The bulk of the article is true. But companies are not lying when they say that legal risk is a reason not to send feedback.
Triplebyte is in the unusual position of being able to say, "Everyone who has enough technical skill gets through the interview." And that fact is sufficient to defuse their risk. But real companies don't have the luxury of ignoring non-technical aspects of the job.
Here are real reasons why I've seen people denied a job. "Nobody could understand his accent." "Accidental personal referenced summed him up as, 'Loves to make things crash and burn in production to see the pretty fireworks.'" "Nobody could believe the argument he got into at lunch."
In my books those are all valid reasons to not want to work with someone. However the first opens you up for an accusation of racism, the second would break a personal confidence, and the third had demonstrated sufficient irrationality that tiptoeing away was a great idea.
And you can't give feedback on technical issues, and not on the rest, because that amounts to a tacit acknowledgement that there was something non-technical. Leave the non-technical to your imagination and guess what happens?
I've done the TripleByte interview before. Even got an offer through them (though I didn't take it). Their interview is almost entirely about fundamental skills plus a bit about your ability to communicate. There's very little in that interview where you could come up with lawsuit material.
All of that said, I think their technical interview is a pretty good one. Their interview feedback was accurate, and it definitely felt both more rigorous and more fair than the vast majority of the first rounds I've done.
If you go a step further, a truly racist company is never going to hire someone of a race they look down on, but they can't put anything on a job description about it, so they just end up wasting a minority's time.
So that makes me question the legal liability reason. Facebook is a bigger target than most for lawsuits. I think it’s just uncomfortable to tell people why you didn’t hire them.
If a company keeps the door open, it's certainly in their best interest to help you enter it sooner rather than later.
The more data you put out there, the more likely that someone will crunch it and find some statistical patterns that they will label “racism” or "sexism". Even if you’re innocent, you will get dragged through the mud in the press and maybe even in court. Not worth it. No matter what, you lose. And what’s the upside? You gave some random guy some feedback.
This is the world we live in, unfortunately.
This is the world we live in, unfortunately.
The existence of that pattern by itself might be enough for a company to be guilty of discrimination. If a policy disproportionately harms a specific protected class and they can't show a legitimate business reason for that policy, it is illegal regardless of intent. It is called disparate impact.
I've noticed you've used "guy" 185 times in the past 5 years, but only used "girl" 58 times. This is a statistically significant difference. You will hear from my lawyers.
This is also the hardest to communicate as it is something inherent to the candidate. It's not personal, but it gets personal at this point.
Not my experience. At least when hiring for programming positions, the typical fatal issue is that the candidate's coding is weak.
In my first role as a hiring manager, I didn't stress coding tests for candidates with long work history on their resume. Since then, I learned better.
I've seen candidates with anything between 1 and 15 years of full time coding work on their resumes fail to answer basic fizz-buzz level coding questions.
At least for the candidates I've seen, the biggest single reason why they get rejected is failure to perform the one main function their job requires: coding.
This must vary from company to company, but it's clear that tech companies spent tons of time and efforts in technical screening. Most questions asked in these interviews are also technical. It's hard to see why candidates would even have a chance to talk about their political views
It was a good lesson for us, because it confirmed what we always kinda knew. Doesn’t matter if you’re good at writing code, we need to get along to do good work, and hiring somebody people can’t stand being around is a terrible idea.
I have a ~90% success rate in guessing whether I'll go on to the next stage / get an offer based on how warm the interview is to me within the first couple of minutes of the interview. The interviewers pre-judged you positively are rooting for you to succeed, and those who are biased against you are looking for reasons to not pass you. (This is assuming, of course, some very basic level of competency and that one passed the initial screening without lying)
Most people get rejected at the resume stage. Most who have acceptable resumes get rejected at the first screen. All of this is invisible to software engineers who only see candidates at the last interview step.
The lunch one - if the argument was not related to work, then I can't see an issue. You don't have to talk personal stuff to the co-workers, so unless the conversation wasn't mandatory and wasn't initiated by the candidate, then no issue here.
Only really valid cause is the firework.
Basically, it tells them that there was no technical reason not to hire them, which raises the question of whether it was something illegitimate.
Curious what the lunch argument was too
Companies are definitely taking the easy way out. The reality is that most of them don't have a good hiring process, aren't consistent about hiring decisions, and tend to choose based on factors that have nothing to do with the job they're hiring for.
