[_corym]

Kind of crazy how all these articles come out about what it's like working at Stripe and how to apply. Everyone I've talked to who has applied has not received a response from their application.

Even in my most recent experience I wrote a cover letter, reached out to multiple Stripe recruiters. Most of them either ignored me, or said that they were not working on that role and said my status is still "pending".

I imagine that Stripe's recruiting team is overwhelmed but it was unfortunate that they weren't able to get back to me. I ended up accepting an engineering manager position over payments at another company.

[ryanSrich]

Oh man. I have a juicy Stripe story from a friend, but I'd rather not share all of the details in case anyone from Stripe is here listening.

The gist is that I had a friend apply, go through a few interviews, and then just get completely ghosted. After several emails and attempts to reach out, the hiring manager replied to his email with a two word reply when my friend asked about his application status. That reply was "no thanks".

[wbronitsky]

In my experience, stories like this are par for the course. While at Stripe, a few of my close friends and former co-workers were treated so poorly during the application process that I stopped referring anyone over a year before I left.

[biztos]

Wouldn't it make sense to give referrals some kind of VIP treatment, just to keep a pipeline of referrals open from any employees who are happy with their jobs?

I can't understand why a company wouldn't do that, even if they were overwhelmed with the challenge of hiring in general. The win is potentially exponential, if you get good people who come to work with people they already know how to work with.

[slumpt_]

Yeah. I wouldn't be shocked if a lot of these blog posts are just astroturfing.

Well designed astroturfing, nonetheless.

Edit: Astroturfing is the wrong word, perhaps. What I mean to say is vocalized better in the replies. These all should be taken with a substantial grain of salt. A rock of salt?

[neilparikh]

These blog posts claim that they enjoy working at Stripe. The comments claim that the application/hiring process at Stripe is not great.

It's entirely possible both are true, since they're mostly unrelated, so I don't understand the accusation of astroturfing.

[gamblor956]

It's possible for both (a) people to enjoy working at a company and (b) for that company's recruitment process to be abysmally bad.

The people handling the recruiting functions are usually not the people you would be working with (unless you go into HR), and generally if HR starts ghosting you during the recruiting process it's because they're putting their efforts into the candidate they are trying to hire.

EDIT: Conversely, the opposite is also true. I used to work for a firm that was an absolute nightmare to work for, but the HR process was amazing.

[wolco2]

That's a tough choice. In the end a functioning hr/payroll department beats a good experience.

I've worked in both. When the company with a good environment closes we were all let go. They mishandled my last paycheck so I'm still waiting. No way to get references. Had to contact government to get seperation papers. The bad environment place that stressed you out and then let your department go for something out of your control. The firing process felt good. They provided career support offered a reasonable settlement package. Easy to use as a reference as they provided a contact #

[neilparikh]

At most companies of this size, HR/payroll is separate from the recruiting department.

I'm definitely in agreement that a functioning HR/payroll department is a prerequisite for a good experience though. I had an employer that kept paying me after I left company, and they only stopped because I told them that this was the case. Obviously, afterwards, they sent me a letter saying they had "discovered" an overpayment, and I should send them back the money to exact cent, with no allowance for the cheque/mailing costs...

[busterarm]

patio11 quite famously on here had a recruiting startup before going to Stripe. Recruiting is likely the only reason they hired him.

[mattmanser]

He's more famous for generally being a developer blogger, he was well known here well before Starfighter. I think he always had the most karma before they got rid of 'top'. He was always very open about his bingo card creator software, and then his appointment reminder sass. His yearly round up of BCC was always a top voted post.

Afaik he originally became well known for his helpful posts and advice on Joel Spolsky's business of software forums before HN even existed. That's where I first came across him, useful info about SEO.

This is a long way of saying I thought he'd been hired as a developer advocate for their startup thing, Stripe Atlas, rather than a recruitment advisor.

Edit: It's on his blog that he was hired for Stripe Atlas https://www.kalzumeus.com/2016/09/09/im-joining-stripe-to-wo...

