Did they ghost you?

Just over a year later I received an email from another in-house recruiter at Roku, thanking me for my application but regretting that they wouldn't be going forward with it (or some such corporate-speak). Which was kind of surprising.

I did a few searches and discovered that the date they went quiet roughly coincided with a sizeable round of redundancies. I also looked up the new recruiter and found that they were new to the company and quite junior. So, presumably, their first task had been to clear-up the backlog. That year was by far the longest I've ever waited for a response to a job application.

A month later another recruiter from the company reaches out and explains the recruiter I was talking to was let go that day. Told me in the system that I was approved to hire, but unfortunately along with the layoff came a 6 month hiring freeze for engineering.

4 years later, a recruiter messaged me saying that they found my name as a potential candidate and knew that I declined the offer, back in 2020, so they wanted to know if I wanted to re-interview. I told the recruiter I never rejected anything. She looked into it and apparently it was your exact same situation: recruiter left that day, a bunch of candidates got marked as "declined" shortly after.

This completely broke the interview pipeline, and in the disorder no one realised. The company got some bad reviews in that period for just stopping a bunch of processes mid-way.

I got the sense it was some internal political drama but maybe the recruiter disappeared… that honestly didn’t occur to me, and up until that point it was a pretty awesome and interesting process.

And the emails you sent didn't bounce after that?

This has happened to be more than once. At various points in time Microsoft has used external vendors for its recruiting/hiring pipeline (which, IMHO, is a bad idea, you want people with a vested interest in the company doing all of the recruiting and hiring...).

So yeah, working with a recruiter, wait awhile, nothing, message "oh sorry she left, but the company wants to go forward."

Ugh.

It wasn't any better when I was a hiring manager at Microsoft trying to hire people. :(

Flip side of this is I stopped giving honest feedback after I interviewed a candidate who, on paper, was a stretch for the role. They generally interviewed well but had obvious gaps in their knowledge from being self taught. At the end of the interview they asked me if I had any recommendations for what they could study up on, I emailed some suggested reading (popular tech blogs, probably something by Petzold as well) and got an angry letter back accusing me of being sexist and some other stuff.

I'm pretty good at what I do and I'm not weird. All the conversations seemed to go well so I have no idea what happened.

The one used in "A public record of professional silence." specifically

I think Wellfound (f/k/a AngelList) is doing something similar.

The jobs advertised on there are real...

I'd been on the job market four months. Every day I did the rounds: Levels, Wellfound, YC/jobs, Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn.

It is what it is, as a crappy jobs market.

Wellfound? I didn't ever hear from anything from their job ads.I'm pretty certain that whatever Wellfound/AngelList was, it has become a company that just markets their resume writing services, resume review services, all sorts of other services that draw in your money somehow.

Why do I say that?

120+ applications on Wellfound since then. Crickets. Absolutely nothing.

One day I got an email, "Your profile has been viewed!". Weird, never seen an email like that from Wellfound. Indeed, "You have 1 profile view in the last 90 days".

Huh. 120+ applications, 120+ times me answering filling out Wellfound's content questions on "why you would be a good fit for this role", "tell us about x and y and z", no interviews, no contact, only ONE company has ever even viewed my profile (and for what it's worth, it's not a company that has any positions open).

Well, maybe my answers suck, you say. Maybe my resume isn't as impressive as I think it is.

But similar answers and the same resume get me fairly steady hits on every other site I mentioned, I've got to multiple final rounds, I've been explicitly told I was hirable, I was just the number two, I was "in the top three".

And to be clear, many of the companies I see on WF are advertising on other sites too.

My suspicion? WF DOES take job listings, but they also harvest them from other sites - the job is real, but there's no-one from the employer reviewing the applications to their "phantom" job at Wellfound... and meanwhile all people like me are doing is providing content for WF to harvest and train models for their real business model: AI-driven resume writing and review service and other products.

My AI video interview? Viewed... zero times.

Huh.

On the other hand, it's hard to forget when I went 5 stages into an interview, then did 3 follow ups: 3 days later, a week after that, then 2 weeks after that. I got a response each time pretty quickly saying "yeah, your're still in consideration", and then nothing. Not even a generic rejection. I just cut my losses because if they can give weekly interviews for a month but need more than a month to consider me, it's not happening.

working as a Redteamer/Purpleteamer, I read this as you physically planting a (listening) bug in the HR office to get that info :D

Say for example, a company posts 10 job openings, fills 9 of them, but for the tenth, they don’t receive good candidates initially, the hiring manager has to go back to their leadership and negotiate a higher salary for the position, it goes through HR, they update the PD, they do a round of interviews with two good candidates, but then the hiring manager has a death in the family and takes leave, one candidate accepts a different position in that time, and then when presented with the offer, the second candidate backs out because they were expecting a salary at the higher end of the range in the PD despite having limited experience, then after 6 months and the team prepping for another interview round, the financial situation has changed and executive leadership freezes all hiring indefinitely and the job gets taken down.

Has the company made good in this case? If not, and this was an example of fraud, what is the mechanism for detecting it as such? Are there law enforcement officers actively scrubbing for possible violations? How much does that cost? Is it worth pulling a prosecuting attorney from a civil rights lawsuit over?

Or, if the company has made good, what compliance could a company do to prove that they haven’t committed fraud? How many man hours do we expect the company to spend on that compliance?

I don’t ask these questions just to poke holes, I think there would be a lot of benefits to the job market for both employers and employees if everyone applying to a job could be confident that the position was open. But I am skeptical that anyone has done a serious cost benefit analysis to determine if the juice is worth the squeeze.

Presumably the Yucca plant in the corner put on a spurt of growth after your visit?

I got one of those a few years ago, from a prominent tech startup CEO (non-YC).

The funniest thing is that I'm pretty sure it's a person who has some kind of recurring episodes of anonymously attacking HN infrastructure and dang.

Who then also attacked me on HN (and elsewhere, it looks like), while seeming to reference that earlier rejection, and emphasizing how much they thought I was unworthy.

> That means there's no record of you ever getting denied for the position.

Or record held in the mind, even years later, of someone who sometimes acts out maliciously.

Apparently, it's a real thing.

If you get a shitty rejection letter, you should see it as a lucky escape. A rejection burns both your bridge and theirs.

If it’s especially shitty, there is nothing stopping you publishing it as a signal to others that a recruiter or employer is wasting people's time.

Especially if you just did a coding exercise that looks suspiciously like code they might put a value on.

And I actually prefer nothing to unsolicited feedback. I don't give a shit about what someone who can't even spell principal thinks about me.