Review of Statwing

Note: This post was adapted from a review I wrote on Quora.

This is a review of Statwing. Statwing is magic. You give it CSVs, and it imbues you with a godlike power to analyze data without really knowing statistics.

My main job involves hiring engineers for startups, but if you’re reading my blog, you probably know that a big part of what I do involves writing data-driven posts about trends in technical recruiting — Lessons from a year’s worth of hiring data and What I learned from reading 8,000 recruiting messages in particular. I’d like to pull back the curtain a bit to talk about a tool that has made creating content like this so much easier.

Way before I wrote my first post, I was a devoted admirer of OKTrends. That blog, to me, was the platonic ideal of good writing: actual data rather than conjecture, complex ideas made simple, unexpected insights into the human condition, interactive graphs, and dick jokes. It was perfect.

Then, a few years ago, when I finally had enough data to do something interesting, I ran across a rather upsetting Quora answer to How important was blogging to OkCupid’s success? Particularly distressing was this part:

The posts each took 4-8 weeks of full-time work for [Christian Rudder] to write. Plus another 2-4 weeks of dedicated programming time from someone else on the team. It’s easy to look at an OkTrends post, with all its simple graphs and casual writing style and think someone just threw it together, but it probably had 50 serious revisions.

The project I was working on (later to become Lessons from a year’s worth of hiring data) was an attempt to figure out what attributes of engineers’ resumes mattered the most when it came to getting offers. Here’s a screenshot of what the raw data looked like:

At the time, drawing conclusions from this mass seemed somewhat intractable, and after reading the answer about OKTrends I was really quite discouraged. After all, the last time I had done any kind of meaningful stats work was in high school. I started brushing up on statistical significance, what kinds of data merited what kinds of significance tests, what p-values meant, and so on. In parallel, I started looking for a viable Excel plugin that would run these tests for me in a way that didn’t force me to do a lot of preprocessing and would give me outputs that I didn’t have to do additional work to make sense of. I also started working through a few R tutorials, hoping that doing things at the command prompt would be less painful than clicking around Excel plugins aimlessly. Limping through R filled me with a vague existential dread, so I stopped.

Then, I saw a post on Hacker News about something called Statwing that claimed to simplify statistical analysis. I took it for a spin, uploaded a CSV file like the one above, and saw that I could click on any 2 column names and ask Statwing to tell me if the relationship between them was significant. Statwing ended up being game-changing and made it possible for me to churn out content I was really proud of a lot faster — it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that Statwing saved me a few weeks’ worth of work for each post.

To get an idea of what it actually does, let’s say you have the spreadsheet above and want to figure out if having syntactic errors (typos, grammar, etc.) matters when it comes to getting an offer. To do that, all you have to do is click the 2 columns, like so:

Statwing is also very, very good at classifying data into types (categorical, numerical, etc) and figuring out what tests are appropriate for that type, including noting when your data has outliers and modifying the statistical test accordingly (as you can see, above, Statwing chose a ranked t-test over an unranked one). It also provides the usual slew of descriptive statistics (means, std devs), lovely histograms, and so on. Below, you can see some descriptive stats and a histogram of everyone’s GPAs:

One of my favorite features is the filter that lets you analyze just a subset of your data. Here, you can see me trying to figure out if having an EECS degree from a top school matters specifically in candidates that come from top companies:

I now find myself relying on Statwing as a sort of exobrain wired for statistics — instead of having to agonize over which parts of the data I should analyze, I can do ALL THE ANALYSIS without tradeoffs, lowering the barrier to finding delightful and unexpected outcomes. In some sense, Statwing almost makes things too easy, and it’s important to remind yourself that statistical significance or a strong correlation do not necessarily make for insights and that there could always be selection biases, a third variable controlling everything behind the scenes, Simpson’s paradox, or some other beastie.

Statwing is still a young product, so there are certainly some things missing. Inside of Statwing, you’ll find all sorts of lovely interactive graphs. But, for now, you can’t embed them in places and have to make your own (protip: use Plotly). And, because a lot of the data I work with has boolean outcomes, I wish Statwing had support for logistic regressions (though I hear that this feature is currently in the works, so perhaps it’ll be a thing by the time you read this).

At the end of the day, while using Statwing won’t turn you into Christian Rudder, it can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to run stats on your data and generally turn data analysis from something terrifying into a delightful, empowering experience. So, if you want to try your hand at doing some of your own OKTrends-style blogging, now you can, with less pain. Of course, figuring out what to write about, gathering the data, presenting it well, and, of course, making the requisite dick jokes is on you.

What I learned from reading 8,000 recruiting messages

If you’ve ever been involved in hiring software engineers, you know how frustrating the process can be. One of the toughest parts is getting candidates’ attention. In an effort to understand what makes engineers respond to some recruiting messages and not others, I teamed up with the fine folks at Hired.