Take some time to take classes and learn the language better. Try working in a Spanish-only environment as a pure English speaker and see how far you get.
This doesn't mean "he has an accent", just that they couldn't understand it.
Sorry, I disagree. A team is more than just a bunch of automatons punching the keyboard.
If I can't understand what you're telling me, if you can't communicate your ideas, if nobody can understand what you're saying, if everything needs to be explained multiple times, and/or slowly, it becomes exhausting to work with a person like that.
If you are working closely with this person, it will be 3 months before his accent is sufficiently adjusted.
This is a stupid reason to pass.
Accent is part of fluency, and fluency is a skill, like coding or graphic design. Hiring someone without an important skill in hope he will acquire it later is a risk you may not want to take.
Given two people otherwise capable of doing the job, one you can easily communicate with, and one you cannot, which would you choose?
The truth is it's part laziness and part racism.
That being said, there is reinforcing incentive to be a bad communicator when the people around you don't make the effort because of your accent.
And those that I didn't hire, I encountered them at other companies. It was flattering to hear them say they remembered me and had a positive impression of our recruiting process, even though they were rejected.
I've always believed that the recruiting process is a great way to sell one's company. Even if the candidate isn't a good match, that candidate may recommend peers to the role if they have a positive experience with you.
I didn't get that job, but it gave me a lot of constructive advice and I ended up getting the next one I interviewed for.
I had terribly frustrating experiences interviewing. Mostly just taking a bunch of tests and interviewing two, three times, and not hearing back for months. What sticks out was a post-interview for a large company that aggressively recruited from my uni. When I asked how I could have improved the answer was, "You ask too many specific questions about the company and software platform. Be more focused on the interviews." "For example?" "It isn't appropriate to discuss how wages are adjusted according to location or salaried overtime policies or the tech stack... in an interview..." I took that one as the, "not gonna drink the Kool Aid." box being checked. Dodged a bullet there, though, seeing as her answers did not exactly inspire faith.
I've seen this being automated in enterprise recruiting systems as "Candidate Relationship Management" using terms like "silver medalist" to identify and re-engage folks who didn't quite make the cut for positions they interviewed for but may be good fits for other open positions or for future pre-vetted candidates.
I applaud you for making things more human!
That's seriously awesome. I would so love that. For me most of the time they just stop responding, even right after "I'll get back to you by the end of the day!" type conversations.
I don't care if it is a no, I just want to get a message, and feedback would be even better.
One company I wanted to work at recently did exactly what I described .... all hyped up meeting, we all got along, good stuff, we'll get back to you by the end of the day. Then nothing, I called a bit later, emailed, nothing.... My impression was pretty negative.
I have a job now, I'm excited to start it, that other company, very negative feelings towards that other company ... if they just sent an email even to say no I'd feel better about it, but nothing.
A good 50% of the resumes were flat out wrong for the position or missing critical information. A standard rejection letter with stats like these and basic recommendations might be useful in the future. It might also trigger a lot of self-righteous justification though... Don’t know if I’m up to receiving another 100 re-submissions with cooked CVs.
Trying to find the first job is extremely stressful process. A junior person has no notion of his worth on the market. Each rejection even if only by a lack of any response ("I'm sorry, I'm afraid we are looking for a bit more experienced person" would suffice) can be like a kick on the face when you're just barely learning to walk and most likely is a burned bridge.
I've mentored my girlfriend for 3 years from almost 0 to getting her first job in a company run by a React Native core developer. She had the skill, great attitude, really solid work ethic and very analytical thinking. It'd trust her more with any task than significant number of my past and current senior coworkers. It's hard to prove and no one expects that so naturally her applications had been ignored or rejected. With each one I saw her confidence, self-esteem and enthusiasm crumb. With each positive reply/invitation she was invigorated until the next step came. I'm pretty sure for some the roller-coaster or even worse, being rejected over and over again can be a life defining experience.
Any reply is great, personal is even better. If you spend time describing what was missing from the expectations of your company (don't say "You don't know enough", say "We need someone with more knowledge") and sincerely wish the person well you can be sure they'll be grateful, remember you, work on the gaps and who knows... maybe some day become part of your team.
Please feel free to reach out if you want some example for inspiration.
Edit: Please don't do that against the policy of your company. But if there are no reasons against just ask if you could provide some feedback and resources for the rejection letter.
