
Inside Automattic's Remote Hiring Process - caiobegotti
http://davemart.in/2015/04/22/inside-automattics-remote-hiring-process
======
tyingq
Cutting to the chase, they seem to depend heavily on a month long trial
period, where the work is performed as a contract resource versus an employee,
at a $25/hour rate.

~~~
learc83
Why such a low rate? This seems like it would automatically disqualify any but
the most desperate job seekers.

~~~
jamesroseman
It should be noted that per the article, this is for a single project for
which the candidate has up to a month to complete. It's not a whole truth to
describe the $25/hr as compensation for a "full month's work".

This is also, per the article again, undertaken while one has a job.

Not playing sides, just adding context -- I have no affiliation with the
company.

~~~
jon-wood
I can see why companies want to do this sort of thing, since it gives them a
decent look at how people really do their job, but it almost entirely rules
out people with a life outside of work. I'm already working a more than full
time job, and Saturdays are entirely spent looking after our son so that my
wife can get some work done.

That leaves one full day off, and a few hours each evening, by which I've
likely been up since 5am, done a full day's work, got our son off to bed, and
cooked a meal. Even if I thought I was likely to produce anything worth
submitting, there's no way I want to give up the few hours of time my wife and
I get together as a couple for the sake of a glorified job interview.

I guess I could take some time off work and treat it as my day job for a week,
but then I've given up a decent chunk of my leave allowance in return for a
job interview, and the addition of some tax paperwork to my life because I've
been doing freelance work.

~~~
jcadam
Yea, I recently turned down an interview with a company that included a
similar 'trial' period as part of their hiring process.

From now on, any long, drawn-out interview process gets a 'pass' from me. I've
had my time wasted too many times (employer suddenly goes dark after the final
interview, no communication, no responses to any attempt at contact, etc). In
fact, I've given up on my most recent job search after experiencing two of
those in a row (need to save my vacation days for an actual vacation at some
point).

On second thought, I suppose if I were unemployed and desperate I might be
willing to put up with an onerous hiring process.

~~~
lazaroclapp
Or, conversely, if you had very little commitments outside of work, time to
regularly hack on side and sufficient interest in the job to say "ok, this
month, my side project is going to be for someone else". But the point remains
that this puts an uncommon expectation on applicants, one that maybe
Automattic can afford to select for, but that would potentially cause untold
problems if all employers hired this way.

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wheaties
That works for everyone except those who would have to declare to their
employer that they're working on the side, for whom they're working and on
what. Also, there are places in the US which allow an employer to claim any
ideas related to your occupation that occur both on the job and off it (i.e.
any code a developer writes, period.)

I'm assuming that type of thing is a no go and leave off a larger chunk of
candidates than most people would be willing to admit.

~~~
thisjustinm
I know there are places where that truly is a requirement to employment but
I've twice successfully negotiated (once at a startup, once at an ad agency)
those clauses out of my contract and I highly suggest others at least try to.

It resulted in a few awkward conversations with HR / legal but I stood my
ground and insisted that them owning my entire life was unfair and said I was
happy to have them own my output during work hours but nothing more. If they
don't come around I'd consider it a red flag.

~~~
crdoconnor
>I know there are places where that truly is a requirement to employment but
I've twice successfully negotiated (once at a startup, once at an ad agency)
those clauses out of my contract and I highly suggest others at least try to.

I don't do this any more. I realized after a couple of these jobs that this
level of explicit disrespect written into a contract pretty much tells you all
you need to know about working there before you've even joined.

Now I just pass politely and move on.

The pay at places that would try and ram that in there was never that great
anyway.

~~~
leesalminen
I've had contrasting experiences. The employment contract was boilerplate and
after a single awkward conversation it was removed.

I was happily employed At each company for years with an amicable "break up".

One company was <5 FT and another was >50 FT. Both in the US.

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jasode
_In that time I’ve reviewed a total of 251 resumes.

63 of those have gone on to an interview (25% of applications received)_

That statistic stuck out to me and it looks really high. When I've gone
through resumes for technical positions, less than 5% looked like something
we'd want to set up an interview for. I'm guessing places like Google and
Facebook interview less than 1% of their stacks of resumes. Is anyone else in
that 25% acceptance range for interviewing programming positions?

~~~
gnicholas
This is probably because the resumes that the writer receives have already
been pre-screened by the CEO.

I tend to think that this pre-screening likely means that they are
underinclusive—if anything—in moving candidates through the process. That is
probably OK for a company like Automattic, which gets tons of resumes. But for
a startup that has less name recognition, it could be more of a problem. Very
interest read, overall!

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ck2
Matt used to put in the wordpress.com page headers something like "if you are
looking at this you should apply"

But that was when he only had like 12 people working for him.

(edit: it's still there on every page served a decade later)

Look at just a handful of people in 2005
[http://web.archive.org/web/20051223160551/http://automattic....](http://web.archive.org/web/20051223160551/http://automattic.com/about/)

a dozen in 2006
[http://web.archive.org/web/20061225011025/http://automattic....](http://web.archive.org/web/20061225011025/http://automattic.com/about/)

to the insanity of today
[https://automattic.com/map/](https://automattic.com/map/)

and still Automattic is mostly a one-trick pony, it's 100% WordPress all the
way down. Even when Matt had a chance to have a second program with bbPress
and fix many of the nightmares with wordpress, he doubled-back and had them
rewrite it into an insanely bloated plugin for wordpress instead.

