017. Is your hiring process scaring away great candidates with this one annoying trend?

If you’ve been applying to startup jobs in the last few years, you may have noticed an uptick in the below type of questions being asked, alongside a resume and cover letter.

• Why do you want to work at [Company]? (We value this response highly - great answers are often 200-400 words.)
• What was most energizing about your last role? Most energy-sapping?
• What's a hot take or opinion you have about frontend frameworks/design trends in 2023/2024?

These are Application Questions – open-ended Qs at the very beginning of the hiring process, and years I started teaching companies to incorporate 1-3 short Qs – back then, Application Questions were quite rare!

Like many trends in the tech industry, Application Questions started out as a good thing – a way to allow candidates to break out of boring resumes and have the space to talk like an actual human. But it seems the intention has long been lost, and now the trend is for companies to ask WAY TOO many questions, and bad ones. Nowadays, there’s growing complaints from candidates, with some even refusing to apply to companies that use them.?

How did Application Questions mutate from a smart and useful tactic into… whatever mess it is now? And what should be their proper application? (pun not intended). That’s the topic of our post today because, welp, I feel partially responsible for this trend - having evangelized them in my startup recruiting training for years!?

For candidates, understanding the behind-the-scenes may help you get less frustrated in your job search process. And for companies, I hope this post will help you learn to employ this recruiting tactic more effectively, and be part of the solution instead of the problem.???????

Pulling back the curtain on Application Questions

Modern recruiting is a constant battle against volume and time. Sure, finding the hidden gems, and building relationships/winning over in-demand candidates over would be easy – if we had infinite time.?

In this job market, many roles get hundreds of applicants within hours of opening, and at the resume-screen stage, the goal is to figure out whether to invest more time with a candidate via the phone screen stage.

Not only do resumes tend to convey just the bare minimum of baseline qualifications, they’re also generally unhelpful in gauging the candidate’s communication and writing skills. After all, most people have their resumes proofread by friends or formal career coaches.

That’s why I found Application Questions so helpful when I had been in-the-trenches recruiting for startups. The key is, to keep it to 1-3 questions MAX, and to ask candidates what they already know. They shouldn’t have to spend more than 5-10 minutes MAX per question or do research. Examples:?

• What’s something you’re learning now? Or recently learned?
• What would your peers say are 2 of your strengths that make you stand out? How about 1 area of improvement??

(See this post for a further explanation on the reasoning behind these specific Qs.)

These days, I’m hiring for my own team, and a cursory glance at candidates’ answers reveals much about their communication skills and potential fit for my open roles. I need to be able to assess whether they can write well and get a broader sense of who they are. Plus, it makes sorting through the volume so much easier, when dozens/hundreds of candidates have similar qualifications.

Application Questions are where some candidates’ personality can truly shine beyond the resume. Maybe someone doesn’t have a great pedigree, but they speak to a deep self-awareness or creative potential. These kind of human answers – not bland resume bullet points – is actually what makes me excited to talk to someone in a Zoom call.?????

What we wanted vs. what we got

The nuance gets lost when something gets popular, and despite my best efforts to emphasize the parameters of Application Questions, I’m now seeing a troubling trend. I’ve seen companies request 8 application questions, each of which seems to expect a full-on essay that requires many hours of strategizing, researching, and drafting. Examples (yes, these are real):

• Provide a roadmap outline of a feature or product launch you owned from start to finish. (Too much work)

• Please provide an example of starting with a customer’s needs and working backward to build a solution. (Asking candidates for free labor)?
• From what you can learn online, write a proposed prospecting list of what you believe our ideal client profile is. (Same issue)
• In Transformers, the KV cache is a bottleneck during inference time. We once tried setting k=v in order to save 50% of the memory in the hopes performance remains unaffected. Think of this as self_attn(q=q, k=k, v=k) instead of self_attn(q=q, k=k, v=v). About an hour later, it became clear this was a pretty dumb idea for a theoretical reason (not only experimental). What could this theoretical reason have been? (WTF?)

So why would a company willingly use such a broken tactic? The answer is usually devastatingly simple: The person who set up the process likely doesn’t know what they are truly looking for, or how to manage the volume. This doesn’t have to be anyone’s “fault” – it’s just a common challenge in startups. For example, if it’s your first time hiring a marketer, how would you know what good/bad looks like? What kind of profiles would be a good fit? The Recruiter (or Founder) setting up these Application Questions is hoping the candidate will literally spell it out for them to make a decision in a snap.

(Another reason, though slightly less common, is a gatekeeping mindset, e.g. “We are a top talent organization and our bar is high, so we make hiring very hard because we only want “the best.” Spoiler: This is a bad idea.)

Using bad Application Questions like these will actually backfire on the company, because in-demand candidates – i.e. the candidates that you actually want to talk to – will simply drop out of your process. They have plenty of other options than to put up with unreasonable requests of their time. And you never know you lost them, because they never applied.

In recruiting, this is called a false-negative error, and this is particularly pernicious if you want to hire the best of the best. You might be filtering out the great in pursuit of making it a little easier to identify the good.?

This looks like a hiring that complains, “There just aren’t enough good candidates out there,” not realizing it’s their process that’s actively driving them away. Then, they end up hiring from a limited candidate pool that consists of people who were willing to put up with a poor process, due to lack of other options.?

So if your company truly needs to hire the best of the best, here’s your wakeup call! It’s time to embrace a growth mindset and recognize an opportunity to improve. Now’s a good moment to pull up your ATS or check with your recruiter – and if you have more than 2-3 Application Questions, scrap them. If your questions expect the applicants to think too hard, scrap them.

“Can I ask you a question…?”

In wrapping up, the way forward is different for job seekers and employers:

PSA / Pro-tips for job seekers?

I hope this explanation provides some clarity against the opaqueness of the job search. I know how exhausting it is, having to submit one application after another – on top of that, how irritating and discouraging it is when you run into poorly-designed processes, whether that’s a 7th-round of interviews, excessive homework assignments, and yes – Application Questions. That’s on the company, not you – and you can always drop out, instead of forcing yourself to commit hours on a bunch of essay questions that won’t even be read by anyone. You don’t have to let anyone beat you down, just move on.?

If you happen to be in a magnanimous mood, you could provide some feedback e.g., “Hey X team, I was excited about this [opportunity/mission/whatever], but when I went to apply, I saw the application seems to expect ~2 hours of upfront time commitment from candidates. So I’ve decided to stop my attempt here, as this can be an indicator that the company doesn’t have strong enough org/hiring processes yet, but I wanted to provide the feedback in case you’re interested in improving your candidate experience. [And drop the link to this post!]” You’ll be giving them a gift.?

For companies??

Even as they’re getting widely misused, you should still implement Application Questions into your process – just keep in mind the purpose and guidelines from above. Do not put the burden of responsibility of teaching you how to hire onto candidates.?

There are countless alternative strategies to increase the quality of your pipeline and hiring conversion – while maintaining a high bar for talent and great candidate experience. Every company is different, and so everyone’s advantages/effective strategies will be different. If you want ideas, that’s what the Workflow team and I are here for – let’s talk ??

Yes – I’m hiring! If you’re a mission-driven startup recruiter ready for your next challenge, I’d love to connect!??

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Jennifer Kim is the CEO/Founder of Workflow, an education and consulting company that trains the next generation of startup leaders on all things Recruiting, People Ops, and DEI. Through its flagship program, the HireEd Accelerator, Jen and her team have taught hundreds of startup leaders to make hiring a competitive advantage. Previously, Jen was Head of People at Lever and advised dozens of top startups. She is known for her hot takes on tech industry and culture as @jenistyping.

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