[heavyset_go]

It's like when you see a dozen Glassdoor reviews for an employer where the only recommendation to management is to "keep doing what you're doing" and that any complaints are "sour grapes" or from employees who can't handle "growing pains".

[wolco2]

Any positive glassdoor post should be suspect. You generally visit glassdoor for three reasons.

1. You are researching a company.

2. You own or work in hr at a company or have been told to post a review by management.

3. You are angry/unhappy at your current role or that you were let go. You go on to warn others / get even.

Rare is the person who is working a company and is happy who decides to visit glassdoor and tell everyone how happy they are. Have you done this? Know anyone who would follow this chain of events?

[blntechie]

Glassdoor asks to leave a review for your current company or share your pay before looking up in detail about other companies. I wrote a review about my current company just for this reason but it was a honest review and not overly positive etc.

[wbronitsky]

I don't see how that would be possible. If you say you like working someplace, we know that you work there. You couldn't possibly be hiding who is paying you. I don't think that is a fair accusation.

I think it would be much better said that we should take with a grain of salt anyone's assessment of their current job.

[slumpt_]

Fair. Wrong word choice. The point just being that there could be a lot of company... encouragement... to be vocal about what you think of working at the org.

And of course, to the point you raise, we must always take that with a grain of salt. Nobody is going to come to the table with complete honesty about the problems at a company with their name right next to it.

Within reason, at least.

[strbean]

Astroturfing just means faking grass roots / community movement. Makes less sense here than in politics, but it would be possible if the marketing department was writing these blog posts on behalf of engineers.

[ionwake]

Lol the worst job application turn down I ever received was from Spotify.

They said “ we don’t want you in our band “

It was oddly personal and upsetting. Lol

How tone deaf is hr sometimes

[jariel]

The level of unprofessionalism is just ridiculous - all these 'great companies' with 'billions' can't fing manage to tell someone what time it is. So much ghosting, don't know what's going on, left in the lurch etc.

Is there literally not a single HR Portal that tracks status? That flags 'pending'? Notifications for '2 weeks no reply'?

The HR person can't grab the hiring manager and hand-hold the response?

An automated response would be just fine.

And just cordial as a minimum you know 'Thanks so much for turning out, but we can't move forward at this time'.

[koltzu]

>Is there literally not a single HR Portal that tracks status? That flags 'pending'? Notifications for '2 weeks no reply'?

As a hiring manager, absolutely all portals/HR management software I have used up to this moment have this feature. Most of them highlight the application and put them in a visible 'No progress for X time' category; some even send separate e-mails for each long overdue candidate.

The truth is that - at least in the orgs I've been part of - the trend for HR is to be apathetic to the needs of the team they're hiring for and tone deaf in communication. Recruitment has been the least favourite bit of their job.

Over the years I have received Linkedin messages from a number of candidates whom I have referred to other teams/department after they interviewed for a position in mine. HR should've followed up with them; they didn't.

[stainforth]

Maybe these HR people should have to go through some whiteboard algorithm gauntlet of their own.

[wingerlang]

Just to give another anecdote. I went all the way to the onsite and within a couple of days I was given a few notes from each separate interview and a fairly clear reason for not proceeding with the hire at the time. They also did this in a video call. This was in either late 2016 or 2017.

[biztos]

Years ago, before "FAANG" was a term, I was flown in for an interview with Amazon in Seattle, a city I like enough to have considered moving there. They put me up in a grimy capital-M Motel by the airport with a cracked sink and a $50 cab ride into town (back when that was expensive).

OTOH they were quite efficient with their response. It was a mutual "no" and they spared me the trouble by getting to me, with useful feedback, within 48 hours.

There is a lot of BS around the hiring process these days, but some parts of it are still in HR's control: namely the "before" and "after" of the actual interview day(s).

If that part is bad, it indicates rot in HR, which will be a problem every single time you interact with them.