If you want to keep your job, don't follow this advice. Honestly, I would love nothing more than giving junior people (all people in fact) feedback on why they didn't get the job, but people will sue at even the slightest hint of any type of potentially litigious situation. It's even worse when the person is in a position of desperation ("I can't pay rent because I can't find a job...oh what this lawyer is going to take my case on a performance basis...heck ya, let's sue those assholes!"). Most of these cases get settled because no one wants to deal with them and it's easier to just pay the problem to go away, so they're easy wins.
Seriously, most good honest HR people WANT to give rejected candidates feedback, but asking them to benevolently provide feedback at the risk of their own job won't earn you many friends.
Edit: My intuition is most companies don't provide the feedback because simply they don't see a value in the time spent or simply never really considered that as there are always other things to do than think about people you'll probably never meet again.
But at the same time requested to not give any feedback because of fear from litigation. Sad world.
As a relatively junior person in management, it is amazing the kind of phantom fears I've been cautioned against. Some of which don't even have any legal precedent at all!
I think a lot of it is trotted out as managerial "emergency hypothesis" for why someone doesn't want to do something, and so invents some plausible legal risk to justify their decision. But, honestly, it can't be only that.
It is sad indeed.
Some would already know it and just say ‘thanks’.
But the people who argue with you that you’re wrong, or they need another try, or ‘I forgot to mention X’, or ‘you just hate me because Y’... the people who feel hopeless and you’re just ‘confirming’ their fears (even if they applied for something way outside their qualifications) or falling apart over it.
I would never want having to deal with that be a big part of my job.
I've most likely never had a person who left without a handshake with a sincere smile on his/her face and most of them expressed their gratitude.
Sometimes you have to reject a person on what you feel is a gut feeling. It's because over time you developed an intuition which is picking small details in a less conscious manner. In the end there are some reasons your intuition is shaped that way not the other and you can find something that presented within the context of your company and expectations will resonate with the candidate and he won't feel like he's been scammed.
9 months later, I found myself in a bad management situation at another company, thinking about looking for another gig when the company that rejected me reached out asking if I'd be willing to come back and interview again. I did and accepted the offer.
By giving good and candid feedback, they wound up saving months of searching for a new dev when they reached back out knowing I was a good fit for what they needed at that time. I was essentially a lead they'd already warmed months prior. It made me wonder why more companies don't think of this.
I thought you all were better than this. Why are you asking questions about relational databases? Why not just have candidates accomplish the thing you're assessing with an actual relational database? I know you're work-sample-literate! But if your feedback emphasizes communication, doesn't that imply a lot about your process is subjective? After all, and to extend an analysis used in this blog post: it could be that the candidates couldn't effectively communicate knowledge about RDMBS's. Or, it could be that the interviewer wasn't effectively listening to what the candidate was saying.
Be glad you didn't get that job, because that would have been the future of your days at work -- constantly listening to Mr. Smartypants compensate for his own sense of inadequacy, where every different opinion is treated as a personal insult or a challenge. No thanks. That personality type is infectious (not in a good way) and it damages an organization.
[1] https://dba.stackexchange.com/questions/57445/use-of-having-...
Edit: shouldn't assume gender
But at that point, I'm more interested in their personal reaction. Pondering, and/or asking "Why the fuck do you even do that!" would've been fine there to me.
Also the next few lines kinda address what you are saying:
> It also might be that they know them inside-and-out but aren’t used to answering questions on the fly, or that our question didn’t use the vocabulary they’re familiar with, or that they misheard the question and answered a different one. It made quite a difference just to phrase the feedback in a way which acknowledged all those possibilities.
No, I write code daily but I might have to distill down technical concepts once a week or so (usually not even that much) and even then if I happen to be the only one who can distill it down.
If your devs are often explaining basic stuff like 'what is a relational database?', you need to hire someone specifically to do that. It's not a good use of time especially when they can go google/wikipedia those concepts and figure it out themselves.
I lost out a job interview in 1997 because I wasn't familiar with "state management" for websites. The guy was pretty insistent I needed to know what "state management" was. I'd already sent over a project using session management (and he'd created an account, logged in, I sent him the code, etc), but... I didn't know what 'state management' was, so I was passed over. I wasn't strong enough on the phone (and was in a different country at the time - was worrying about the long distance charges!) and... it fell apart. I was essentially a perfect fit (had had an interview before - this was second interview with someone else), but I choked on that phrase, and they passed me by...