Hired is a 2-year-old marketplace where engineers create profiles, and companies bid on those engineers, auction-style. A personal message accompanies every bid a company makes on an engineer, providing a rich data set comprised of thousands of candidates, hundreds of companies, and thousands of messages between them.

We analyzed a sample of about 8,000 recruiting messages, examining a number of factors including company prestige and size, engineers’ desired salaries, degree of message personalization, and whether messages came from recruiters or from engineers/founders themselves. Our goal was to determine which factors would be predictive of an engineer deciding to engage with a company (referred to in this post from now on as the introduction rate).

In the process, we discovered that:

  • despite what people claim, money is hugely important in determining which opportunities to pursue
  • message personalization is very important, but not all personalization is created equal
  • left to their own devices, engineers and founders sound just as spammy as recruiters in their attempts to woo new talent

Here’s a graph of all the factors we looked at and their relative importance in predicting introduction rates. These values come from running a logistic regression on the factors that were most statistically significant. The y-axis represents the standardized value of the coefficients in our regression. It’s on a scale of -1 to 1 and represents how heavily each of these factors weighed into predicting whether a candidate was interested in an opportunity. Bars that are below the x axis mean that that factor has a negative effect. Note that all the graphs in this post are interactive, so you can hover and do other fun things.

These findings require a bit of explanation, so below, I’ve drilled down into a few of the more interesting takeaways.

Money

Although Hired’s data provides a pretty good approximation for email recruiting, recruiting messages in the wild don’t generally come with a numerical offer value. I was curious about how money might change the game, so in addition to examining what aspects of the messaging itself are sticky, we also looked at the effects of setting expectations around compensation up front.

Of all the different factors that went into whether a candidate was interested in a job, money was by far the most significant. This particular metric refers to offer (bid) amount divided by a given engineer’s self-reported preferred salary. In other words, the more an offer exceeds some target the engineer has set, the more likely it is that he will respond affirmatively.

How much more likely? Assuming a preferred salary of $120,000, there’s a 45% introduction rate for interview requests right at that amount. Dropping the offer down to $110,000 results in a 34% intro rate. Upping it to $130,000 shoots the intro rate up to 54%. In other words, for an engineer with a $120,000 preferred salary, paying $10k more leads to a 20% higher chance of introduction, whereas paying $10k less leads to a 25% lower chance. To put it another way, even dropping an offer by $10,000 can be significantly detrimental. It’s also interesting to note the inflection point that occurs in the introduction rate is right where the offer amount is equal to an engineer’s preferred salary.

Despite the strong evidence that money talks when an engineer decides whether or not to engage with a company, we did see an interesting disparity in what engineers reported as important to them versus how they actually behaved. As you can see below, lack of interest in the company’s value proposition was twice as common as any other reason for not engaging with a company, including insufficient compensation. Of course, stronger compensation may make a candidate reconsider a given company’s value, and a company with greater value may be less likely to offer under market, so the effects aren’t independent.

Money is a convenient attribute to cite as important because it’s so easy to measure, but I’d be very surprised if it’s telling as much of the story as it appears to. In other words, before racing to the conclusion that engineers are driven primarily by greed, I would like to posit another idea. Figuring out what people want in a job is hard, given just someone’s work history and self-summary. Even in a world where a recruiter has perfect information about a candidate’s professional desires, framing a prospective employer’s offering in a succinct way that resonates with a candidate is still really difficult. The fact that so few messages on the platform were truly personal is indicative of that (more on that below). Money is an objective metric that encapsulates not only the financial strength of the business behind the offer, but also how much they need your skills. I believe that if there were a way to quantify “how interesting the projects you’ll be working on are to you”, “how great the people you’re working with will be”, the impact someone can make, and so on, those numbers would easily be as significant as cash.

Personalization

I’m a recruiter, and the nature of the beast is that I somewhat regularly send out cold emails. I used to be an engineer, however, so I viscerally despise recruiter spam. To prevent cognitive dissonance from melting my brain, I wanted to understand how much personalization is enough. To test how much personalization mattered when it came to introduction rates, I broke up the messages into 3 categories.

1. Not personal at all.
This message could have gone to anyone on the platform who met the criteria for a given position and still would have made sense. Example:

Impersonal message

2. Somewhat personal.

This message mentions something about you that’s easily identifiable and maybe ties it back to the company. Example:

somewhat_personal_1

and

somewhat_personal_2

3. Totally personal.

This message was clearly meant for you, you unique and beautiful snowflake. It might talk about your past work in depth or mention some projects that you would be interested in for very specific reasons or appeal to your specific sensibilities when talking about the company vision. We didn’t redact this particular sender’s info because this message is a shining beacon of all that is good and right in cold emails. Example:

personal

Despite the title of this post, reading almost 8,000 messages and scoring them for how personal they were was clearly intractable. Instead I wrote a little script that hashed messages with an edit distance of less than 60 characters (effectively covering recipient and sender first & last names) to the same bucket and surfaced messages that varied by more than this threshold amount. Those messages I scored manually.

