[starship]

"Though I averaged two interviews a day, we had only grown the team by three-four engineers each year."

Wait a second, he was interviewing 100X more people than he was hiring??? Does that seem a little extreme to anyone, or is it just me?

[ghshephard]

What he was doing was phone screening two people a day. Actual interviews were probably 1/20th that - so, approximately 400 Resumes = 100 Screens = 20 in person Interviews = 4 Hires. Which is a reasonable average over a year.

[edit] My strategy has always been for posted positions that I'm actually acting as the recruiter for, is to do the initial resume screen myself (I can triage a resume in 1 minute for a position that I know about), and then hand over the screening to a reasonably competent (but unemployed) person in that area, ideally with a set of standard questions that the two of us have come up with together.

I.E. Hire a Unix Sysadmin to screen systems administrators, and give them a list of questions like, "what is an inode, what is the difference between a process and thread, how would you sum up the total size of files in a directory, what's your favor unix based operating system and why, tell me about the unix systems you've worked on?" - This usually takes 30 minutes/person.

The interviews with around 5 people takes about 45 minutes per interviewer (30 minutes to 1 hour) - so, about 4 hours per candidates.

So - 400 Resumes (6 1/2 hours) = 100 Screens (50 Hours) = 20 interviews (80 hours) = 4 Hires.

Total investment per hire is about 136.5/4 = 35 hours. Only 7 hours/hire needing to be done by the hiring manager. The screening is the easiest stuff to be outsourced.

Of course, you can dodge 90% of this if you just get great internal references (removing the need for screening, filtering) - which is why internal references are so highly valued by companies. (That, and they don't have to pay $20K-$30K to an external recruiter)

[modoc]

Depends on your pool. Small companies need to be absolutely brutal about only hiring the best people, with the best skills, and the best fit for the company. I went to a local university career fair looking for two different junior level folks. I took back over 40 resumes, made 3 follow-up phone screens, and 0 hires. 500 real interviews for 4 hires is a bit much, but in general I pass on people all the time.

[starship]

I've done the same (50 resumes for two positions, phone interviews with 15-20, follow-up in-person interviews with 4). That's 10X interviews. But 100X? Assuming anyone he hires goes through multiple follow-up interviews, I don't see what information he's getting from these interviews that couldn't be handled by a subordinate or by email. Evaluating someone for "fit" is impossible in a short interview like that.

[arupchak]

That's not uncommon, assuming that an initial phone screen counts as an interview.

I have had stretches where it took me talking to ~80 candidates between initial phone screens, random chats, etc over two months before finding someone to hire.

And to be clear, I am not claiming that I found the 'best' person out of 80 people. 'Best' is a very custom definition depending on the environment, role, and fit.

[zeroonetwothree]

Each candidate probably had more than one interview. 100 interviews for each hire is not all that high, especially if you don't have a lot of intern conversion hires (that's why larger companies can hire more efficiently).

[l3amm]

Depending on how you define interview. In my experience a rough funnel of 100 people (random people through a job board, not referrals) -> 20 phone screens -> 5-10 actual interviews. Generally at large organizations in the Valley a rate of 10 on campus interviews to one offer is considered inefficient (shoot for ~5 from an efficiency perspective). Too many in person interviews generally suggests a weak filter in an earlier step (you can learn quite a bit from a phone screen, for instance).

[joshu]

100 sounds roughly correct to me. There are a lot of awful developers out there.

[lucianof]

*she

[hirehand]

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