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Comment by ChaitanyaSai | Hacker News Reader

OP here. We are fully aware of how this might seem like a lot of work for job seekers. But the practical reality is the Indian job market has a massive supply of talent. As with any, it is of variable quality. We are very clear we do not want to use the usual credentialing and leetcode interviews as filters. They suck. We want to work with people who are genuinely interested in the domain we work in (education) and this has worked reasonably well for us.

I would love to find a better way to filter through 2500 applications. What markers do we rely on. AI has made the usual filters even more irrelevant.

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The job seekers time is more valuable than that of your company. I want you to drill in your skull, tonight, tattoo it on the back of your hand, perhaps.

Time is the one resource that none of us can get more of. It is not saved, like money, to be spent on some future endeavors. It does not accumulate interest. It does not grow with market fluctuations. We get what we get and nothing more or less.

When an applicant has already taken the time to develop a resume that illustrates their skills along with a portfolio/repo that proves said skills, you callously dismiss that work and past experience by making them jump through hoops in your application process. This starts the conversation by telling the applicant you do not value their efforts thus far, whether you actually do or not. It's not a good foot to lead with.

Filtering through thousands of applicants is tough, no doubt, but if your company is successful enough to be receiving that many applicants for a position, then it is successful enough to hire and develop a robust HR or recruiting department that can vet these applications with actual human contact. Yes, this costs money, but if you want to make the omelette, you need to crack some eggs. If you cannot afford to take that path, then you cannot afford to grow, making it tougher to find quality applicants.

> The job seekers time is more valuable than that of your company.

As with anything of value this is also a supply and demand thing. Perhaps in India, junior candidates' time is simply worth less. The author mentions they got 2.5K applications, so obviously this will affect how picky the company can (and should) be.

> When an applicant has already taken the time to develop a resume that illustrates their skills along with a portfolio/repo that proves said skills, you callously dismiss that work and past experience by making them jump through hoops in your application process.

Yes. Because there are lots of people with nice looking resumes who code poorly and have at best superficial knowledge of technology.

- Completely ignoring the portfolio side of his comment

Agreed, but then you have the problem of asserting that the person really wrote it.

Nevertheless, every take home I accept I assume the default action of the receiver is to forget the effort and time that went into in, rejecting with no feedback. Horrible, but based on reality.

It is what it is, but I'm on a mission (getting the job) and unfortunately I do not hold all the cards.

If only there was a way to prove one's worth without having to spin plates while reciting 1000 digits of Pi EVERY TIME.

Portfolios also take time. It also takes time to evaluate portfolios. Not to mention that portfolios can be faked like everything else.

Generally, societies value human time far less than we might wish they should.

You've probably misread the situation. As far as I've seen there are two types of job seeker:

- People who will be hired immediately on applying because they're amazing. These people generally don't apply through the usual pipeline, they contact people they know and offer to work with them. Sometimes they get headhunted.

- Everyone else. To these people it is a numbers game where they have maybe a 5% [0] chance of being hired on applying and so need to apply to maybe 20+ jobs. Any challenge is going to be a massive pain for them because it represents a big time investment for little marginal gain.

[0] In the article there are 15 applicants, assuming you only hire 1 there is a 5% chance right there even if they are all obviously qualified and acceptable hires. And then there are a lot of "fake" jobs where the company is not actually going to end up hiring anyone this month.

Probably simplistic but probably also not inaccurate.

You have the people who will be directly hired through networking.

Then you have everyone else who will shotgun their resumes and other credentials. Some will have better schools and portfolios than others but it's still basically a numbers game. (And, given it's a numbers game, they may not invest much in a given opportunity unless it looks particularly interesting or a company puts skin in the game--e.g. flies them out for on-site interviews.)

You are filtering for the most desperate candidates, not the most suitable ones

A candidate who had applied for jobs before knows that his chances for getting a reply are in the low single digits. Now you are offering them to waste some time for probably the same. Only the most desperate will go through with this

This feels like bingo to me. The optional ”creative questions” will be filled by those who have more free time (ie not currently employed), and those who can use LLMs. If you want genuinely mission-passionate applicants you’ll need to talk to them, which means spending your time too, not just theirs.

>You are filtering for the most desperate candidates, not the most suitable ones

Maybe. I'd say "motivated" rather than desperate. Desperation might motivate, but another motivation might be that this is a job that is a really good fit for me, or is a company I really want to work with. As opposed to a job I could do but isn't a good fit.

Is one of your messages that industry hiring is broken, but if the right candidates will trust your company enough to invest in its hiring process, then that trust will be rewarded?

I don't know about India, but, in the US, companies have a credibility problem. I would guess that most of the job-seekers don't trust companies, and think the hiring processes are incompetent.

And we see numerous examples of companies saying they're doing something different with hiring, but these have also generally not left favorable impressions.

US people play along, to varying degrees, with hiring processes they don't trust or respect. But I suspect that their feelings are consequently mercenary and transactional.

This is based on the US market and culture and may be off base in India, but for me starting with a form with open-ended questions is a huge red flag of being a massive waste of my time. When I left school I swore off of essay questions, and any company that is going to force me to answer essay questions to even get a chance to talk to a human is not one that appeals to me.

If the culture is at all similar there, then that first step in your process is instantly filtering for people who are extremely compliant with arbitrary processes and bureaucracy. Which in turn will be very likely to instantly filter out the self-directed learners you claim to want.

Why can’t you proactively source your own candidates instead of thinking they’ll come to you? Especially for self-directed learners/more independent people?

Randomly choose ten and hire one of those. Hire them on a temporary basis at first. Coach them.

Stop trying to find the perfect person and find instead someone willing to work and improve themselves. Grow the staff you need.

BTW, I wrote a book on self-directed learning, and at one time was the youngest manager in Apple R&D, when I was 20.

> About 15 went on to complete a reasonably simple real-world challenge

I am not sure what you mean by better way of filtering. You already got only 15 candidates from 2500 applicants. Next step is to just check what they have done in the challenge which will further reduce the number of candidates. The problem would be if lets say 1000 applicants submit the challenge.

How about you ask for a personal repo with open source projects that solve real problems?

Instead of inventing a bullshit pre-job you can make the world a better place. You also get a strong signal on who can deal with real world problems when they take more than 4 hours to solve.

That's one of the questions in the form.

Then why on gods green Earth do you also have:

> HIRING CHALLENGE: Find our recenter browser plugin (it is open-source). Understand what it is for and suggest an interesting and personally useful feature you can add to it. Go through the code and share a brief note on how you would go about building this feature, and why. Note: Send us an email once you have thought this through, have put together the design doc, and are ready to start coding.

Because worst case scenario they can get their candidate to do some free labor?

facepalm here's how you do this.

- Ask people to nominate someone else they know as a good resource. - Reach out to the multiply independently recommended person - Ask they who they would recommend and why.

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