Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe

Only some of this could be explained by "several sigma" of bad luck. The rest is either the candidate misunderstanding/distorting the process or a structural hiring problem.

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.

Describing your recruiting process as a random variable...wut? Does the hiring manager make decisions randomly? Someone calls up, the hiring manager gets out the lucky 8-ball, and it comes out "give a 29th percentile recruiting interview", and the manager just straps on the Biggles goggles to bomb the candidate. Why even say that to someone who is pissed off with your recruiting process? Just don't say anything.

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.

I also hire a lot of people and I tend to agree with you. It’s hard to think that I misunderstood the process, however, when a start date was mentioned.

>Describing your recruiting process as a random variable

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

What size org do you manage? At some point your choice is to either talk to candidates for shorter times or delegate the entire decision to managers under you. While 20 min definitely isn't enough to fully evaluate a candidate it can be enough time to assess potential gaps you see based upon the feedback of the rest of your team. It can also be enough time to make an intro and make it clear to the candidate that someone very senior values their role.

I think what GP is trying to say is that your hiring process is within your control (especially this far in the pipeline), so even the worst candidate experience should fall above some baseline. You don't get much sympathy if you say "that baseline turns out to be absolute gobshite at the first percentile, sorry."

Sorry this is BS and will lead to bad hires.

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

> 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.

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.

You are hiring somebody who will be managing managers meaning they will probably have responsibility for at least dozens if not hundreds or even thousands of people.

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.

> What size org do you manage?

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

What I'm suggesting is that maybe what matters is the total set of questions asked by all the interviewers. Does it really matter if one person asks questions for 2 hours as opposed to 6 people asking questions for 20 minutes each if the same questions are asked?

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.

The other reply explained this but imagine you bought a soda, and you drank it and it turned out to be rat piss. You call up the company: my soda was full of rat piss. Their reply: "Oh yes, we sell lots of sodas, you couldn't possibly understand how much soda we sell so rat piss soda is a seven sigma event...bye".

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).

Op said that only 35% of interviewers stated 20min so approx 2 out of 5? 3 long rounds and 2 short 20-30 min rounds should be plenty to get a decent hiring signal.

People report even more clear cut events regarding food products than your example, even. You know, like rat parts. Sometimes they may be hoaxes or urban legends. Not necessarily all the time.

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.