I have nothing against Stripe, just commenting on the general case.

[AA-BA-94-2A-56]

I'd become an apple music or google music user for life after that

[ionwake]

I know! It was particularly painful because I used spotify daily for about 5 years up until that point and was technically aware of the product.

However I realise it was just a bad person in a big company so I did not let it reflect badly on my use of the product.

[nsenifty]

I went through the whole loop, "cleared" the interviews (as per the recruiter) and was told to stand by for the offer. A week later, instead of the offer, they just said they ran out of headcount. Never heard back from them again (even though they said they'll reach out when they get headcount back).

This was for a pretty senior position.

[ryanSrich]

Stories like this make absolutely no sense to me, and yet I hear them all the time about Stripe.

Why not just tell the candidate that they aren't getting an offer? Why make up elaborate stories about headcount? Why say you're going to follow up? It's clearly not a bandwidth issue since they took the time to respond anyway.

Even something like "We've filled all positions. Your application was strong, but not strong enough. It's unlikely we'll reach back out."

That's 1000x better than getting ghosted after being told they WOULD reach back out. Complete bullshit on their part and a total lack of integrity. There's really no excuse for it.

[mytailorisrich]

Saying that they ran out of headcount is both telling that they won't offer and offering a reason, which is exactly as your example: they filled all the positions. It's a polite and somewhat sugar-coated reason instead of bluntly saying that they thought the person was not good enough, but it's standard to be polite when rejecting candidates.

[Judgmentality]

Going back to nsenifty:

> A week later, instead of the offer, they just said they ran out of headcount. Never heard back from them again (even though they said they'll reach out when they get headcount back).

Saying you'll get back to a candidate, especially when that candidate has already been told to expect an offer, and then ghosting is not polite. Any framing of this as acceptable behavior, be it polite or impolite, is unacceptable. You can say "oh that's just the way it is" and there's some truth to that, but that doesn't mean it isn't pure fucking bullshit and deserving of condemnation.

[borroka]

It is unacceptable in theory, in practice it sounds like most of the ghosted in this thread would gladly work there, given the opportunity. Money and visibility (and beauty) make many sins forgiven.

I had terrible interview experiences (rudeness, ghosting, and making zero sense) with Lyft, Airbnb, Twitter, but if they make the right offer, I might say yes (although I have quite a strong memory).

[mytailorisrich]

They did not ghost him.

They came back to him to tell him his application was rejected. That was obviously the end of it.

I don't understand the anger here.

[ALittleLight]

How is it polite to mislead candidates? Surely it can be uncomfortable to hear that you aren't up to par for a job or didn't interview well - but if that is the truth it is better to hear that truth than to hear some platitude about headcount. If I believed the "headcount" story I might invest time waiting to see if headcount opened up, or hold out hope that I'd potentially get an offer. On the other hand, if I heard that I had gaps X, Y, and Z I'd probably start working on X, Y, and Z - or at least think through how I could demonstrate my aptitude in those areas better or mitigate my weakness there and so on.

It's like if your doctor tried to be polite to you by not mentioning some serious disease because he was afraid it would make you feel bad. It might indeed make the candidate feel bad to hear about their (perceived) deficiencies - but if they do hear about it then they can do something about it!

[ryanSrich]

If a recruiter or hiring manage wants to sugar coat a rejection then go for it. It's a coward move, but not a straight up lie.

Telling the candidate that you'll reach back out, and then not doing that, is complete bullshit.

[xerxesaa]

Literally the exact same experience at the Seattle office. Horrible candidate experience.

[ng12]

Doesn't surprise me. I did an on-site a while back and several of the interviewers seemed like they'd rather be anywhere else rather than in the interview room. It's a good thing the product has scaled well because it seems like the culture hasn't.