~~~
georgestephanis
Eh, bbPress used to be on BackPress, which was a relatively unmaintained fork
of the functional core of WordPress -- rather than having it run on
unmaintained software or duplicating effort by pulling code across, it was
changed to a plugin -- which is now much easier to set up and share users and
content with your main site. It was a good change.

Also, while WordPress.com is WordPress some of the way down, some of our other
stuff is anything but. We've been migrating to much more API-driven
functionality, and the current WordPress.com dashboard (codenamed Calypso) is
purely Javascript, based in React, and fully open source. You can download and
run it yourself if you like -- [https://github.com/Automattic/wp-
calypso](https://github.com/Automattic/wp-calypso)

And yes, as noted, Simperium/Simplenote, Cloudup, PollDaddy, Gravatar, others
-- these aren't WordPress.

~~~
ck2
bbPress originally was a standalone forum written by Matt over one Christmas
and greatly improved by a few other folks over a few years.

It was exponentially faster than wordpress and fixed a great deal of WP legacy
nightmare.

Then Matt ruined it by having them create backpress and porting it to that.

Then he destroyed it by making it into a wordpress plugin and just kept the
name even though it was completely different.

(I'm somewhat of a bbpress standalone "expert" perhaps the last one for what
little it is worth)

~~~
georgestephanis
Right, when you add functionality, speed may go down. Okay. It's a worthwhile
tradeoff, largely because very few websites are 'just a forum' anymore, and
forums aren't distinct parts of a website, they're fully integrated into the
design, and by having it be a plugin it can be more integrated throughout the
full site, sharing data and widgets and such back and forth.

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darylfritz
> Note: Replying to applicants takes top priority over every other
> responsibility I have.

Although I don't care for his example rejection letter, I like that they
actually respond to applicants whether they interview them or not. It's nice
to get feedback that your CV was actually read and reviewed by a human.

~~~
poopsintub
I applied and had to follow-up a month later to receive that notice. They
completely ignored me until I applied for a 'second' time.

------
Animats
Someone needs to program Watson to get itself hired via this system.

AI will have arrived when AI systems can get hired for remote jobs, competing
directly with humans.

~~~
nickpsecurity
That's great. Should try a chatterbot first as a Turing test for HR
department. If they think it's real, they're too robotic to work for.

------
nickpsecurity
Aside from trial payrate, the overall process seems really good. I'd like to
see experiments in this method in other companies. Maybe even in large
companies at the branch or store level with manager taking place of CEO in
pre-approvals.

The more interesting part, though, is questions to gain the most insight.
There are forums where experts in marketing, site optimization, etc detail the
results of their experiments to show what had real value and what didn't. They
become sets of tactics one can throw at new, but similar, problems. If it
doesn't exist already, hiring people should create such a site for coming up
with assessment questions and tactics. Curated by good moderators and industry
veterans if possible. Thoughts? Existing examples?

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vincentbarr
> At any point in time, Matt knows better than anyone else which roles in the
> company have the greatest need for additional resources.

I'm skeptical of this statement. It seems to rest on many unreliable
assumptions (e.g. at a busy company, it seems that a team lead may know better
than the CEO when his team needs additional resources to deliver).

Other than that, I love their approach to interviewing: casual, asynchronous
communication.

When people are actively seeking a new role, they may not be the best version
of themselves. They may be stressed, feeling frustrated, dealing with a life
event, and attempting to conduct a job search on the side. This gives such
candidates a better chance to be able to put a better foot forward IMO.

~~~
georgestephanis
> I'm skeptical of this statement. It seems to rest on many unreliable
> assumptions (e.g. at a busy company, it seems that a team lead may know
> better than the CEO when his team needs additional resources to deliver).

As a team lead at Automattic, pretty much all of us have regular chats with
Matt -- some on bi-weekly group hangouts, others casual private conversations
in Slack -- but we all communicate our personnel needs and concerns to him,
and sometimes the solution isn't "Hire a new person for X squad" \-- it may be
take someone looking for a team switch and shift them around internally.

Having actually experienced this in practice, Matt really is stellar at making
sure we have the people we need.

------
Killswitch
> Once I fire off a contract, I’ll post a comment on our internal hiring P2 to
> give HR a heads up that a trial contract will be incoming shortly.

> NOTE: P2 is a WordPress theme that makes threaded discussions incredibly
> simple. We use P2 for a large portion of our internal communication.

> I’ll then create a new private WordPress.com blog and invite the applicant
> to be an editor. This is where I’ll post the project brief. This is also
> where I’ll move the conversation for the remainder of the trial.

I understand WordPress is their business, but I feel that using WordPress for
internal chat and interview board is kind of weird.

~~~
georgestephanis
We also use Slack extensively, but P2s are a pretty solid choice for us (we
used to have the unofficial slogan "more p2s than people!") -- it makes
onboarding really easy, as the full history is easily searchable and you don't
need to forward emails to new people or the like. It also defaults
communication to open, which is super nice.

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josep2
I interviewed, made it to the paid project stage and got cut loose. Since then
I've contributed to a number of open source projects and built some great
things in production. Would now be a good time to apply again?

~~~
dplgk
yes

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raverbashing
Well, in essence:

Nothing there is difficult, people just need to think outside (the tiny) box
they live in. Especially HR drones

But still, the classic answer "not being a great fit" reeks of cynicism.

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funkysquid
"consider re-applying as your skills and contributions to open source projects
grow and expand."

It's not us - it's you. I'm surprised they feel the need to blame the
candidate, especially since I'd guess experience isn't always the issue.

~~~
voltagex_
I've got that kind of response from various places a number of times. You
can't take it personally.

