Non-hiring Practices

If the candidate is strong, then I send them links to job openings at some of our peers, partners, and even competitors (depending on skills). Sometimes we get people who are solid technically but just not the right fit for our culture or team. In this case, they may be a good fit for another team. Your meta goal is to get strong candidates to work in the larger ecosystem that surrounds your company, not just your team.

This extra step always surprises and delights candidates, even if they don't end following through. They'll then go on to think and say great things about your company.

It's an incredibly nice thing to do that will pay dividends. I'm Twitter "friends" with several candidates we passed on by took this approach with. It's lead to several business development meetings, a partnership, and evening a speaking engagement. They've also referred new candidates to us.

I've had nothing but win from this and strong encourage others to try it.

But the "solution" suggested here is far worse.

It suggests to me that this person DOES have a 20% response rate, but then is waiting around for that 1 application per week that they send.

This is insanity itself (unless it is a ceo or high level director or other extremely, extremely scarce position with a hugely different funnel. same if you know someone, obv.)

I mean, just think it through. Imagine that the OP here is really lucky, because it turns out statistically that he has a 15% response rate (his phone rings 15 times every time he sends 100 applications), an 80% interview rate (80% of the time his phone rings, they ask a few questions and call him in) and a 75% second interview rate, and a 100% offer rate at the end of the second interview, and a 20% great-offer rate out of those offers - really, top of the market.

This is a great position to be in. All you have to do is send enough applications in, and the only thing stopping you is the fact that you are sifting through all this crap that the funnel gives you.

If I didn't have a job, which I do, I would not mind sending thirty emails today, thirty tomorrow, and thirty the day after (in the mean while the phone has rung 15 times), going in to 12 interviews and 8 second interviews, and getting a selection of 2 fantastic jobs to choose from.

Meanwhile, the OP can have the very same response rate, 15%, and spend 5 weeks on 5 applications, waiting to hear back. In fact, this results in only 55.62% chance of hearing back from a single person at the end of all 5 weeks (the formula is 1-0.85^5). And that's just step 1 of his funnel.

so of course he will be frustrated if he doesn't hear back from that one person. oh well, he's going about it wrong.

as the OP stated his case, I do believe his only problem is too small reach. Not, as you suggest, a 0% response rate.

Of course, if you do find that (after 3 days nobody gets back to you out of the 28+37+26 applications) instead of the 10-20 that you expected, then you change your strategy. This also reduces your down-time, because you are never "waiting", and if on day 4 the three previous days turn out to have had some lead time but you get 20 calls, so much the better. :)

"I’m looking for work right now; and I have looked for work in the past. It’s something everyone does, now and again."

There is indeed an ongoing interest in finding paying work among the many participants on Hacker News. That's why I have devoted time and effort (with the kind help of several other HN participants) to writing up a FAQ about company hiring procedures,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4613543

which gives job applicants tips on what to get ready for at companies that use the best procedures.

"It is bizarrely standard, if you’ve decided not to hire someone, to simply never contact them again.

"Don’t accept this. Don’t behave this way."

It's easy to tell other people to do work you are not going to have to do yourself. You have no idea how many other applications were sent in for the same position.

HN participants luu

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4768830

doctorpangloss

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4768999

munin

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4768864

and hso9791

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4769295

all have pertinent comments in this thread that appeared overnight in my time zone, at various comment levels.

The key idea is that companies get unimaginably more applicants, some with very poor fits to the advertised job requirements, than most job applicants suppose. I strongly sympathize with the idea that if someone has applied for a job I advertise, I might as well be polite enough to reply. As Winston Churchill said (hat tip to the HN participant who recently mentioned this quotation), "After all, when you have to kill a man it costs noth­ing to be polite."

http://richardlangworth.com/when-you-have-to-kill-a-man

It costs nothing to be polite, but it costs a little to send out a response, even by email. A company in hiring mode is looking for people to respond to its paying customers. It is GROSSLY impolite to ignore a paying customer. When forced to prioritize by press of busyness, most companies devote more time and effort to responding to paying customers than to job applicants who in many cases are taking a shotgun approach to applying for jobs. I assume that all the HN participants here who have recently applied for jobs have done careful research and only applied for positions for which they are a prima-facie good fit and well qualified. But at all the workplaces I have ever worked at, the company has received many out-of-the-blue applications on a cold-call basis, and many responses to advertised openings with an extremely poor fit to job requirements. And meanwhile there may be people on staff whose job it is to HIRE new people who fit, but there is no one on staff who is assigned to have time and resources to answer absolutely every job application that comes in, even for advertised positions. The inexpensive availability of word-processing software on personal computers, beginning in the 1990s, has deluged most companies with many more applications than most companies have procedures in place to answer individually. That's tough on the job applicant, but that's reality. I agree with everyone here who says it's the decent thing to do, and can even in some cases be the expedient thing to do, to answer a job application with a definite result in a polite tone, but all companies have higher priorities, and at least one of those priorities is decently answering actual paying customers.

What the OP describes truly does seem to be almost standard operating procedure today. In one instance this happened even after I had substantial contact with the company:

* phone screen with recruiter;

* technical phone screen;

* completed a substantial pre-interview coding project;

* multi-hour interview with 6 technical interviewers, including on-the-spot coding tests;

This process took a month and a half. I was assured by the recruiter that I did awesomely on all of these, and then, silence...

Only after pressing them for weeks did I finally get a reply: "sorry, we're not hiring for that position after all". It's incredibly rude to put someone through this kind of process, only to insult them at the end (if you acknowledge them at all).

I've been on the opposite end of the interviewing table many times, and I understand that there are all kinds of reasons to reject a candidate (technical skills, people skills, personality, just plain "bad fit").

And sometimes it's best from a legal standpoint to not even explicitly say why a candidate is being rejected. But a simple "sorry, we feel you're not a good fit for this position" as soon as you know you will not be making the hire, will save an incredible amount of worry and anxiety, and let people get on with their lives.

I've had about a sixteen year industrial career now. Most of it spent in the web / internet space. I can think of six cases off the top of my head.

Two of those are probably causing major recruitment problems for particular companies - since the dissatisfied people are 'names' in a fairly narrow field, and are somewhat vocal about their experiences.

It happens a lot more than you think. I talked to a guy in NYC last week who was originally from the UK and we have people in SF and Cambridge UK among our common acquaintances. Six degrees gets really freaky quite quickly once you've been around a few years.

To pick an example from my own experience - I once went to do an interview after being told that it was a position that allowed telecommuting and was of a certain minimum salary. When I arrived it turns out neither of those was true. The recruitment agent had lied. Wasting a day of my time, and an afternoon of the companies.

I know this because the guy who was interviewing was somebody I hired at another company about five years previous to that. I had a lovely time listening to him call up the recruiting firm and rip them a new one. That firm no longer works for him, or for me, at any company we've worked at. I know of others that we have related this story too have shuffled that particular organisation to the bottom of the pile.

Everybody starts somewhere. Paying it forward pays off.