First, here’s the distribution of personalization across all messages (n=7818):

As you can see, the vast majority of messages were effectively form letters, and it was especially surprising how few genuinely personal messages there were (a whopping 60 out of 7818 or ~0.8%).

So how much did personalization matter? For context, the average introduction rate on the entire platform was about 49.6%. Here’s the breakdown of introduction rate by personalization level:

What really struck me here was that adding a little bit of personalization didn’t appear to matter at all; in fact, the introduction rates for both impersonal and somewhat personal messages were virtually identical. In other words, the time it takes to drop in the moral equivalent of “Ohai I see you went to Local Good College, well so did our founders, go Local College Sports Team!” or just casually mentioning a candidate’s past employer or projects should probably be spent on something else. On the other hand, truly personal messages had a 73% introduction rate on the platform.

Unfortunately, all told, there were only 60 truly personal messages, probably because taking the time to write something unique is really hard. If you’re not an engineer yourself, knowing what to say can also be really difficult. To that end, I broke up each personalization tier by whether it came from a recruiter or from an engineer/founder. Perhaps not entirely surprising is that more impersonal messages came from recruiters than from engineers and founders (per capita).

What was surprising is the sheer volume of form-letter like messages that DID come from engineers and founders. In fact, over 85% of the messages that engineers and founders sent out were form letters; this is especially surprising given that those groups are the ones who are often on the receiving end of this kind of barrage.

Based on these findings, it seems like if you know enough about the subject matter, putting in a bit of effort and making messages truly personal is probably worth it. This is quite hard to do in the real world, where info about a candidate can be scattered all over the internets, if it’s even there at all. On a platform like Hired, however, where the candidate goes out of their way to write up a self-summary, talk about their interests, provide a resume, and more often than not, a GitHub profile, and where most of the people doing the hiring are also the ones working on the product and are in a position to talk about projects in a meaningful way, going personal is very likely worth the mental effort.

Who the message comes from

Personalization notwithstanding, I was also curious about whether who the message came from (recruiter, engineer, or founder) mattered when it came to introduction rate. To control for personalization, I focused on just the impersonal messages (n=6827). The breakdown of introduction rates was surprising:

Recruiter: 53%
Founder: 49%
Engineer: 47%

In other words, recruiter introduction rates were statistically significantly different from the others, and recruiter messages did better than messages from both engineers and founders. I was quite surprised by these results, so I did some sleuthing. First, let’s talk a bit about in what situations recruiters are likely to be the ones sending messages.

As a company grows, founders are less likely to be the ones doing recruiting. Below, you can see what portion of messages came from recruiters as a function of funding stage:

Saying that recruiters get more or less introductions overall isn’t truly meaningful because perhaps major corporations might have really strong brands, happen to have more recruiters doing messaging, and can potentially pay higher salaries. When I controlled for these things, the effect largely went away, and introduction rates were pretty much the same across the board, except for some outlier recruiter messaging. Here’s a good example.

recruiter_message

What made messages like this particularly compelling was beyond me, but then I looked at non-recruiter messages in the same batch.

nonrecruiter_message

So what’s the difference? I think the secret sauce is in the tone. The recruiter message sounds genuinely excited and what it lacks in technical depth, it makes up for in enthusiasm. In other words, this:

recruiter doge.jpg

The non-recruiter message, on the other hand, is a bit more dry, canned, and tentative. It also doesn’t do a good job of getting across the scope of the opportunity. Perhaps the takeaway here is that, if you can’t go personal, you should at least go enthusiastic. The last thing I want to encourage here is a barrage of doge recruiting, but if push comes to shove, it may be in your best interest to hire good recruiters who know how to hit the right notes. While this kind of recruiting isn’t a substitute for genuinely engaging with your audience, having experience sending out tons of messages is going to make you better at it than someone who is uncomfortable with reaching out to strangers and hasn’t done enough of it to overcome their gag reflex.

Conclusion

So, at the end of the day, what is it that makes recruiting messages more sticky? What drives engineers to be interested in certain opportunities and not others? What can you do now to get better at attracting engineers to your company?

