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Comment by Peroni | Hacker News Reader

I interviewed roughly 300 people for our back-end/full-stack engineer position

Q1. - Given that most companies interview less than 10% of the total number of applicants, I would love to know how one job received 3,000 applicants.

Q2. - Why did you have to interview 300 people to fill one job? There is a serious flaw in that strategy. If you spent one hour with every candidate you interviewed, that works out at just under 6 weeks of back to back interviews. That's not taking into consideration the logistics involved in filtering and processing these 300. All that aside, do you not consider it to be exceptionally flawed that you had to interview 300 different people in order to find one suitable person for the job?

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He is likely saying that he interviewed 300 people to fill about six engineer positions, given he states a 1-in-50 hire rate from interviews. Still, that means 500 applicants per open position which, I agree, seems high.

In tech-ese, his use of the word "position" is referring to the abstract job role, rather than an actual instance of that role.

A 1-in-50 hire rate is absolutely shocking regardless of the company size, industry, etc. Whoever is responsible for prescreening these applicants prior to being interviewed simply isn't doing their job.

Not really, no. I've found resumes to be terribly poor indicators of hiring suitability, and so I end up conducting brief first-round phone screens with most at-least-slightly-suitable candidates.

This correlates well with the article here, as it turns out that resumes were more useful as a writing sample assessment than a work experience assessment to this company.

To be honest, I misinterpreted the ratio. I wasn't aware that the 50 included people who were phone screened. Fortunately the ratio makes a lot more sense in that context.

0. Peroni, thank you for reading this. I've been a fan of your writing for years, and your take on hiring was one of the things that ultimately helped me make the decision to switch from coding to recruiting.

1. Yeah, over the course of a year, we got several thousand applications/resumes for this position. The interview rate was roughly 1 in 10.

2. We interviewed 300 people and made offers to 6, i.e. the hit rate was 1 in 50, or 2%. Moreover (and fortunately!), each individual filtering round and subsequent interview took much less than an hour.

Thanks for the kind words. I feel exceptionally guilty for my harsh feedback now.

I'm still bothered by the 1 in 50 ratio. Maybe I'm misinterpreting it. Does that 50 include people who get phone screened or is that 50 exclusively people you have met face to face?

If it's the former rather than the latter, then consider my incredulity null and void. If it's the latter then you should drop me an email as I would jump at the chance to help you to halve that number.

Thank you :)

The 50 includes people who got phone screened. The onsite to offer ratio was something like 3 to 1, if memory serves. I will update the original post to make that clearer.

can you clarify something.

when you say 'typos matter', what you mean is that there was a correlation between 'typos' and whether Trialpay hired the candidate? The resumes with the least typos turned out to be the ones Trialpay hired (presumably because the technical team judged them to be the best candidates).

That's different from saying the candidates with the least 'typos' turned out to be the best engineers.

Making a predictive statement like that is probably a bit premature. All I'm saying here is that the group of people who got offers differed significantly from the group that didn't get offers when it came to how many typos and other errors they had.

Moreover, whether an offer is a good proxy for whether someone is a great engineer is unknown. As I mentioned in another comment, it would be awesome to track on-the-job performance and use that as the dependent variable.

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