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Intern at a YC Company

by Y Combinator

Would you like to intern at a YC company this summer? We're helping place paid interns at YC-backed companies like Dropbox, Stripe, Optimizely and others.

You'll get:

> A chance to work with one of Silicon Valley's most exciting companies

> An invitation to YC's intern conference

Please fill out our application[1] by March 21, 2014. We'll notify you by March 31 if you've been accepted.

[1] https://ycombinatorevents.wufoo.com/forms/intern-at-a-yc-com...

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>Please enter the url of a 1 minute unlisted (not private) YouTube video introducing you.

Does this violate equal opportunity employment or is there some weird legal exclusion?

An interesting point. I doubt if it would be used for that, but it could be.

I think it's probably a bad idea in general, and most large companies avoid doing it just because it could be used for this (age/gender/race discrimination).

Sure you're eventually going to interview, but this could open a company up to potential actions by a much larger pool than just people who made it to the in person interview.

Perhaps alternatively, this is a test by some hot new, stealth-mode YC startup to test the viability of video interview screening? And simply using interns as a small test subject pool.

Furthermore, because interns are the testing pool. The turnover of selecting quality interns and seeing how they turn out over a summer internship would provide good data for whoever the startup is doing this.

They do the same thing for regular YC applications, so I don't think its anything crazy new.

Though, there's a large difference between overt "we want to discriminate against who joins our private secret society" and "we want to discriminate against potential employees."

The goal of the video is so they can form opinions about you more quickly. They don't want to waste time getting to know you or your history on paper if you turn out to be somehow unlikeable or unworkable as a person.

[Also see: online dating. When you read profile text, you read it as yourself and form opinions based on your ideal world view. When you end up meeting and dealing with someone in person, you end up seeing how much they completely don't match the ideas you formed from textual communication.]

As someone with no legal expertise in any area: Well, the companies are getting age/race/gender information from seeing you and they could use this information to discriminate against a protected class, but I don't see how its different from in-person interviewing where they would have access to the same information.

>I don't see how its different from in-person interviewing

An in-person interview is a two-way conversation and costly (in time and energy) for both sides. It is ideally a rich experience with a lot of infomation.

What we have here is a call for a very short (1 minute) one-way look at the candidate, who is asked in incredibly vague terms to introduce themselves.

IANAL but it seems like an attorney could make a case that such a short video with so little non-visual content -- no meaningful prompt, no real chance to show skill -- is a pretext for discrimination based on age or race or gender. Not that I'm saying it is, mind you, but asking for a video "introducing you" does suggest that the content of what the speaker says is incidental to who the speaker is. Particularly for a job that does not involve introducing yourself all the time (are these sales interns? receptionists?).

Why not a prompt like "...introduce yourself and explain why you're interested in working for $COMPANY..."?

I find the YC interview videos a lot better than solo videos because one of the most interesting data points is how the team seems to interoperate, which you can sort of get a sense of in a 1 minute video. It's a lot less of an argument in a solo process.

> An in-person interview is a two-way conversation and costly (in time and energy) for both sides. It is ideally a rich experience with a lot of infomation.

That's a valid point, but I don't think that discrimination laws say anything about the time and effort required by each party.

Time and effort are being used here as evidence against wrongdoing, not as something inherently legal or illegal. Think "security footage confirming an alibi". Laws about murder say nothing (or very little) about security footage, but that doesn't mean it can't be used as evidence.

Suppose that it is illegal to discriminate by using information of type A and that the following media transmit the following types of information:

In-person interview (IPI): A,B,C,D,E,F,G

Vague video upload (VVU): A,B

Cover letter + resume (CLR): B,H,I

In this slightly oversimplified example, it would be illegal to request VVU+CLR because the only possible motive for requesting VVU+CLR instead of CLR would be to obtain information that was illegal to use.

YCombinator already openly discriminates man, there is no need for secrecy.

We use video in the YC applications because when a group applies to YC and describes their business on video, we get a lot of information that can't be explained in print. And so, we have the mindset that using video is always a helpful tool for evaluation. However, in the case of interns applying for jobs, we've realized its not adding the same kind of value. We're not sure about its legal status, but even because it could possibly be a grey area, we took it down because we don't ever want to cause any hassles for our portfolio companies.

Is this for the intern applications, I don't see it in the form.

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