Why not just have candidates accomplish the thing you're
assessing with an actual relational database?
After all, it'd be unfair to judge someone on a platform they weren't familiar with - so now you gotta maintain a fleet of laptops with a really wide range of tools. And these have to sorta float outside the usual IT management system because they aren't really issued to a single person, and you gotta be online enough that people can google stuff, and you can't have hiring managers let other people use their login, that'd be bad security practice. And if you didn't confirm in advance what platform the candidate wanted to be tested on, you gotta haul three laptops to the interview. Oh, they're pretty good developer laptops and one went missing? We really ought to have people sign those out...
And even after that, you _still_ have to apply subjective measures like "were their variable names clear?" and judge them on communication - like if they see an opportunity to refactor the code for clarity, but they say they're focusing on completing the task before spending time on that.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do this, just that I can understand why many companies don't.
Regarding "fleets of laptops" and environments and all that jazz: these seem like unforced obstacles. Just have the candidates use their own machines. Here's a crazy idea: have them use their own offices/couches, too.
Regarding security practices... come on. We have an interview process that involves giving remote developers read/write access to an entire AWS environment. These are simple engineering problems. If they're the only thing stopping you from having a better interviewing process, and you hire regularly, just go solve the problems.
Instead, just describe it to me. Best guess it. We'll dive into that.
You write about hiring from the perspective of someone with hiring authority. TripleByte doesn't have hiring authority, or even sufficient reputation to get their candidates out of doing another technical interview at the companies to which they apply.
There are two problems you might solve:
- Joe Nerd needs a job. He knows everything about relational databases, but no interviewer has ever noticed this. His limp, effeminate handshake leaves them unimpressed.
- IBM needs a database engineer. They really want to hire someone, but they're having trouble filling the opening; their existing network of friends-of-current-employees is tapped out.
That is to say, you could try to optimize for finding people who will be good employees, and then bully companies into hiring those people, or you could try to optimize for finding people who will pass an existing hiring gauntlet, and then introduce them to companies where the magic will happen naturally.
The first approach solves the candidate's problem and would logically charge fees to the candidate. The second approach solves the company's problem and would logically charge fees to the company. TripleByte wants to get money from companies, and follows the second strategy.
But... they like to send messages as if they were following the first strategy, because that strategy solves the candidate's problem and those messages therefore attract candidates to TripleByte. I don't like this.
There you go, now it's a work-sample for your senior developer.
* It's the same for all candidates.
* It captures facets of the work as it is done on the actual job.
* It's objectively evaluated (ideally, it has a rubric established a priori, such that results can be evaluated by someone other than the person who proctors the challenge).
It's possible to devise work-sample challenges that assess communication skills. I have friends who've done it at their companies for customer service and sales roles. I'm saying, the process described in this blog post does not appear to be that.
I’ve been trying to do something about that when it’s my turn to ask interview questions. For instance, too many front end people struggle with basic data manipulation workflows. I want to virtue signal that it’s better to move this kind of logic to the backend, but I need to test them anyway.
So I create a plausible scenario, maybe this is a POC to see if it’s worth sort or grouping functionality to the backend.
It's not the same thing. Browse around the various SQL tags in StackOverflow and you'll see plenty of candidates who can "accomplish" things using relational databases yet have positively no idea of how they work.
When shit hits the fan they're asking strangers to optimize their thorny queries. But a modicum of understanding of how a relational database works would have led them to a better way to do things to begin with.
Obviously if the job is highly MySQL specific and they need to know all the quirks that’s relevant.
It's because you can only fit so much into an already long interview (2 hours). A big chunk of that time is already spent on an exercise about reading/writing/debugging complex code. You can't fit everything in, so database stuff is moved to the non-coding section. Also, the questions aren't "guess the right answer" questions, the interviewer keeps digging with open ended questions to see how deep you can go.
> it could be that the candidates couldn't effectively communicate knowledge about RDMBS's. Or, it could be that the interviewer wasn't effectively listening to what the candidate was saying.
You could certainly get a bad interviewer, but that's a strawman here. If it's not TripleByte judging the candidate's communication skills, then it's the hiring team judging that. The suggestion was about how to give feedback about communication skills. And there are definitely stronger and weaker communicators, and it definitely makes a big difference in day to day work.
