[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.

[borroka]

My "genius" comment above was a bit salty and over the top. But, I had so many bad experiences with recruiters (of a company, independent) that is quite difficult at this point for me to take them seriously or offer any (professional, I am not talking about human of course) respect beyond what I grant to anyone, from poor to rich companies, from guilty to innocent managers, from stripes to stars. I understand it is the nature of the job, but also that the nature of jobs tends to attract certain people.

For example, the most common behavior with these recruiting companies (and I am fully employed and paid very well) is that they take 30 minutes of my time with the usual general questions, then they make me chat with some sort of hiring manager of the target company, then they send an email "I will let you know in a few days", and they never write back. I send an email saying "so?" and I never get an answer. Then, I find out they moved into real estate. Ten, 15 times over a few years (why I continued answering? The hiring companies were quite interesting, one in Vegas, some in the East Coast where I don't have much of a network, they could, with emphasis on the conditional tense, be useful).

We can say that they are just a little piece of a bad process, or that it is the hiring manager/company fault, or "yes, but you did not have to deal with certain rude candidates" (and I have seen plenty of those rude candidates, there I certainly offer my solidarity). And if we go on with the circumnavigation of people, we find a justification for any sort of less-than-good behavior. If telling lies is part and parcel of one's job, they (recruiters/hiring managers/C-level) are still liars, they don't get a pass in my book.

It sounds like you found a decent recruiter and it is quite telling that a recruiter re-initiating a conversation and apologizing, things I happen to do also in my job, is now an "off-the-charts" EQ genius. That's the 101 for anyone with a modicum of professionalism. I am sure there are great recruiters around like there are plenty of needles in haystacks.

[webmaven]

> It sounds like you found a decent recruiter and it is quite telling that a recruiter re-initiating a conversation and apologizing, things I happen to do also in my job, is now an "off-the-charts" EQ genius. That's the 101 for anyone with a modicum of professionalism. I am sure there are great recruiters around like there are plenty of needles in haystacks.

Ah, sorry about that, I didn't mean to conflate the two quite so directly. I also didn't make it clear that I was ghosted by the hiring manager after the recruiter handed me off to them. The recruiter wasn't supposed to even be involved from that point forward, but they followed up anyway. However, you can ignore the anecdote as an unnecessary distraction if you like.

Anyway, sure, recruiters get a bad rap, in the same way as used-car salespeople do. I wasn't really arguing that the reputation the profession has is entirely undeserved. I was just saying that good and even great recruiters do actually exist. For many of the working-environment reasons you've mentioned, they often don't stay in the role of recruiting ICs, or even for relatively senior roles. They have better opportunities in recruiting-adjacent fields like executive search services, life-coaching, and so on.

[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.

[borroka]

Yes, it is not, but it should be. And not "the priority" of the organization, which is, as you said, making money, but one of the priorities. In fact, using the double KPI method, "finding great candidates and treating all with basic respect" should be the guiding light/mantra/KPI of any recruiting team.

"Scaling recruiting is hard". Sure, plenty of things are hard when scaling, but calling back candidates after multiple rounds of interviews (just to highlight one common complaint) is not. That is a cultural problem.