“Hiring is broken. It’s ridiculous how companies filter for algorithmic skills & artificial puzzles.”

While this is indeed happening, I’ve talked with founders who are capitalising on having a great hiring process by *not* copy&pasting the Google hiring process. A thread.

First, disclaimer: I know the BigTech hiring process quite well. I did this for years & designed interview loops. BigTech has different goals & constraints. There are a *lot* of candidates and it’s a real pain when you have a mis-hire. And you need some standardisation.

Smaller & smarter companies do a few things different.

1. “Try out via open source” then hire. A bootstrapped startup pays freelancers/grads to add features to their open source product. This is - admittedly - also a weeks-long test. They hire those who do well. Works fantastic.

2. “Minimise stress & real-world interview.” A company with a female founder ran one of the best & welcoming hiring process. Inclusive job description (“you’ll learn X, Y, Z”), very clear comms on the process. The coding takehome was the most intriguing:

2. (Cont’d) it was a task to implement a small component that... passed the 40 or so unit tests provided. An hour-long task that they give 2 hours for. The on-site: 30 minutes taking about the code, 30 minutes with the founder.

Both places have ridiculous success with hiring & diversity of engineers. They rarely advertise positions as they get referrals from the people working there. Part of their pitch is “the interview process is low-stress”.

Companies copying the wrong things: you can do better.