Andreessen Horowitz is relatively cool
A bit of background... I'm a self taught programmer who is not a start-up guy nor interested in the VC world. I write web apps for companies, manage some small databases and some servers. I know a bit about a lot of things but sometimes don't know exactly what I know and what I don't.
So... a few weeks ago Andreessen Horowitz posted a programming test looking for applications. I took it but didn't submit a resume. When they contacted me telling me I wasn't what they were looking for (no surprise...I didn't send a resume) I asked to see how I did on the test. They actually emailed me back telling me how I did (it wasn't as well as I had hoped but was ok for me I suppose). Not only that they gave me specific areas I should improve on, as well as those I did well on. They certainly didn't have much to gain from responding. This is pretty cool behavior on the part of Andreesson Horowitz.
21 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 31.4 ms ] threadIf you are just totally unqualified, that's easier feedback to give. When it's a near miss and gets subjective, it's extremely hard to verbalize/express what the mismatch is.
One thing to do is to see if people are willing to give you mock interviews where there is no job or corporation involved -- do this for the express purpose of getting feedback. I have offered this to many entry-level programmers I have met who ask for advice on interviewing.
Simulated interviews. Help companies refine their hiring process and (maybe) find a person they would not have otherwise. And help employees keep their interview skills up to date and have a better picture of how they are viewed by employers...
edit to add:
You can interview the same way at 5 different places and get 5 extremely different responses based on the various personalities involved. You can't even go for "finding the strategy that works most often." If 4 places hate you and 1 place loves you, that sounds like an 80% rejection rate, but, like finding a buyer for your house or a partner in romance, you only need 1 person to love you. That's a success. It's a better result than having 2 places hate you and 3 places feeling lukewarm about you.
At the same time I think there are general rules about what makes a successful hire/interview. Maybe someone could help people practice those. It's one thing to read a book. Another entirely to practice.
It's an article of faith among HR people and, apparently, employment lawyers that explaining decisions to candidates exposes you to legal risk. There seem to be two broad reasons why:
1. A disgruntled candidate alleging discrimination could litigate the conclusions in the rejection letter, by generating a convincing amount of evidence that (a) you're wrong about the specific points you raise and (b) you didn't expend a good-faith effort to reach your conclusion, which is really a proxy for a discriminatory rejection.
2. That same disgruntled candidate, again alleging discrimination, could compel you to produce the applications for candidates that fared better, and then litigate the distinctions between the candidate; "you rejected me because I only have 1 year of Java, but then hired such-and-such who only has 3 months of it".
To that, several responses:
* A lot of other things that are de rigueur for hiring processes, such as "we'll keep your resume on file", can create other legal exposures --- some of them possibly for things other than discrimination, such as a perceived binding promise to alert the candidate to future openings.
* Presumably, an aggressive lawyer can compel production of competing applications no matter what the rejection letter says. The kind of person who interviews innocuously, gets rejected, and sues for discrimination is very likely to have an aggressive lawyer.
* Sadly, most of the protected classes which are most exposed in the interview process (disfavored race, gender) are not well represented in the candidate pool, and other protected classes (religion, say) don't tend to come up in sane interviews; you may be reasonably well shielded from discrimination claims for most candidates.
* Your lawyer (you're at the point where you're hiring, so you have one, of course) can probably up-armor your rejection letters to blunt the concerns about contractual reliance and comparative evaluation of offers.
To my mind, the bigger reason not to give detailed rejections is that candidates will litigate them informally with you. We're all nerds. Nothing bothers a nerd more than hearing someone else say something wrong. A lot of the time, if you reject a nerd, they're going to assume you're wrong. About them. Angry nerd -> unpleasant conversation -> Twitter rage storm.
Not sure how this would work with an ex-trader friend who rejected an applicant by writing "BROWN SHOES" across their CV and giving it back to HR.
Here's a few reasons it's difficult to give rejected candidates feedback:
* the application isn't competitive, and there's no good way to say "you're in the bottom half of the applicant pool"
* the reason for rejection is personal in nature, and there's no great way to say "we didn't like the Facebook photos of you launching bottle rockets from your backside"
* the candidate clearly isn't a fit, but it's hard to describe why
* many unqualified candidates try to overcome rejection, and it just gets awkward
* communicating reasons of rejection to some candidates and not others feels unfair
* there are simply too many applicants to reject, so a personal reason for each one simply isn't practical
What's so bad about saying "there are several other applicants with much stronger qualifications than you"?
> * the reason for rejection is personal in nature, and there's no great way to say "we didn't like the Facebook photos of you launching bottle rockets from your backside"
Pretty please tell me you are only using looking at Facebook photos when hiring PR managers and other public facing positions. Otherwise why on earth would how someone wants to spend their free time have anything to do with their job performance?
> * there are simply too many applicants to reject, so a personal reason for each one simply isn't practical
An interview with a candidate takes one to two hours. Evaluating the applicant with colleagues maybe 30 minutes more. Formulating a written rejection takes at most 10 minutes. That's not a lot of overhead.
This is exactly the conversation they don't want to get into.
Coming off another job hunting cycle, I think it completely and totally sucks how little feedback candidates get. But this attempt to argue that the company's reasons for not hiring you are wrong is exactly what the companies want to avoid. Even though the benefit to you is probably greater than the cost to them (which means there must be some Coasian solution), it's still something that can only have downside for the company. And people are very risk-averse to lawsuits.
It's just so moronic that I hope GP is an exception and that most recruiters doesn't give a shit about facebook.
And the candidate often has this idea of "if I prove to the employer that their reason for not hiring me was dumb, then I win the argument, and then I get the job!"
Really, the best a candidate can hope for is to get the reason, and then walk away without talking about it. But because candidates want to make the company "defend their decisions" the employer won't even bother starting a conversation that will have no good outcome for the company.
It's closed. You can still take the test but they won't review it. I did like the format.