> It also might be that they know them inside-and-out but aren’t used to answering questions on the fly, or that our question didn’t use the vocabulary they’re familiar with, or that they misheard the question and answered a different one. [...] People are generally open to hearing that, one way or another, they didn’t manage to demonstrate that they understood a topic.
The author is actively acknowledging that being unable to answer a question about RDMSs doesn't mean they don't actually know anything about them.
And the point, I think, stands. An interview isn't a passive process where by some magic algorithm they determine good candidates from bad and the candidate just sits there hoping the right question will be asked. You have to actually communicate to the interviewer your knowledge and experience because they don't know.
1. They missed a failure mode: in addition to (a) lack of knowledge and (b) lack of communication skills, there is also (c) lack of interviewing skill.
2. It's possible to design an interview process that is resilient to both (b) and (c), and I figured Triplebyte, "who has just one job", would do that.
In addition, on this thread, I've tried (badly) to point out that while (b) is maybe a reasonable thing to check candidates for, it's better to do that explicitly, with an actual test of communication skill, rather than something that can easily get confounded with (a) and (c) (and all the attendant stress that situation generates!).
Thanks for the opportunity to clarify; I'm doing too many things at once today.
Asking you just to do one thing in an interview risks accidentally hitting one of the ten-twenty things you do know how to do, leaving me with no proof that you can solve the other 980-ish possible problems.
For some jobs it may even be appropriate to ask questions that the candidate cannot answer and see the reaction. Does he admit that he does not know? How does he phrase it? Is he making things up to cover for his lack of knowledge? And so on.
Why wouldn't you ask questions about relational databases? I would expect any decent dev to know the fundamentals of relational databases.
There are tons of companies that give you a generic email after you completed an IQ test, a questionary, open questions and of course the 8hours+ homework. That's just perverse.
"Try again in three months"
Why? I wouldn't do anything different.
> Why? I wouldn't do anything different.
But they will. The interview process is stochastic; exactly the same performance from you will lead to different results on different attempts.
> Getting rejected at Triplebyte was actually a pretty good investment time wise. Guess the whole thing costed me three hours in total and I got quite a list of things to improve and how. It was clear it was tailored towards the interview not just a larger generic mail.
For another perspective, here's the entire feedback I got when they rejected my application:
> This was a tough decision and one that we were on the fence about. We really appreciate you taking the time to work on the take home project. We're aware this requires a substantial time commitment and we are really grateful that you invested the time in completing it. We thought you wrote a great, very full featured regular expression matcher. It was especially impressive how much you dug into the academics behind regular languages.
> However we made the decision because we felt that while going through the project together during the interview, we didn't see the fluency of programming when adding to it that we had hoped for. While we specifically designed the take home project track to help overcome the difficulties of coding under time pressure with someone watching, we do still need to see a certain level of programming during the interview. This didn't seem to be the case here, where making changes to the project seemed to be slower and more difficult than we'd have liked.
“How to set up a test that works and then completely ruin the results by doing nonsensical things during a dumb ritual that our entire industry seems set on preserving.”
Question for Triplebyte: when’s the last time that a single hour of coding — while being watched — determined whether you’d get to keep your job? Not acquire a job, but keep it.
I’m gusssing “never.” It’s a fake ritual.
I agree that's in practice true for many places. But I hope companies have the good sense to be too embarrassed to admit that their inability to be consistent is the reason to reapply.
I think the traditional reason for the "try again in three months" bit is that paper-based processes make it hard to find and re-contact promising candidates who didn't happen to make the grade this time. But if any place really thinks, "We won't hire this developer now but they would be good in the future," I think a much better solution is for the hiring company to make a list of people to re-contact next time they're hiring.
> But they will. The interview process is stochastic; exactly the same performance from you will lead to different results on different attempts.
Yeah I thought about that. But "try x months later" really means that you didn't pass some kind of bar. If I would be one of the five people that passed there would be no problem if I applied next week again, right?
This was a common experience for me pitching my company last year:
1. Investor likes my co enough to schedule an in-person meeting
2. I meet investor in person to pitch
3. I send them a followup email
4. Radio silence
I'd read that investors like to keep you in limbo instead of passing, I just didn't realize these well-respected professionals would value someone highly enough to give them an hour of their day, but low enough to neglect all followup communication. In retrospect I don't think it's a big deal, but I felt bad about it at the time.