[saagarjha]

At almost every large, successful company there is a huge disconnect between what hiring is screening for and what corporate blog posts might suggest, to the point of engineers themselves being unaware of how the experience is for most applicants (after all, they are self-selected…) Usually this boils down to "you don't seem to have enough experience" or "you don't know anyone on the team who can vouch for you to get through the initial resume screen". A real shame, since it leaves a number of qualified applicants in a poor position, but presumably Stripe has enough people applying that they can afford passing up people.

[OliverGilan]

I applied for a new grad position two months ago, did the coding challenge and passed all test cases with clean code and time to spare and haven't heard a peep from them since. It's a shame considering how I only hear good things about the company and the recruiting process but almost all the big companies I've applied to have at least had the decency to let me know they aren't moving forward

[gonehome]

I think it's like most companies, really hard to get attention unless:

- You have a referral

- You went to MIT, Stanford, Caltech, CMU, Cal

- You're coming from FAANG or similar

The frontdoor is a waste of time.

Even with the above odds are against you, but at least you have someone to ask about progress/move things along for you.

[Ashanmaril]

I don't know about "most companies." Maybe most really big tech companies, places that are constantly getting crazy amounts of applications. And if you're living in a heavily populated city.

I live in a place with a fairly small population, and I got offers at 3/3 programming jobs I've applied for since my first in 2017.

[gonehome]

Yeah - you're right.

I should have said 'most bay area software companies' and even that could probably be qualified by 'competitive' or 'famous'.

[cyral]

I applied for the new grad position too a couple months back, having a previous FAANG internship and starting (and selling) my own startup during college. Never heard back or even got the coding challenge. I’ve used Stripe in my own projects a few times and have also heard good things so I’m bummed too.

[akhilcacharya]

When I was an undergrad I applied to Stripe several times with a FANG on my resume as well without any responses.

Two reasons for that are:

1) I went to a state school (NC State)

2) The FANG in question was Amazon, which I don't think they "count". I have friends that applied when they decided to leave Amazon and they didn't get interviews either.

If your FAANG was Amazon I'm guessing you're in the same boat.

[cyral]

Haha, you guessed it. I wish I knew how much my school would matter when I applied to colleges, and that Amazon isn’t as well respected as I hoped. Unfortunately Microsoft gave me a LeetCode hard for my internship interview and google auto declined me so I didn’t have a chance at them. Not sure what was up with that either.

[akhilcacharya]

I knew how much school mattered I just couldn’t get into a better one save UNC. Shame, really.

[sushshshsh]

what an amazing industry we work in! denying top talent every day because people aren't motivated enough to check emails, make phone calls, click buttons to schedule things.

[ignoramous]

Stripe likely has pick of the cream for open positions. It has been public knowledge for a while that they're a rocket ship, and that attracts top talent by definition (in addition to sharks and wolves [0] I'd presume).

[0] https://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/06/great-story-from-s...

[varjag]

Overwhelmed or not, ghosting after coding challenge/technical interview is unacceptable.

[colejohnson66]

Correct. Never responding after an application? Par for the course. But asking someone to complete a coding challenge or even an interview and then ghosting is downright unprofessional and should be unacceptable.

[lioeters]

Totally agree. From what we can see in this thread, when a recruiter / hiring manager / HR department makes it a regular practice to ghost interviewed candidates, it has a significant effect on the company's reputation - that they lack common decency and respect. It does not seem worth it for whatever time/effort they might have saved by such behavior. To put it another way, it seems it'd be worth spending time and effort to improve the process and experience, to improve such a reputation.

[pc]

I'm sorry to hear this and apologize. We're definitely still a comparatively small team wishing we had more efficient ways to handle our inbound funnel. (We do have some ideas here.) But this is good feedback and we should absolutely have provided a better experience.

[rochester46]

This is such an insulting excuse.

Ironically, this is almost the exact same attitude I got in my poor experience interviewing with Stripe. Interviewers were constantly late to our calls and mixed up who would be interviewing me more than once. Despite that, I still was told I was going to receive an offer... only to be ghosted for weeks. Once the recruiter finally reached back out, they said the position had been cancelled but they would find me another position. Spoiler: I never heard back from them, and they ignored all of my further communications.

