How a Tiny Startup Beat the Secretary Problem and Hired 5 Stars from 300 Applicants
Side-stepping the Secretary Problem, unwittingly
Aditya Athalye recounts how he and a colleague hired five QA engineers at a Clojure startup by breaking the cardinal rule of the Secretary Problem: they allowed re-applications and offered opt-in learning support. Out of 300 applicants, all five became tenured staff, and the approach even indirectly landed a kickass engineer. Athalye argues that non-zero-sum hiring should be the default, not the exception.
We got accustomed to receiving 'Thank You' emails in response to 'Regret' emails we sent out after people had passed through three of our four to five step filter pipeline.
- robto
This approach is really appealing to me, and it's similar to how I got my start as a software developer. I had applied for a job and been rejected, but they invited me to apply again in six months. And indeed, in six months I had learned enough and grown enough in to go from a marginal candidate to a good one. I was motivated to do it because it was a career change that had a lot of upside, and knowing that the door was potentially open encouraged me to persist.
- hungryhobbit
I don't understand the article. LOTS of patting himself on the back and saying how great his approach was ... and almost zero explanation as to how his approach was actually different from any other tech company's.
I swear, I read the article ... but everything he described seemed the same or basically the same as every other employer. Except the "free classes" part: those were cool, but they seemed more like a footnote than the point of the story.
- jawilson2
What are SLA and ATS?