  • If you can, go deeply personal with your outbound recruiting messages. Talk about what you’re working on, how that ties into what the candidate has already done, and why what you’re doing matters to them. Name dropping and shallow, faux personalization attempts simply don’t cut it.
  • Reachouts from founders aren’t intrinsically more valuable, unless they’re personal and targeted.
  • Writing really good recruiting messages is hard, and when engineers and founders put on their recruiting hats, they don’t necessarily fare better than recruiters themselves. Good recruiters, on the other hand, are worth a lot. People who do it professionally are going to be able to craft more engaging messaging than those who don’t.
  • Trying to underpay good people isn’t going to make you any friends. And, being transparent about salaries out of the gate, assuming those salaries are competitive, may be a good strategy for standing out.

Lastly, I’d like to throw out some acknowledgements. As always, Statwing made the statistical analysis required for this post a delight. If you liked the pretty, interactive graphs, check out Plotly.  A huge thank you to Elliot Kulakow of Hired for all his help with the SCIENCE and the pretties. And finally, thanks to everyone who proofread this behemoth.

Looking for a job yourself? Work with a recruiter who’s a former engineer and can actually understand what you’re looking for. Drop me a line at aline@alinelerner.com.

Hire from your user base

Recruiting great engineers is hard. You might guess that the hardest part is finding great people, but with the advent of LinkedIn, GitHub, and a number of search aggregators, it’s actually not too bad. The really hard part is finding great people who are likely to be interested in what you’re doing. To that end, wouldn’t it be great if you could reach out specifically to engineers who are already familiar with your product? It turns out that with a list of user emails and a few scripts, you can.

Companies with brands that are household names are doing this already — when they do cold reachouts, those reachouts are actually warm — chances are, anyone they contact will have used or heard of their product at some point. However, for companies who aren’t yet household names, cold reachouts are not that effective. Personalization of messages can help, sure, but execution can be difficult, either because the person writing the messages doesn’t have enough technical depth to do this right or because there’s not enough info available on the internets about the recipient to say anything meaningful.

So, how do you find engineers who are already familiar with your offering? All you need is a list of your users’ emails. If you don’t have that list, you’re probably doing it wrong. Also, if you’re a B2B company, you probably shouldn’t be poaching engineers from people who give you money, but I’ll leave questions of case-specific ethics as an exercise for the reader.

Once you have your user list, you can filter it to find the engineers by checking each email against GitHub to see if there’s a corresponding account. There are 2 ways to do this. One is free but is also information-poor, and slow. The other will cost you a few hundred bucks but will provide a lot more info about people and will be orders of magnitude faster. Choose your weapon.

To get all the code mentioned in this post, go to my GitHub.

Free but slow

One way to see if someone is an engineer is to ping GitHub directly. This is something you’re probably already doing anyway when you source, but doing it manually is slow and intractable on a large user list. Instead, here’s a Python script that pings GitHub to see if there are GitHub accounts associated with your users’ emails.

import json
import urllib
import urllib2
import base64

def call_github(email):
  """Calls GitHub with an email
  Returns a user's GitHub URL, if one exists.
  Otherwise returns None """
  url = 'https://api.github.com/search/users'
  values = {'q' : '{0} in:email type:user repos:>0'.format(email) }

  # TODO insert your credentials here or read them from a config file or whatever
  # First param is username, 2nd param is passwd
  # Without credentials, you'll be limited to 5 requests per minute
  auth_info = '{0}:{1}'.format('','')

  basic = base64.b64encode(auth_info)
  headers = { 'Authorization' : 'Basic ' + basic }
  params = urllib.urlencode(values)
  req = urllib2.Request('{0}?{1}'.format(url,params), headers=headers)
  response = json.loads(urllib2.urlopen(req).read())

  if response and response['total_count'] == 1:
    return response['items'][0]['html_url'] 
  else:
    return None 

I chose to only consider people who have at least one repo. You can be more liberal and look at everyone, but empirically profiles with 0 repos have been pretty useless. You can also filter further by limiting your search to people who have some number of followers, code in a certain language, etc. The full list of params is here. Note that although location is listed as a filter and can be good (i.e. if you can’t support remote workers and if it’s not H-1B season), the search is not as useful as it could be because location is a self-reported, optional field, and users who don’t specify location will not be included in the results.

One of the big downsides of this approach is contending with GitHub’s rate limit: 20 requests/min with credentials or 5 requests/min without. To put things in perspective, if you have 500,000 email addresses to go through, at 20 requests/minute, you’re looking at about 18 days for something like this to run. With that in mind, if you’re dealing with a long list of emails, you could potentially use a number of GitHub credentials and load balance requests across them. At the very least, I’d suggest spinning up an EC2 instance and running your script in a separate screen.

Not free but verbose and fast

Though the GitHub approach isn’t bad, it has 2 serious drawbacks. First, just a GitHub account may not be enough info about someone in and of itself. You’ll probably want to find the person’s LinkedIn to see where they work and how long they’ve been there, as well as their personal site/blog if one exists (and probably other stuff that comprises their web presence)1. Secondly, GitHub’s rate limit is pretty crippling, as you saw above.