Throughout all of this, I was apologized to several times (credit is due there, I guess) and each time the excuse was "ha ha sorry things are such a mess, that's just how things are when you work at a start up!" First of all, "haha we're a startup" is not a valid excuse for being late to meetings and ignoring communication.

Second: you're a company worth tens of billions of dollars, have thousands of employees in offices around the globe, and were founded a decade ago. You are not a startup. You are not a "small team". Stop using it as an excuse.

[PragmaticPulp]

> each time the excuse was "ha ha sorry things are such a mess, that's just how things are when you work at a start up!" First of all, "haha we're a startup" is not a valid excuse for being late to meetings and ignoring communication.

Pretending to act like a startup has become a cover for being sloppy at big companies. People want to pick and choose what it means to work like a startup, and usually they choose the aspects that give them flimsy excuses for bad behavior.

In reality, my experience with actual small startups has been that people are better at arriving to meetings on time and following through with commitments because small teams mean everyone knows each other. If you don't show up to the meeting, we can see you across the small office and hold you accountable.

It's the big companies where accountability starts to disintegrate. People know they can get away with dropping balls all over the place as long as they get their OKRs finished for quarterly review. Things start to slip through the cracks because that person you're dealing with is just another e-mail address, not your close coworker who sits on the other side of the room.

[ditonal]

Stripe was founded over ten years ago, is worth tens of billions of dollars, thousands of employees, and has tons of software expertise. And the excuse for bad candidate experience is a lack of resources.

[thewarrior]

Well the answer is that they get lots of applications from really good developers who also have top colleges on their resumes and top companies they've worked at. So they interview them first and can't get to the rest. This is obvious but can't be said publicly.

This is also why people fight so hard to get prestigious companies and universities on their resume.

[ss3000]

Exactly, it's clearly not a lack of resources, but explicitly not prioritizating candidate experience for candidates you're not actively pursuing. Which, by the way I think is a totally valid decision to make, but let's not kid around and make it sound like your hands were tied.

[pc]

There are two somewhat separate issues, I think.

(1) The practical reality that a lot of people will have a suboptimal experience until we (both "we Stripe" and "we the industry") figure out more scalable ways to assess people. We'll do the best we can to identify promising people but a lot of people will get something somewhat functionally equivalent to a form rejection. You could argue that this is merely a prioritization decision -- we could keep hiring recruiters until everyone could be individually assessed -- but doing so would require a recruiting team of comparable magnitude to the rest of the Stripe organization and so the current state is an unfortunate compromise given the current constraints and given the decision to have an open application form (which is, I think, on net better for everyone).

(2) Cases where people at Stripe mishandled the process. I know for a fact that some of the anecdotes shared in the thread are from many years ago, and I know that our process has improved since then (we have empirical data to this effect), but we're also acutely aware that we continue to make mistakes -- recruiting is a high-stakes and complex process with a lot of fallible moving parts. For whatever it's worth, we issue CSAT surveys to every candidate who interviews (about 6,000 onsite interviews in 2019), and track the results both at the aggregate Stripe level and at the individual recruiter level. And I get why some people here sound so annoyed -- what might be "another entry in a database" to a recruiter or hiring manager is "the future of my career" to someone on the other side. While it's always hard to know what to make of a set of anecdotes, and while our referral rate among Stripe employees is very high today, I'm nonetheless bothered by the number of cases shared here, and we're going to be digging in. (Specific anecdotes with more concrete dates or data are welcome at [e-mail].)

[rochester46]

>For whatever it's worth, we issue CSAT surveys to every candidate who interviews (about 6,000 onsite interviews in 2019)

I interviewed in 2019 and never got a CSAT. The recruiter (and rest of the team) completely ghosted me after telling me an offer was coming. No further communication, and certainly no CSAT.

