Non-hiring Practices

If all you wanted was a minimal features analysis you'd have asked an accountant. You asked this professional in the field for his judgment because of his experience and you got it.

That company is unprofessional because they ignore you unless they're making money on you right now. Nobody wants to be stuck waiting for consultants who've found more profitable work and are constantly rescheduling you.

That 'grudge' is really valuable business intelligence.

I love 37Signals - their products and their content, but this is the biggest issue I have with them - ignoring applicants.

I've never shared the story of my efforts in applying to 37Signals, but this seems like a great time :)

About 6 months ago, 37Signals advertised for a dedicated Conversion guy/gal:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3175-were-hiring-help-us-sign...

This was very exciting for me. I'd been a long-time 37Signals customer and over the last couple years had been studying and practicing with optimizing the customer life-cycle (conversion, onboarding, retention, etc) with my various contracting clients.

I've been more of a backend and devops engineer for much of my career, but I always loved when I'd get to simplify or add enhancements to a site and see the traffic and engagement go up. It had become my side-passion and I devoured all the books and articles I could find on the subject.

So I spent several days looking over the 37Signals product marketing and coming up with a strong pitch. The Basecamp landing page was full of classic mistakes and seemed like the lowest hanging fruit to address, so that's what I picked to overhaul.

Here's my initial pitch: http://yconvert.com/

I kept thinking about the problem and I realized that the mockup I sent of a new Basecamp landing page was still pretty weak, so I spent some more time revamping it and sent this 2 days later:

http://yconvert.com/redux.html

I still kept thinking about how it could be improved, so I also addressed the Basecamp funnel flow and sent this another 2 days later:

http://yconvert.com/basecamp_funnel.html via this link-baity tweet: https://twitter.com/nanobeep/status/212543236374409216

During this process, I watched my logs carefully and geo-located every IP that hit my application. Sure enough, the guys I wanted to see it had seen it. They also saw every update. They also tried some of my suggestions on the Basecamp landing page. And they also ended an online discussion with a puppy pic (if you reviewed my pitches, you'll know why that is significant).

Now, I'm not bitter about being ignored and I don't necessarily think it's evil or anything. I totally understand that folks get busy and things fall through the cracks - but companies should realize that it's often your customers and fans that apply for your jobs.

When I'm hiring for something, I'll admit that if I get an application where the person obviously cut-and-pasted a generic cover letter with no thought for the actual job, I may ignore the applicant unless they follow-up. However, if someone puts obvious significant effort into applying personally to my job - I would never ignore them. It's just really bad form.

I'm still a 37Signals fan, and I realize that as only one data point, I could just be that one guy they forgot to reply to. But if it's a more common problem, I do hope they change their hiring process to treat their applicants with more kindness and respect.

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P.S. I also have to mention that during this process I emailed Patrick McKenzie for advice and he responded immediately with some great and timely counsel. He encouraged me to be persistent and be as engaging as possible, and I applied that the best I could. He's a scholar and a gentleman.

I'm amazed advice like this needs to be given. I was contacted and asked for a resume by someone at Rumblefish who wouldn't divulge how he got my contact info and complained about how hard it was to hire good developers. The position looked interesting and I consider myself a pretty good developer so sent him my resume and told him I would call in a couple days to chat.

Before I called, I spent some time going over the job description writing down notes so we could make the best use of our time.

He didn't answer his phone, my last email, or his voicemail and I never heard from him again. Maybe he just knew after reading my resume that I was the wrong person for the job. Because of his lack of professionalism we'll never get to have a conversation about why, and I'll never refer anyone to them.

With such powerful analytical skills and immaculate professionalism I'm baffled as to why they're having trouble finding good developers.

Very true. There are severely competitive scholarships and fellowships, however, that exceed a 100:1 applicants-to-slot ratio. I'm not sure what the averages are. But we already know the comparison is hard because applications to university cost money. Maybe the ratio of applicants-to-slot and cost of application are just parameters of the same model, not proof that there are two different models. But you raise an interesting question:

Does a higher ratio necessarily imply more competitive? It could be that more unqualified applicants apply to more jobs than unqualified students apply to university. That would suggest that organization reduces the friction for matching the right employee to the right employer; but differences in ratio due to organization doesn't prove that the right employee is more likely to be matched to the right employer.

Why does this matter? If we take efficiency to mean reducing friction, then business will never inform applicants they were rejected. If we take efficiency to mean better candidates get better jobs more frequently, business will always inform applicants they were rejected.

I found when hiring that I could process 30-40 applications per hour. If I liked the application, I would respond with, "Name, thanks for applying. Are you free for a 15-minute phone interview on Date?" If I didn't like the application, I would reply with, "Name, thanks for applying. We received many applications and are going to hire someone else, but we will keep your information on file." The responses were appreciated by most people and, again, didn't take much time. I agree replying should be expected of employers.