If you don’t want to deal with either of these drawbacks and are down to shell out a bit of cash, Sourcing.io is pretty terrific. It’s a lightweight search aggregator that pulls in info about engineers from GitHub, Twitter, and a slew of other sources, provides merit scores based on GitHub activity and Twitter followings, and includes links to pretty much everything you’d want to know about a person inline (LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, personal website, etc). Unlike many of its competitors, it has supremely elegant UX and non-enterprise pricing. And, most importantly, it has a fantastic API that lets you search by email and, at least at the time of this posting, doesn’t have firm rate limits. As I mentioned, in addition to returning someone’s GitHub profile, the API will provide you with a bunch of other useful info if it exists. Here’s an example response to give you an idea of some of the fields that are available:

{
    "id":"f8d0595a-af59-41e9-b991-1da5c1e7a60d",
    "slug":"alex-maccaw",
    "name":"Alex MacCaw",
    "first_name":"Alex",
    "last_name":"MacCaw",
    "email":"info@eribium.org",
    "url":"http://alexmaccaw.com",
    "score":82.2,
    "headline":"Ruby developer at Sourcing",
    "bio":"",
    "educations":[],
    "twitter":"maccaw",
    "github":"maccman",
    "linkedin":"/pub/alex-maccaw/78/929/ab5",
    "facebook":null,
    "languages":[
        "Ruby",
        "JavaScript",
        "CoffeeScript"
    ],
    "frameworks":[
        "Rails",
        "Node",
        "OSX",
        "Cocoa",
        "iOS"
    ],
    "location":"San Francisco, CA, USA",
    "company_name":"Sourcing",
    ...
}

And here are teh codez for getting someone’s title, homepage, LinkedIn, GitHub, and Twitter from their email:

import json
import urllib2

def call_sourcingio(email):
  """Calls Sourcing.io with an email
  Returns a user's title and relevant URLs, if any exist.
  Otherwise returns None """
  try:
    url = 'https://api.sourcing.io/v1/people/email/{0}'

    # TODO insert your API key here
    key = ''

    request = urllib2.Request(url.format(email))
    request.add_header('Authorization', 'Bearer {0}'.format(key))
    response_object = urllib2.urlopen(request)
    response = json.loads(response_object.read())
  except urllib2.HTTPError, err:
    if err.code == 404:
      return None
    else:
      raise err

  return { 
  'headline': response['headline'], \
  'linkedin': 'https://www.linkedin.com/{0}'.format(response['linkedin']), \
  'github': 'https://github.com/{0}'.format(response['github']), \
  'twitter': 'https://twitter.com/{0}'.format(response['twitter']), \
  'url': response['url'] 
  }

Going through your result set with less pain

Once you have your result set, you have to go through all your users’ GitHub accounts to figure out who’s worth contacting and what to say to them. In most cases, this result set will be pretty small because most of your users probably won’t be engineers, so going through it by hand isn’t the worst thing in the world. That said, there are still a few things you can do to make your life easier.

I ended up writing a script that iterated through every user who had a GitHub account and printed them to the terminal as it went. Each time a new user came up, my script would open a new browser tab with their GitHub account ready to go (and potentially other URLs). It would also copy the current user’s email address to the clipboard so that if I decided to contact them, I’d have one less thing to do. Note that to use Pyperclip (the thing that handles copying to the clipboard), you have to download it first.

import json
import webbrowser
import pyperclip

def parse_potential_engineers(results_filename):
  """Goes through potential engineers one by one"""
  json_data = open(results_filename)
  results = json.load(json_data)
  json_data.close()

  for email in results:
    if results[email] == None:
      continue

    print email
    print results[email]

    webbrowser.open(results[email]['github']) # open GitHub page in a new browser window
    pyperclip.copy(email) # copy email address to clipboard
    sys.stdin.readline()

Don’t be awful

As a final word of caution, I’ll say this. If you’re the one using these scripts, you’re either an engineer or have been one at some point, and you know how shitty it is to be inundated with soulless recruiter spam. These tactics give you the opportunity to find out enough about the people you’ll be emailing to write something meaningful. Talk about their projects and how those projects relate to what your company is doing. Talk about why someone would want to work for your company beyond just stupid perks or how well-funded you are. And if you find engineers who have great blogs or GitHubs but no pedigree, give them a chance. In other words, please use your newfound powers for good.

EDIT: After some good discussion, I think it’s worth pointing out that while a GitHub account isn’t a bad signal for whether someone is an engineer, the absence of one most certainly is NOT a signal that someone is not an engineer, and it’s certainly not a signal that someone is not a great one. Several of the best engineers I know simply don’t have side projects or don’t throw their side projects’ source code out into the world or aren’t involved in the open source community. In other words, I would hate for someone to interpret this post as validation that a GitHub account is a good gating mechanism for job applicants.