It seems that could be a huge hole and your entire CSAT program is subject to confirmation bias if you are not even sending them to the people who are most likely to respond with a negative experience. I'm not sure I would trust this "empirical data" you have.

[marcinzm]

It's not hard to have an automated system that tracks if a candidate that's been interacted with has been ghosted. If the candidate has been previously contacted then require communication with the candidate for any archiving or other rejection. Hell, require communication even if you reject them without ever talking to them. Sending an automated email tied to the HR system candidate status isn't expensive or hard. You can then reprimand the recruiter or their manager as appropriate if they don't do this or try to get around it

[gault8121]

Couldn't you "pen test" your own hiring process? Have some folks stage applications and see the process failures first hand. You might get better data from running these experiments yourself rather than through a survey.

[com]

You’re talking about a “secret shopper” test. They deliver very actionable findings, if there’s a will to improve.

[anonymoushn]

I had an on-site interview in your San Francisco office in 2019 and did not receive a CSAT survey

[borroka]

"The practical reality that a lot of people will have a suboptimal experience until we (both "we Stripe" and "we the industry") figure out more scalable ways to assess people."

It is not inevitable and there are company that do recruiting better and other worse. For example, asking for a cover letter at Stripe and then ghosting people liberally even after multiple rounds of interview does not sound tremendously good to my ear. That is a not a sub-optimal interview experience, like being in a coma is not a sub-optimal life experience.

I understand that working with recruiters is hard (who ever said: I know a recruiter who is a genius? Or even the lesser: I know that recruiter, they are brilliant), but respecting candidates should be a priority of any organization.

[webmaven]

> I understand that working with recruiters is hard (who ever said: I know a recruiter who is a genius? Or even the lesser: I know that recruiter, they are brilliant), but respecting candidates should be a priority of any organization.

Generally speaking, the same sort of superlatives used for high IQ aren't used to describe high EQ, but we probably should.

I have interacted with a few recruiters (not at Stripe, I've never applied there) who were off-the-charts in their ability to make people feel comfortable and at ease, occasionally even in the face of truly horrendous processes and systems failures.

Also, it's an interesting signal when you get ghosted by the hiring manager (bosses boss of the team lead I would have been reporting to) and the recruiter re-initiates communication to apologize and get things back on track.

I still never got that job, but that was basically because "Remote OK" really meant "Remote OK in theory because we like the idea of paying a lower salary, but in practice it's only 'OK' for overqualified candidates that we can't convince to relocate, or maybe a relative of ours", and definitely not the recruiter's fault (it turns out that the hiring manager wasn't a good fit for the organization. Go figure.).

I did get some really good chocolate chip cookies as a consolation prize, though.

[pc]

> For example, asking for a cover letter at Stripe and then ghosting people liberally even after multiple rounds of interview does not sound tremendously good to my ear.

Absolutely. That is category 2!

[mbesto]

> but respecting candidates should be a priority of any organization.

Sorry, but it's not. I'm not giving Stripe a pass here per se, but the priority of an org is to make money so that they can offer positions.

Scaling recruiting is hard. Just like you might want an org who see thousands and thousands of applications every day to act more benevolently, the opposite also holds true.

[polote]

What do you want him to say publicly ? Do you want him to say that he doesn't care about developers he doesn't hire ? Even if that's what every business owner thinks, you can't tell it because you will sounds like an arrogant person.

They don't have (and you should not expect them) to give a feedback to anyone who apply (as it is the case of the parent comment)

[ska]

> Even if that's what every business owner thinks, you can't tell it because you will sounds like an arrogant person.

It's not, in fact, what every business owner thinks.

[gavinray]

I don't have a horse in this race, but I always get surprised when people critique responses from high-profile members of organizations.

Have you ever seen a businessperson make a public statement on behalf of a company that espoused or accepted negative/neutral sentiment?

I dunno why people even bother responding or reacting internally to these statements. There's not a human being behind them -- there's a corporate entity who has to answer to stakeholders with a spotlight being shined on them.

