A letter from the CTO re: the hiring process
by Matt May
Hi, all. It’s been a while! Six weeks, by my count. As it turns out, building up a business is like eating a clock: it’s time-consuming.
Here’s a quick overview of what the last month and a half has looked like:
- Put out a job description for a lead engineer
- Got over 200 resumes
- Did 10 screening interviews and three final interviews
- Hired our top candidate
- Put out a job description for a UX specialist
- Got over 600 resumes
- Doing screeners starting on Monday
There’s a lot that I can’t yet say about aLayer, yet. I can’t say how many more people we’re hiring, or for what, or when. I also can’t talk about what we’re building, but I think I will have to soon, because it’ll be the only way I can hire enough brain surgeons to install bitcoin wallets in people’s cerebra—
Oops, I’ve said too much. 🫢
Anyway, back to reality. I’ve done a lot of the human resources part of these hires myself. I read all of the engineer resumes; my CEO kindly filtered out the obviously irrelevant UX applications we received over portions of 3 days last week, leaving me a mere 214 to review. Obviously, this doesn’t scale, and at some point we’ll need the filtering, the candidate communications, the scheduling, the offering, and even a good chunk of the evaluation to be a job of its own. If not, I’m on track to become the least-qualified head of HR ever.
That said, there are some things that I want to be a part of our hiring process. Some are for my benefit as a hiring manager. Some are for the culture of the company. And some are for the applicants themselves, because what they go through is awful. Applicants receive little to no feedback about their application status, or the milestones in the hiring process, or when a decision is made, whether or not they’re the candidate. It sucks. And my feeling, after plowing through hundreds upon hundreds of applicants, is that they’re responding with quantity over quality, using automated tools to mass-apply to the automated systems that reject them. Google can handle that kind of onslaught. I can’t.
It’s bad. LinkedIn, which made over $16 billion in revenue, has an atrocious job listing system. I can’t even share a listing with other members of my senior staff. We ended up dumping all the resumes out to a shared folder and tracking them in a spreadsheet. (Ironically, LinkedIn’s parent company, Microsoft, has an internal hiring system that’s actually pretty good, at least from the applicant’s perspective. I wish they would show it to their subsidiary.)
Of course, there are tons of recruiting systems out there who will happily centralize your application process, like Taleo, whose job search and application UX, I can say from both hiring manager and applicant perspectives, is a fate worse than death. I would like very much to find a humane recruitment system with a web interface that doesn’t look and act like it’s held together with spit and baling wire. There’s a billion-dollar business in that alone. Why, if I weren’t already making Netflix for cats—
Oops, I’ve said too much. 🫢
And that’s before we get to the snake oil of AI-based recruitment systems. I would love to be able to believe that some magical parser in the cloud will read my resumes for me and surface the “best” for the role. But I’m also aware of the work of my mentor, Jutta Treviranus, evaluating these systems, and they’re horrible, discriminating across just about any axis of human difference imaginable. Oh, you went to Radcliffe rather than Harvard? You were in the Black Student Union? Your resume has the letters LGBTQ nearby one another? You mentioned something that even signals a disability? Then you’re far too often filtered out before a human even sees your info. I don’t just think what’s out there are bad products. I think they can never be good products, because they are more about easing the workload of the employers, and leaving them with plausible deniability about their discriminatory tendencies.
So where does that leave someone like me, with n new people to hire, wanting to cultivate a diverse and equitable workforce, while also not wasting time on automated submissions (almost exclusively dudes, often with “10x” or “DeFi” or other crypto trash filling out their job history), and not leaving hundreds of people hanging, or only having the listing open from 3-5am on a Sunday in February?
I don’t know. What I do know is that I've found a small number of incredible candidates by going through them myself, so until I can find something better, I’ll keep at it. But here’s what I think is the right mix of what I can commit to, and what would make life a little easier for the candidates who apply for roles at my company:
- A human should read your resume.
- You should be notified as soon as you are no longer a candidate. (I know people hate quick rejections, but at least there is clarity.)
- You should know where you are in the interview process, what happens in each phase, and on what date you can expect to know whether you have moved on.
- You will not be expected to do work that materially benefits the company or its products (i.e. spec work) without due compensation.
- You will not be placed under an NDA unless we are giving you information that’s actually privileged.
That feels like my baseline. I wonder how many hiring managers, or even recruiting departments, actually think of their applicants as, well, people, rather than just paperwork. Obviously 599 people are going to be disappointed when they find out they’re not the one we offered the job to. But we should handle that both promptly and respectfully.
Now, here’s the part that I cannot commit to, but wish were possible. Obviously, there are a lot of really outstanding candidates that I just can’t hire, no matter how much I wish I could. And a lot more that have something important enough missing from their resume that I can’t put them on the Yes pile, but can’t give them that feedback. So I’m putting these out there, hoping someone can solve them:
- I’d like to be able to give reasons for my rejections, that candidates can opt in to, to help them with future applications, though not to reopen or re-litigate my own decision. (I also don’t want to get sued because the 459th-ranked candidate thinks I misunderstood part of their resume.)
- I would love to boost candidates I have interviewed, and would hire, but who just missed out. I feel like there are a lot of folks who get close to a hire, especially for senior roles, and end up back at square one each time. I’m also not proprietary about resumes I receive because I might someday want to hire them, but maybe that makes me weird. Basically, something below a reference, like a “Matt thinks this person should have a good job” endorsement, that other hiring managers could pull in.
Hiring is hard. Getting hired is harder. This is a process that sucks all around. As a DIY recruiter, I’m sure I’ve missed a ton of tips and tricks to do this work efficiently, but the hiring process is so thoroughly broken that maybe building up new pieces of it from scratch could at least expose a hint of something better. At least, before AI-based systems swallow it all up, serving the candidates other AIs can’t quite replace yet to their new overlords, along with a scan of their facial expressions taken while the chipper voice of JobGPT asks them about the gaps in their resume.
Office hours
Oh, why not. They’re open for this Thursday. If you are an active candidate for a role at aLayer, please don’t reserve a slot. Otherwise, I have a limited number of free 30-minute slots to talk about inclusive design, product equity, Zoom-based phrenology—
Oops. I’ve said too much. 🫢
Calendly - Matt May
My office hours are for people with questions about: product equity, inclusive design, accessibility in general careers in all of the above dealing with depression/anxiety/stress due to all of the above Free sessions are available on Thursdays. If these times aren't convenient for you, please
That’s it. Have a good week.