 

1Tools like Rapportive and Connectifier can make your life easier when it comes to getting additional context about people, but Connectifier isn’t cheap, and Rapportive requires toggling Gmail. You can try using Rapportive programmatically — Jordan Wright did build a pretty great Python wrapper around Rapportive’s undocumented API, and I was trying to use it initially to get more info about users — but that thing gets throttled real fast-like.

Looking for a job yourself? Work with a recruiter who’s a former engineer and can actually understand what you’re looking for. Drop me a line at aline@alinelerner.com.

Review of Lever

Note: This post was adapted from a review I wrote on Quora.

This is a review of Lever, my favorite applicant tracking system (ATS).

ATSs suck

There are a lot of bad ATSs out there. I’ve tried out most of them at this point, and I’m consistently shocked at how they manage to stay in business. Their ability to survive is a testament to how terrible the recruiting software space is. Hiring software is really hard to build correctly because as soon as you get some traction, your big-name enterprise customers start demanding one-off customizations in exchange for fat wads of cash, and that’s hard to say no to. But as soon as you go down the perilous rabbit hole of building custom features, you lose out on usability for the rest of your customer base. As a result, building software can easily devolve into a game of checking as many feature boxes as possible. This is especially true in enterprise sales because the person who ultimately makes the purchasing decisions isn’t necessarily the same person who actually uses the product in question. An extreme example of this is Taleo, which purports to do everything from sourcing and managing the interview pipeline to onboarding candidates and reviewing employees. On paper, it checks all the boxes. It’s the perfect system. But in reality, the product pretty much fails at everything. So then instead of getting a system that does everything, you end up with a hefty subscription fee for a system that actually does nothing useful at all. By the time you realize this, they have all your data. Migration is a nightmare, so you just grin and bear it because they have you by the balls.

It’s absurd how companies that are otherwise really good at things continue to give money to bloated, clunky, borderline unusable products like Taleo and Jobvite.

Lever is awesome

Lever isn’t like that. You know how sometimes you use a product and just feel really good because you can tell it was made by people who get it? It’s so rare, and it’s even rarer in B2B/enterprise software space. With Lever, it’s immediately clear that UX was a priority from day one and that the people who built it took the time to understand the recruiting space rather than just frankensteining together features that sound good on paper. Everything about the Lever experience is deliberate. The product is moving toward a vision of recruiting that I really love — there’s no process for the sake of process, just a system that unobtrusively gives you access to all the info you need and lets you intuitively collaborate with anyone on your team who’s involved in hiring.

Below is some stuff about Lever I really like.

Amazing LinkedIn (and other site) integration
This feature is ridiculously useful. If you’re looking at someone’s LinkedIn profile, Lever’s browser extension can scrape the page and automatically create a corresponding entry in Lever. On top of that, if I’m looking at someone’s LinkedIn profile, and a candidate with the same name already exists in Lever, Lever alerts me and asks if they’re the same person.

This feature is fantastic for collaboration around sourcing, especially if a few people are sourcing within your organization. In the status quo, candidate information is probably going to be in some mix of different people’s emails, LinkedIn, StackOverflow, your current ATS, social media, and so on. This dispersal of information makes it difficult to effectively track who’s been reached out to. The low-friction candidate import features in Lever make it possible for all this info to live in one place, ultimately making it much easier to track response rates and prevent noob mistakes like contacting the same person multiple times without context.

In addition to LinkedIn, you can use the extension with pretty much any site (e.g. GitHub), though not all sites will have a preconfigured scraper.

Snapshot of state
When you log in, you can see exactly who’s in what part of the pipeline.

When you drill down into an individual candidate, you can see everything that’s happened until now inline, including all candidate communication, as well as internal notes and interview feedback. Moreover, any activity that goes with a candidate is always associated with an actor and a timestamp so that you can begin to ask and answer questions about your actual internal process and how it’s going. You’d think this is a given, but I haven’t seen any other product nail this aspect.

It’s not gross to use for non-recruiters
If you want someone else on your team to do something related to a candidate, you just @ them, and the conversation ends up in email. This is particularly awesome because it’s intuitive for people on your team who aren’t recruiters. In general, the feel of the product is about fitting in with Google Apps rather than making you do things in a bunch of places.

The Lever experience also tries to mirror how people would actually operate during hiring if the hiring process weren’t muddled with, well, process. The notion of filling out forms to submit feedback is absent, and though you can customize your process in any way that you want, the idea that you have to rank candidates on some scale or fill in ten different form fields about candidates’ aptitude isn’t something that’s taken for granted. The product doesn’t make any assumptions. All it does is remove the friction associated with storing information and having a bunch of different people interact with it, whether they’re used to doing hiring-related stuff or not.