The best is for European academic jobs. Often there's a schedule up front for when they'll make a decision, usually a 2-stage thing like: we will shortlist candidates by Sept 15, interview in the following 3-4 weeks, and make a hiring decision by Oct 15. So if you didn't get shortlisted, you get informed early and don't have to wonder whether your resume is still under consideration or what. American universities, though, leave you guessing what their schedule is, may take months to get back to you even if they're interested, and usually don't send a rejection letter if they aren't.
I did your online code quiz and got sent an email about doing a 2-hour technical interview, without really knowing much about what the job I was supposed to be applying for was.
On the interview, since I didn't really want to waste 2-hours on something I didn't want to do, I asked the guy a few questions about the company only to learn he's actually a freelancer interviewer, has little direct relationship with triplebyte and doesn't really know anything about me.
I carried on for a 2-hour quick-fire interview with a guy that was obviously trying to fill in a questionnaire rather than actually gauge my ability, questions designed by people who likely have no real-world experience in the scenarios they describe ("how would you architect the amazon.com frontpage?" is not a 2-minute answer)
About 15 minutes in, I was sure that even if I had wanted the job in the first place I wouldn't have taken it; and I had forgotten about it when I got an incredibly patronising email explaining how, if I do some online code puzzles and study hard, I too can get a job. Gee, thanks.
Granted: a bored, funemployed, grumpy dev is probably not your target audience, and I'm sure this interview style works to filter out people fresh off college, but the email was definitely the most ridiculous part.
What are your recommended resources for technical improvements in coding interviews?
I think it's a pretty good starting point. I also like Cracking the Coding Interview and I think there's definitely a place for timed coding challenge sites like leetcode - especially if you've been in a role where you're mostly working on larger-scale problems rather than on producing smart, working code quickly on the fly.
It's certainly great as a candidate to get detailed feedback (would have really appreciated it back in the day as a co-op student), but I just wonder if the concerns over it have any merit or are overblown.
> The number one reason companies cite for not sending feedback is legal risk. Interestingly, I don’t think this is true. Companies put themselves at legal risk if they are rejecting candidates for illegitimate reasons, like race, gender, or a disability. If they send feedback which tells candidates, truthfully, that they were rejected because they didn’t get very far on the coding project, then if anything a company reduces their legal risk: they have a transparent track record of evaluating candidates based only on their skills. I recently talked with an employment lawyer about this, and he didn’t think that specific feedback on technical performance put companies at risk. So legal risk, despite being frequently cited, seems unlikely to be the real driver of policies here.
Then, an explanation that legal risk isn't the same thing as lawsuit risk:
> Even if your process isn’t biased, if you send feedback that creates the perception you’re biased, that’s enough for a costly lawsuit. So while legal risk isn’t a reason not to send detailed, honest technical feedback (as long as you’re not discriminating), it’s a very good reason not to send carelessly compiled feedback through a haphazard process (even if you’re not discriminating).
What was especially frustrating to me was that up to that point, the tone of both the conversations and email exchanges was very positive and cordial. I would have expected a "Thanks, but no thanks" follow-up at least, especially considering I was an internal referral from a Sr. Mgr. But... nothing. Made my reconsider my view of that particular company.
If in 2-3 weeks you haven't heard from the recruiter, you should ping them back, if no response don't was further time and move along.
Interviews often seem like hit and miss. I would recommend training at geeksforgeeks.org just to refresh dynamic programming, etc. But beyond that you're better off applying multiple places.
After 2 full days on-site with said company, I got radio silence. Not even a quick "thanks but no" email.
It reminds me of a restaurant I worked at in my youth - because the owner and her daughter were so conflict averse - rather than fire someone, they would just slowly write them off the schedule. Sad.
Firing someone (without cause) leaves you open to having unemployment claims filed against you. Writing them off the schedule so they're forced to quit on their own accord negates that leverage; underemployment claims are harder for complainants to pursue/win.
Restaurant owners being the stingy type, I guarantee you this wasn't done to avoid hurting employee feelings.
I didn't find a useful or correct way to inform all the potential candidates about that change. That happened two times and I only sent the more generic e-mail we send for rejection telling the people that had had at least one face to face to apply for other positions if they were still interested in the company.
For the easier case of filling the headcount up with someone and not wanting the rest it's easier to send a rejection e-mail, it's just not what always happens with every job opening.
It took my friend there a week to find out that I'd been rejected.
In hindsight I'm glad we did this. In the years since I've had multiple people tell me the rejection was a positive turning point and the only honest feedback they'd received.
