9y
Thanks for the review, and I'm very sorry you came away with such a negative impression of how we handled your interview process. I don't expect you to contact us again, but for your benefit as well as the benefit of others I wanted to try to be more transparent about our process in a way that will hopefully provide additional context about how we make decisions.
What the recruiter said to you about the way your application was classified was correct. It is a placeholder for the system that we use, which is provided by our parent company, WWT. It has no bearing on how you are evaluated in the process. We hire many people at a variety of levels of capability, and we do have a classification system of where we think they are that each interviewer uses to give us a sense of what we could expect from a hire and how to properly gauge compensation. However, we expect the interviewers to make that determination, not the recruiters; the interviewers don’t even see the system where your application was classified as “Mid-Level."
If you want to blame someone for the fact that we did not make you an offer, please blame me. I am the one who makes the final determination on how to proceed, based on all of the input we gather from our various sources. Sometimes with people we consider to be more entry-level, we may have an interview where everything goes well and all of the interviewers say this is someone we could bring on, but I still decide not to proceed. This is generally because we have already brought on several other entry-level developers before them, and we don’t want to find ourselves in a situation where we have too many people who need more time to learn. This could result in frustration by those people because we can only accommodate a certain number of entry-level developers on each project (and some projects can’t take on any at all due to their complexity), and we would then have some number of them sitting on the “bench” waiting for their opportunity that may be a long time coming. We’ve had this happen before, and it’s not a good result for anyone involved.
I'm guessing that given the way you describe the process, you were classified as an entry-level developer, and since we have already brought on several folks at that level (and expect to hire a few more our of our summer intern program), we decided to pass on your application for now. I know this may not be great to hear, that it was a matter of timing, and that if you had somehow gotten through the process earlier you could have made it in. I understand that, but we would still rather that you go out and get experience somewhere else first that better prepares you to work with us in the future than to have you join us and be frustrated and underutilized. In this case, you may rightfully never apply to work here again, and we may have just missed the chance to have a great employee, That’s sad, but it’s the risk we have chosen to take for the benefit of everyone.
At any rate, it’s very helpful to hear your side and have a chance to respond. We will work on ways to be more clear with our applicants in the future to try to prevent situations like yours. If you would like to talk more about what happened in your case, you are welcome to contact the recruiter you were working with and ask more questions, he’ll be glad to tell you what he can. I'm glad to hear at least that you got another offer; I hope things work out well for you at your new job.
