Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe

More than 10,000 people have interviewed at Stripe so far this year, so "several sigma bad" still happens to an unfortunate number of people. That said, we want those who interact with Stripe to come away having been treated professionally and respectfully, and our recruiting team cares about fixing our process failures. On behalf of Stripe, I apologize.

I interview a lot of candidates. I just can't imagine to make a hiring decision for a dev, let alone a manager that manages other managers, based on 20 minute discussion.

As you say, it is very hard to attribute a bad recruiting process to something that is non-structural...no matter how many thousands of people you hire.

You might look to improve y'all's process by looking at datatdog's interview process. I have never felt more appreciated and well treated than interviewing there.

1) they always give feedback

2) they have more generic positions, get you in the door to some small filter interviews, and then shop you around to find the right team for you, instead of the reverse approach where people shotgun resumes across your company trying to get in the door. The problem with the recruiter and multiple HMs I talked to at stripe is they didn't seem to care about getting people to work at stripe, only getting people to work in their org which didn't have open positions for X.

3) incredibly quick and responsive through the process. My recruiter at stripe did this!

Love what you're doing for science, Take care

Anyone who can do anything with zero variation should definitely drop what they are doing now and make it their new business.

I assume plenty of other people do that, e.g. Steve Klabnik with rust articles. Unless they’re just always on HN…

Extensive talk about a position. Then ghosted. Then invited for an interview with the hiring manager, who then cancelled last minute. Invited to do an ad-hoc interview during one of my work meetings. Denied and asked for different time.

Ghosted.

Definitely dodged a bullet with these guys. Some companies think because they're growing they can do whatever.

You may wish not to do this. As much as the feedback would probably help Stripe and possibly even yourself, given the post you've written, it sounds like it may put someone else's career on the line.

Regardless of the size of the org you need 45 mins to get good signal.

20 minutes might work for a “what questions do you have” sell call.

But any company making hiring calls on this model, that’s a yellow flag right there

- 35% of interviewers did the 20 min thing. Why haven’t you said you’re going to investigate this specific issue yet? You should have enough data to now go back to the team and find out if this is a real issue, rather than waiting for op’s email.

- this was a senior manager position and already in the offer stage. So you can’t compare that sample size to the top of the funnel.

They gave me a large and complex take home assignment which I put a significant amount of time into, and which I felt I did a very excellent job with. They declined afterwards without a word. We didn't discuss it, no feedback was given. Just unmatched on the hiring platform we were using.

I am an experienced developer at a reasonably prominent company and I know I wrote the code well for that assignment. The fact that they would assign something so time consuming and then take no time to go over it at all and reject it so out of hand left me with a very very bad taste in my mouth.

I think it would be hard to scale a business to the size of Stripe without those things. It's fair to say that, no matter what else you might believe, pc has managed to do that. Ergo, by your own logic, he has earned his comp.

You caught Patrick on his false argument.

Patrick did not mention the number of Manager of Managers that interviewed at Stripe this year, did not address the "I will only need 20 minutes for this" culture and did not apologise for the ghosting.

The PR spin:

> professionally and respectfully, and our recruiting team cares about fixing our process failures

If Patrick is interested in fixing anything is up to him and he absolutely does not need an email from OP for this.

The fact Patrick is asking for OP to doxx Stripe’s hiring managers should tell you anything you need to know about how Patrick operates.

Publicly, Patrick cannot afford Stripe to begin to develop the slightest trace of a bad place to work and a bad reputation for such a niche recruiting position as engineering Manager of Managers at Stripe is damaging.

Patrick is asking OP to doxx the senior leader in the office OP applied to.

> His answer: "don't come. It's a mess and a revolving door of people"

But what if others in their 20 minute discussions with the candidate ask the questions you would have asked if you had spent longer interviewing them?

If the hiring decision is based on the feedback from all the interviewers I could see having many of those interviews be short interviews where the interviewer just concentrates on finding out one important input for the group decision working, provided that there are enough interviews to cover all the important things and if there has been some planning on the part of the company to coordinate who covers what in the 20 minute interviews.

I have no idea if Stripe does the necessary coordination to make that work, but the fact that several of the interviewers started out mentioning they would only need 20 minutes suggests that it was some sort of organized thing.

While there may be opinions on whether or not this “makes it right”, apologies in today’s world should still carry some worth.

Main issues:

- wrong level offered (e.g. sub-director vs director) despite initial agreement;

- lowball salary offer (~30% less of what I stated I wanted to even start interviewing for the job, and ~20% less of what I was making at my then-current job)

- confusing interview process (too many things to even list them here)

- lack of preparation for the interviewers (e.g. didn't read my resume, wasn't aware of who else interviewed me and on which topics, didn't ask me questions relevant to the position, etc)

As a manager/leader of that organisation they will have an important role that can mean difference between those hundreds of people bringing huge value or huge loss to the company.

So your responsibility is to figure out how much time to spend with the candidate. You can choose anywhere between "just hire first person to apply" and "spend a year grooming an employee to see if they can do the job".

And you want to tell me that 20 minutes is the right answer here? That out of entire continuum of possible choices you say that the optimal return (performance of manager) on investment (cost of conducting interviews) lands at approximately 20 minutes -- less time than you take to have a lunch?

I get that he had couple of these sessions but still... it sounds like giving the job to a first person that looks the part.

At what size of org it stops being important who is going to be heading it?

The former gives more flexibility to alter the questioning on the fly, such as to delve more deeply into some area than had been planned. The latter gets more people to spend time with the candidate.

A mix of this could be the best of both worlds. Have several short interviews mixed with some long ones. If one of the short ones turns up something that seems worth going in depth on that can be handled in one of the long interviews.

If you are in software, recruiting is your business. You have no other real assets. So categorising your hiring process as a random variable makes no sense. You should have processes in place that ensure non-randomness...again, is Coca-Cola out there selling tons of rat piss, and just saying: "Tough luck guys, this is a hard business"...no. If you don't have processes to ensure that outcomes in the core parts of your business are not random, you don't have a business (I used to work as an equity analyst, I have heard this kind of thing from CEOs over and over...I never recommended investing in such business, I have never seen a company that was run that way succeed).

This, to me, is evident in the fact that OP interviewed for a specific, high level position, and named specific, repeated bad processes that go beyond Patrick's generic "We interview a lot of people so some people are going to have a bad time."

Patrick has more than enough information to start fixing things on a systemic level. Instead, he optimizes for the appearance of contrition without committing to fixing any of the specific problems mentioned.

I've seen odd things first hand with processed food from the grocery store. I've bought sealed packages of food that were all dried out and stale. Or that looked fine but gave me...indigestion. The weirdest thing I've seen recently were some mints where some of them randomly were solid chocolate, no filling. Oh, and a frozen dessert had a sealed cardboard box, but the plastic covering inside was open.

How does that sort of variation happen? I'd imagine that the better your process is, and the less variation you have, the larger proportion of your failures will be "unknown unknowns" that are just weird.

I acknowledge the conclusion that the interview process is f-ed up could well be correct.