threatened and change averse for the exact same reasons, and not pressure you at all. :-)

I can't help thinking that a "rational" team wouldn't trust heuristics like these.

It's tough for me to stomach #1, because you clearly have to pass on a lot of brilliant people. I can see how this would generate the other advantage he describes though.

Overall, great article - gives me a lot to consider at this particular time in our company's life.

Speaking from my experience doing a fair bit of interviewing and hiring at Twilio, I think #1 becomes less important as a company grows. He is absolutely right that for a team the size of Stripe's, enjoying working with every other team member is critical. But I'm interested in his thoughts on that requirement after they have 100 engineers, which they surely will. Perhaps at that scale, the Sunday test only applies to the smaller team or project group the candidate will be joining.

Ignoring #1 caused my company to split and I lost half my income.

In my experience, I would say #1 is paramount - not only for loving your job, but for profitability.

Had a phone screen with them at one point — I was surprised they took the time to talk on the phone when they hadn't even looked over my github or website.

Ended up being a waste of both my time and theirs, and their follow-up email was very strange.

This is depressingly common. No one seems to take interviewing as seriously as they should.

We always look over websites and github when available, because it provides a pretty good signal and makes for the most useful phone screen. Happy to discuss your case over email, if you'd like -- I'm gdb@stripe.com.

What strikes me is how similar these guidelines are to what we practiced for my fraternity's recruitment in its best days.

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