Ability to snooze candidates and delay rejection emails
Lever has a few Boomerang-like features I really like. Let’s say you reach out to someone over email, and they respond to tell you that they’re stuck at their current gig for the next 6 months. There are a number of home-grown ways to deal with this in the status quo, but none of them are centralized. Lever actually lets you “snooze” candidates for some amount of time and resurface them when it’s time to make contact again. You even get a calendar invite reminder.

Another great feature is rejection email delay. I hate looking at a candidate, deciding he’s not a fit, and then having to remember to reject him later because it’s kind of terrible to reject someone 5 minutes after they apply. To avoid this, Lever lets you schedule rejections for some time in the future.

Things I don’t like

Lever isn’t without shortcomings. The product is extremely young. Bugs crop up from time to time. And there are lots of features that are missing. Here are some shortcomings I noticed.

Absence of tracking on outbound emails and job postings
It would be cool if you could track when candidates open emails and track click-through rate on job postings.

Inconsistent candidate duplication detection
As I mentioned above, Lever’s LinkedIn browser extension is very good at catching candidates you’re looking at in LinkedIn who might also exist in Lever. Unfortunately, if you enter candidates in manually, and you already have someone in the system with the same name, there isn’t any warning asking you if this is intentional.

Somewhat clunky setup process
When you initially set up Lever, you have to talk with someone on the team to get it configured for your company’s pipeline/interview process. Though this isn’t unpleasant, ideally there’d be a way to self-serve any configuration stuff through an admin site.

Stop giving money to shitty products

At the end of the day, I’d caution users to not get into the trap of comparing a product to its platonic ideal over comparing a product to the status quo. In terms of what’s out there at the moment, and given how great Lever is already, I have no idea why everyone wouldn’t use it. Yeah, migration is kind of a bitch (though Lever does its best to make it less painful), and yeah, it’s kind of risky to depend on a very young company that might not be around in a few years, but I see moving away from a terrible ATS to Lever as not only as a rational decision but as a proud rejection of clunky, enterprise systems that make users miserable. Sunk costs, fear, and complacency are not good reasons to make decisions. Awesomeness is.

Silicon Valley hiring is not a meritocracy

Note: This post was adapted from an answer I wrote on Quora.

EDIT: I’m working on something that I hope will make things better. Check out interviewing.io.

I’ve been hiring people in some capacity for the past 3 years. First, I was doing it as an engineer, then as an in-house recruiter, and now as the owner of my own technical recruiting firm. Until recently, I was quite sure that the startup world was as meritocratic as something could reasonably be.

I was wrong. Most hiring managers pay lip service to how they’re looking for strong CS fundamentals, passion, and great projects over pedigree, but in practice, the system breaks down. The sad truth is that if you don’t look great on paper and you’re applying to a startup that has a strong brand, unless you know someone in the company, the odds of you even getting an interview are very slim.

People focus on the technical interview itself as a potential source of unfairness in the hiring process, but I’m going to focus on something that I think is even more of a problem: just getting your foot in the door.

How the system breaks down

Let’s say you’re the technical co-founder of a new startup that has had some traction, and there’s a backlog of work piling up. Fortunately, you’ve raised enough money to hire a few engineers. Chances are, you’re the sole technical person, so you’re probably the one working on engineering recruiting full-time. This sucks a bit for you because it’s likely not what you think you’re best at, and it sucks a bit for the company because of opportunity cost. However, you’re probably doing a pretty good job because 1) you’re really good at selling the vision of the company because you’re so vested in it and 2) you have the technical chops and intuition to evaluate people based on some set of internal heuristics you’ve acquired through experience. Because of these heuristics, you’re probably going end up letting in people who seem smart even if they don’t look great on paper.

Eventually, things are going well, your startup gets some more funding, and you decide you want to go back to doing what you think is real work. You hire an in-house recruiter to deal with your hiring pipeline full-time.

This is where things start going south. Because recruiters are, generally speaking, not technical, instead of relying on some internal barometer for competence, they have to rely on quickly identifiable attributes that function as a proxy for aptitude. OK, you think, I’m going to give my recruiter(s) some guidelines about what good candidates look like. You might even create some kind of hiring spec to help them out. These hiring specs, whether a formal document or just a list of criteria, tend to focus on candidate attributes that maximize on odds of the candidate being good while minimizing on the specialized knowledge it takes to draw these conclusions. Examples of these attributes include:

  • CS degree from a top school
  • having worked at a top company
  • knowledge of specific languages/frameworks1
  • some number of years of experience

This system works… sort of. If your company has a pretty strong brand, you can afford a high incidence rate of false negatives because there will always be a revolving door of candidates. And while these criteria aren’t great, they clearly perform well enough to perpetuate their existence.