One time I interviewed for a position that I wanted badly. I studied and prepped for the interview, then during the interview I nailed every question. I waited a week but never heard back. After a few weeks of silence and giving up hope, I searched the company on LinkedIn, and found the person they hired for the position. It turns out he had more backend experience, which is what they were looking for. It was a painful truth, but them sending me a rejection email telling me this wouldn't have helped me at all.
Ultimately, that means your interviews have bias. (Even though it appears you try very, very, very hard to avoid bias.)
Honestly, I don't think interview feedback is a good idea. It just encourages gaming the system. I'd rather that feedback come through a neutral 3rd party. We just haven't set our field up to do that.
Why neutral 3rd party? Because of the above situation! The 3rd party could just say things like, "looks like this was just a bad interview. Don't read too deep into it, and keep trying." The 3rd party could also push back on the employer if the interview ran poorly.
And no, recruiters are not neutral 3rd parties.
I take a lot of issue with this. Interviewing and doing code projects is also an enormous amount of work. If a company sends an 8 hour exercise to each candidate, then in aggregate the candidates are probably expending way more person hours than the total expended by the hiring company to settle on a new hire.
I no longer do unpaid work. Of course I’ll interview, but to show them how I code on their product and work in their processes, I will only accept a contract-to-hire offer. If more people did this I believe it would exert pressure on companies to not be so wanton with what they ask of candidates, and how expendably they treat them.
Bingo. I've opted to share specific team feedback via phone and although candidate feedback was generally positive and thankful, once in awhile the reaction would be extremely negative. I now opt for the much more (emotionally) safe route.
Triplebyte is more incented to provide candidate feedback because if the candidate improves, Triplebye may be more likely to place them in the future. With companies, this incentive is less apparent.
Now you have to decide whether to fight in public with someone you didn't hire, normally bad form, or say nothing.
My current firm (McKinsey & Company) expects every candidate in round 1 or final round interviews (either from the recruiter or hiring manager) to receive a call same day or within a day of interviewing with their interview results. If the results are a decline, feedback as to how and why we came to that decision is provided. It's painful for sure and no one likes to give bad news but the firm has been operating this way for years and I’ve found candidates appreciate knowing sooner rather then later.
Let's face it, there are a lot of bad hiring processes out there and not hearing back is the WORST when on the job hunt. At my firm, we rigorously evaluate candidates based on performance and will always do our best to ensure they are provided with feedback in a timely manner (note: I'm sure there have been slip ups in the past RE: same day/1 day after interviewing feedback but the firm expects every recruiters/interviewer to follow this process).
I think the problem comes when he talks to his friend of another race/gender and that friend said "Yeah, I couldn't finish that either, but they still hired me". The company may have had a legit reason to overlook the coding project (like the second candidate had experience in some other technology), but when you tell candidate X that they didn't get the job because they didn't complete the coding exercise, but then you hire candidate Y despite him not completing it, it provides candidate X with some concrete evidence of discrimination.
One was for a marketing company that's already gone public because I made it to the final round and really fell apart during the coding portion. I knew I screwed up and the recruiter confirmed that (without me asking) during the "thanks for applying, but no thanks" phone call.
The other time was for a medium-size startup. I had to ask the recruiter via email after I got the "no thanks" email, but she provided the info within minutes.
I wonder, does Triplebyte have any kind of annual summary of why candidates are getting rejected?
When interviewing candidates, I have been more than happy to give detailed feedback if they've asked me to give it. I realise it's unconventional, so I get the feedback peer reviewed before sending it away. I'm pleased to see that there are other companies learning how to give better feedback.
Giving feedback is a small token of respect that a company can give in return for a candidates time.
In my experience, interviewees have been thankful and shared how hard it is to get feedback from their interviewers.
You can do an automated response to 95% of the rejected ones, and for the rest which made the cut past the initial stage of applying, having a more human-centric approach on providing response is the way to go.
The good words that would come out vouching for the company I think is enough reason that hiring organizations should take the effort to provide a meaningful response to some applicants.
> Even Triplebyte only sends individualized feedback to candidates who've done a two-hour interview with us - we simply don't have the resources to do it for everyone who takes our online quiz.
Unless there's something interesting going on, it seems like it would be easy to give some kind of feedback based on the online quiz, even if it's only "You answered X out of Y questions correct on $TOPIC", repeated for however many topics were covered.