It's purely politics and statesmanship, the human being is long gone, or only shows up in private settings after everyone's had several drinks.

Except Elon Musk. That's a man you can, probably, take at his word.

[dexterdog]

Can we get a citation on that last one?

[defen]

Crazy suggestion: figure out a way to dogfood your hiring process. Have an engineer with a few years experience at Stripe try to get through the application process and see what kind of feedback they bring back. Kind of like secret shoppers but for hiring.

[mjayhn]

Don't forget to send often marginalized people through as well!

[meowsnow]

My college classmate put in a referral for a specific role a couple of weeks ago, and no word. Not even an email acknowledgement that my job application is in the system.

[sigstoat]

what sort of ideas are required besides sending an email to your IT folks and telling them to set up a JIRA project for tracking job applications? you could, in an afternoon, ensure that no applications are ever mysteriously forgotten about.

[polote]

All that is already included in any ATS (applicant tracking system) on the market

[superfrank]

I do mainly frontend work and am just shy of 10 years experience. My resume is solid and I can at least get my foot in the door at well known companies including FAANG. I'm not saying I'm going to get the job, but I feel like I can at least get a response.

I was job hunting earlier this year due to my last company (a fintech start up) shutting down and Stripe was the only company that just handed me an immediate "No" without even a recruiter call. I know one other engineer who is more mid level and she said she had applied and never even got a response.

I harbor no ill will toward them, but I'm really curious what their hiring criteria is and why it seems so different that most of the other major companies out there.

[xyzzy_plugh]

I'm tangentially familiar with the process, so let me paint a picture.

Imagine you have enough high-quality candidates such that you could have every single employee interviewing candidates all day every day, doing no other work. What do you do?

In the real world, most engineers top out at one or two phone screens a week, and/or one or two on-site interviews a week. Sometimes more. Each is 45 minutes at least, usually an hour. Each involves writing deliberate, thoughtful feedback and a professional assessment. Candidates that do well lead to decision meetings that take more time for all the interviewers to discuss -- candidates that do poorly can circuit-break.

Then there is scheduling! Is there physical space available for the candidate to interview? Can we get all the necessary interviewers? What if one or more of them can't make it (sick, etc.)? What if the candidate needs to reschedule? Time zones? Holidays?

Imagine Stripe has 100 recruiters (this is at least accurate within an order of magnitude). What does the back-of-the-napkin math look like for their maximum interviewing bandwidth?

Hiring is a really hard problem, even for well-equipped organizations. Even the best in the world do it badly sometimes. And the anecdote cases tend to shout the loudest. Maybe you had a typo on your resume. Maybe other candidates looked better. Maybe there is a nasty rumor about you. Maybe the recruiter was having a bad day. Or maybe you were just unlucky and arbitrarily cut.

[dangrover]

This happened to a friend too, got totally ghosted by Stripe.

This is generally how our industry works, though, which is that it's not worth it to go through loop for a job unless you were referred by someone on the inside.

[mgraczyk]

I interviewed in March, thought I did really well in the interviews, had great conversations with the hiring manager etc. After Covid hit they told me they were postponing hiring decisions and I never heard anything since. Sort of a weird way to manage things but I suppose the lockdowns have added quite a bit of chaos.

[polote]

Well I don't know for Stripe but subconsciously recruiters will always consider people who apply to be needy compared to people who are 'hunted' via Linkedin.

When you do that kind of blog posts, you try to improve the image of the company externally so that more people want to work there. It could help with more people applying but also increase the acceptance rate of the offers.

When you have a lot of people applying then you just cherry pick the best ones

[znull]

I'm surprised to hear so many in this thread had negative experiences. My experience as an applicant at Stripe was stellar from beginning to end, probably the most professional and well-executed interview process I've seen in my career. I can say that without bias because I ended up choosing another offer, but it was really difficult to turn down Stripe's after that.

[OliverGilan]

When did you go through this process? I imagine they get a lot more applications nowadays