Unfortunately, this system creates a massive long tail of great engineers who are getting overlooked even in the face of the perceived eng labor shortage.

What about side projects?

Folk wisdom suggests that having a great portfolio of side projects can help get you in the door if you don’t look great on paper. I wish this were more true. However, unless your side project is high profile, easy for a layperson to understand, or built with the API of the company you’re applying to, it will probably get overlooked.

The problem is the huge variety of side projects, and how indistinguishable to appear to a non-technical recruiter. To such a person, a copy-and-pasted UI tutorial with a slight personal spin is the same thing as a feature-complete from-scratch JavaScript framework. Telling the difference between these kinds of projects is somewhat time-consuming for someone with a technical background and almost impossible for someone who’s never coded before. Therefore, while awesome side projects are a HUGE indicator of competence, if the people reading resumes can’t (either because of lack of domain-specific knowledge or because of time considerations) tell the difference between awesome and underwhelming, the signal gets lost in the noise.

To be clear, I am not discouraging building stuff. Building stuff on your own time is a great way to learn because you run into all sorts of non-deterministic challenges and gotchas that you wouldn’t have otherwise. Few things will better prepare you for the coding interviews that test if you know how the web works, have decent product sense, can design DB schema, and so on. It’s just that having built stuff is no guarantee of even getting your foot in the door.

What can we do about this?

Bemoaning that non-technical people are the first to filter candidates is silly because it’s not going to change. What can change, however, is how they do the filtering. There are a few things I can think of to fix this.

  • Figure out which attributes are predictors of success, going beyond low hanging fruit like pedigree. This is hard. I tried to do it, and Google’s done it. I wish more companies did this kind of thing and published their results.
  • Find other ways of evaluating candidates that are at least as cheap and effective as resume filtering but are actually more primary indicators of competence.
  • Establish a free/low-cost elite set of CS classes that anyone can get into but that most cannot complete, because of the classes’ difficulty and stringent grading. Build this into a brand strong enough for companies to trust. This way merit can effectively be tied to pedigree. This is also really hard. I know a number of companies are attacking this space, though, and I am excited to see how hiring will change in the next few years as a result.

My second suggestion is the one I will talk about here because it’s the least hard to implement and because pieces of it are already in place.

To avoid being judged on pedigree alone, in lieu of the traditional resume/cover letter, applicants who don’t look great on paper could apply to a specific company with 1) a coding challenge and 2) a writing sample.

Ideally the coding challenge could be scored quickly and automatically. It should also be an interesting problem that gives some insight into the company’s engineering culture and the kinds of problems they’re solving rather than a generic FizzBuzz. If the coding challenge is too textbook, a certain subset of smart people aren’t going to want to waste their time on it. Tools to automate coding evaluation already exist (e.g. InterviewStreet, Codility, and Hackermeter), but they’re not currently baked into the application process the right way. In the case of InterviewStreet and Codility, candidates have to already be in a given company’s pipeline to be able to work on the coding challenges, which means that anyone who looks bad on paper will be cut before getting to write a single line of code. In the case of Hackermeter, candidates code first and hope to be matched up with a company later. This approach has a lot of potential, but unless Hackermeter can establish themselves as the definitive startup application go-to, candidates will always be limited by Hackermeter’s client list. The ideal solution will probably be a more decentralized version of Hackermeter that companies can administer from their jobs page.

The idea for the writing sample came from the study I conducted. Of the many attributes I tested, the three that achieved statistical significance were grammatical mistakes, whether the candidate worked at a top company, and whether you could tell from their resume what they did at each of their previous positions. Two out of the three attributes, in other words, had to do with a candidate’s written communication skills.

For the writing sample, I am imagining something that isn’t a cover letter — people tend to make those pretty formulaic and don’t talk about anything too personal or interesting. Rather, it should be a concise description of something you worked on recently that you are excited to talk about, as explained to a non-technical audience. I think the non-technical audience aspect is critical because if you can break down complex concepts for a non-technical audience, you’re probably a good communicator and actually understand what you worked on. Moreover, recruiters could actually read this description and make valuable judgments about whether the writing is good and whether they understand what the person did. If recruiters can be empowered to make real judgments rather than acting as a human keyword matcher, they’d probably be a lot better at their jobs. In my experience, many recruiters are very smart, but their skills aren’t being used to their full potential.

The combination of a successfully completed coding challenge and an excellent writing sample should be powerful enough to get someone on the phone for a live coding round.

The problem of surfacing diamonds in the rough is hard, but I think these relatively small, realistic steps can go a long way toward helping find them and make eng hiring into the meritocracy that we all want it to be.

1This is definitely very relevant for specialized roles, but I see it a lot for full-stack generalist kinds of roles as well