Ah, but have you considered what would happen when you give this "transparent skills-based feedback" to 90% of your rejected candidates, but then a couple of them get rejected for reasons you don't want to specify, or could potentially be interpreted (by an aggressive litigation attorney) as illegal discrimination?
Some candidates get rejected because "nobody enjoyed talking to him", "he seemed weird", "alienated the interviewers", etc.
Are you going to write any of that in your transparent rejection letter?
Dear <So-and-so>,
Thank you for considering me for <position>. I certainly enjoyed talking to you in person. Unfortunately, I feel that <company> is not a fit for my needs at this time. I wish you the very best of luck in your candidate search.
Sincerely, etc.
It triggers one of those "how much better would the world be" feelings, if more people took more time to give each other genuine feedback. I mean, maybe giving good feedback (for candidates that took time to apply and clearly made effort) could help people learn, it might even ultimately address unemployment, homelessness, or other root cause problems.
I understand the legal concerns - and there would be candidates who would exploit the process of genuine feedback as well - but I think it would serve to help people more than it would hurt. It does require time and resources, so organizations / institutions would have to look at it as a sort of a social benefit cost or something. But I do wonder how much good it might really do.
VP hated the idea and very quickly was abandoned. We got a lot of bad candidates tbh, so it was hard to tell them what they did wrong (they bombed pretty much).
I still think, done well, it provides great benefit to candidates being considered.
Thing that worked well for me, I had elaborate set of topics/knowledge I want my developers to know and be rated on, it wasn't arbitrary selection. Still, when someone bombs, it is hard to relay they did bad.
Rejection sucks because we all like to imagine that we are good enough and the only reason we applied is because we believed we are good enough so it stinks to be told that we are not good enough.
Doesn't matter how you phrase the email, might be nice to give a feedback, but for anyone who receives it, it stings. The only difference is that some folks have a positive mindset, they get over the sting and work towards getting better. Feedback or not.
It’s almost the same reason you stay quiet when held by police. Even something seemingly innocuous may end being used against you in the future.
I don't care that they're not hiring me, I'd just like some feedback. FEEDBACK PLEASE, anything that really matters that I can improve on or such.
It is to the point that even automated rejection letters seem nicer than the usual "ghosting".
After my in-person interview, about a month passed with no contact from her. I figured I didn't get the job. But I wanted to call her anyway, just because. She said, "Oh, I thought I sent you an email about it. Yeah, they don't want you."
Believe me, it's a lot easier to just send a form rejection.
Wait, what? That means you're interviewing on average 12 people every single working day of the year. Even for someone who's job title was "Technical Recruiter" that would be a TON, let alone for someone who is a Team Lead and presumably has other duties. How is that possible?
That could easily be a full-time job for a large company.
I once got feedback that I wasn't technically qualified, and when I asked how they knew that, they said that I hadn't spent enough time on leetcode studying the answers.
I'm surprised by this. I would think that Triplebyte could automate the feedback for applicants who took the online quiz but didn't make the cut.
This was either written very poorly or lacks serious basis to conclude thoughts about employee feedback (of which drives the thesis of the whole article).
First - "I talked to a lawyer and he didn't think it was a risk", does not sound very much like legal advice. Is there precedence for civil cases that were thrown out due to the basis of "just giving technical feedback"? How often do firms that provide "just technical feedback" get sued and how often do they settle those suits?
Second - I think most people want feedback on "how they interviewed" and not "were they the right fit for the job". This is where you get into a gray area of legality, because anything you might say may get misconstrued as discrimination. "Oh you think I was too nervous during my interview...well I have X condition that makes me like that and you can't reject me for that"
Third - feedback on technical skills? To what avail does this hold for the candidate? Example:
Potential Employer: "You couldn't reverse a string, so work on string reversals."
Potential Candidate: "Ok, I'll go learn a string reversal so I can ace my next interview"
Feedback on interviews is imperfect because the hiring process is imperfect.
Reminds of a recent prudential billboard. "We spend more time reading billboards than planning for retirement." Great, if you aren't doing your job of planning then I'll use someone else!
I think the problem here is that it exposes you legally even if you're not discriminating. If your explanation can in any way be argued as euphemism, or analogous to discrimination against a protected class, then you could face trouble. Maybe the risk is overblown, but the form of exposure you're talking about may not be the main one, far as I reckon.