What is your overall impression of the hiring process in your chosen industry? Is it efficient? Is it effective? Is it ethical?
I’ve been very fortunate to have a primarily positive experience with the hiring process. My first two internships in high school materialized through connections: the first through a friend’s mom who happened to be the CEO of a company at Innovation Park, and the second through a professional connection I made during my first internship. While these internships were by no means my dream jobs, they were at least concrete real-world experiences and resume boosters.
In college, I received all of my internships through the normal application process. Because so much worth and value is attached to these internships (at least among my CS friends), it was a pretty disheartening experience to apply to 30+ internships and only receive 8 interviews and 3 official offers.1 It made me wonder why I was good enough for some companies and not others. Was my technical skillset just not a ‘good fit’, as all the rejection emails said? Or was I lacking the core soft skills needed to sell myself? Or worse did I simply apply at the wrong time and catch the recruiter on a bad day? Receiving a solid offer in the late Fall alleviated some of these pressures, since I knew at least one company wanted me.
Because of this over-dependence (and many other reasons), many people claim that the entire hiring process is broken. I can attest that while I was inside the process it certainly felt like everything was broken. However after talking with the HR team at Akuna (where I worked this summer) and seeing their struggles to attract and retain high-quality talent in today’s increasingly mobile modern job market, I realized that there just isn’t one fix-all solution to the problem. The job market is all about striking a deal between worker and company that is agreeable to both parties, who both have their own (often conflicting) self-interests to attend to. From this, I’ve come to believe that you can learn a great deal about a company by their approach to hiring: if they utilize super difficult technical coding interview questions, they probably highly value technical skills or raw talent. But if they focus more on behavioral interviews, they probably value soft skills more highly. At Akuna, the interview process consisted of talking through a series of theoretical network design questions, where I came up with and talked through a possible design, including a justification for my decisions. After working at Akuna this summer, this focus on design-centric problem solving reflects their day-to-day work culture. The hiring process is often your first glimpse into a company’s values and expectations and should be thought of as such, instead of a mundane and superfluous mental exercise.
As we talked about in class, many different factors come into play during the interview process. From my experience, connections can be a great asset in expediting the whole process or creating new opportunities out of thin air,2 but are not strictly always strictly necessary. In line with what I said earlier, I believe the exact rating of what’s important depends on the company and what they value most. Part of the process is finding out what you value, and finding companies that align with your convictions. This starts even before the interview and continues for as long as you work for them. Part of the reason I like my job at Akuna so much is that we both have the same underlying desire to engineer clean, modern software, even if it takes extra time to get it right.
1It was after this experience that I entered into what I now call my 'mid-college crisis' last spring, but this crisis may or may not have been directly related to my internship search process...
2My high school internships developed in this manner. I never actually 'applied' for a position, I just kinda showed up and they gave me various work to do. This atmosphere was definitely reflective of their status as a new small startup. I can't imagine this happening at Google.