When an almost identical interview questionnaire was posted a few months ago, I was hoping it was some sort of anomaly, or that Canonical would learn from the feedback and alter it. To see something so similar (for a different role) two months later makes it seem far more likely that they have one of the worst hiring pipeline processes I have ever seen.
I’m good at these sorts of written/verbal assessments, and even my eyes start to glaze over just reading the list of questions, let alone thinking about how to answer them. A quality response to this sort of questionnaire would take at least an hour and that’s before you even get into the actual interview process or hear a salary range.
And as dumb as questions about high school and college are for professional job interviews (unless you are hiring straight from undergrad, I just don’t see how this is relevant. And even for college recruits, I have a lot of problems with this approach.), it would be one thing if I thought the recruiter or hiring manager was actually going to read each response from each candidate. But I cannot imagine they will.
For a company that has openly expressed its struggle to hire, it’s stunning to see them double-down on such a terrible recruitment process.
The people who you want for this job probably have better things to do than waste an hour or more answering an overly-long questionnaire before they even find out the salary range.
I applied for positions there late last year. I appreciated that they were upfront about the steps of their process. It made it a relatively quick decision to not continue.
Honestly, it would take me a few hours too. I just wanted to undercount the projected time, in the event there were “I could do this in X minutes” responses. But yes, it would take me a few hours to do this too.
I once interviewed at Northern Trust for a programmer role. Interview was 2 hours long divided into 4 - 30 minute segments each with different interviewers.
None of the interviewers asked anything about tech. Absolutely nothing. All of the questions were in the style of “if you were a (blank), what type of (blank) would you be?”. And each interviewer asked the same questions in the same order working off the same interview sheet. By the third 30min interview I was concerned that I was stuck in some sort of time paradox. By the fourth 30min interview I just wanted to get out of there.
They ended up offering me the position but I declined. Don’t know what happened but they felt very disorganized to me.
I worked with Northern Trust tangentially for a few years (I left my role in early 2010s) in a quasi consulting role (it was actually a joint venture where we did the software, they ran it sort of thing). NT was hands down the most painfully bureaucratic company I've had the displeasure of working with. Something simple like a DNS change for a server was a 6-8 week turnaround. On top of that, they weren't exactly the best at following instructions, either, so it was often multiples of these multi month cycles to get even the smallest thing done.
Very frustrating. You likely dodged a huge bullet by declining the offer.
I noticed this last year when I applied for a software engineering job. For that position, the process is:
- Initial screening (done)
- Personal essay (this stage)
- Standardized aptitude and personality tests
- Meet and greet with an engineer
- General interview(s)
- Recruitment screen
- Technical assessment
- Role-specific interview(s)
- Hiring manager interview
- Senior leadership interview
I highly doubt the initial screening is done by a human. So they want the essays and personality tests done before you speak to a human at the company, and they are probably not even on the team you're applying for. If you're unlucky, every human involved in the process will be on a different team until you get to the hiring manager interview, which is at the very end.
Not only this but on Glassdoor I found dozens of people saying that they ghost you before the hiring manager interview so you could spend tens of hours interviewing and never speak to anyone on the team.
Wait, they have SEVEN distinct interviews? Meet/greet, general, tech assessment, recruiter, role, manager, senior leader? Holy shit. Wow. That’s insane. What a waste of everybody’s time.
At my current job, I did about the same number of interviews. Not counting an initial 15 minute screening call, I had a 30 minute phone call with two of the engineers on the team, a technical panel interview, and 3 exec interviews. So that's six interviews. I would be working with all of these people directly and I wanted to avoid "broken stair" coworkers I have had in the past. While I found this valuable, I didn't feel the same way about the Canonical process and refused to proceed. Each stage of an interview process needs to provide value to both sides. As a candidate, a personality test or an essay does not help me at all except to raise a red flag. And speaking to many people who I might never speak to again is useless to me.
So many tech companies are bloating the interview process with seven or more interviews. For my current role I did several interviews and the record during my most recent cycle was ten IIRC. The particularly annoying part is that most of the time the rounds are almost complete duplicates of each other just with a different person.
edit: I just checked my calendar and I had nine meetings/interviews with Cruise before they rejected me.
These are almost always extremely discriminatory when it comes to neurodiverse populations and I'm saddened that Canonical uses the equivalent of phrenology in its hiring process.
I mean, there are plenty of bad tests out there (Meyers Briggs etc.), but good aptitude and personality tests might well be the best (objective, reliable, valid...) tests of aptitude and personality there are, no?
To be clear - every application resume is screened by one of my colleagues or me, and every written interview is read by at least one of us, usually two.
I personally screened 40,000 resumes last year, and hired 100+ people into the company. It has been very exciting to see how we are lifting our confidence and aspirations as a result.
Do you think it's normal for the CEO of a 800+ employees company to be reviewing resumes? It sounds like you don't trust the people you hired to do that job, and decided to do the job yourself...
Also, 40,000 resumes screened means an average of more than 100 resumes per day, every day of the year. Again, do you think it's normal for the CEO of a big company to be spending their time doing this?
And finally, don't you think the whole process is biased by the fact that you review the resumes? Let's say you personally approve a resume, don't you think the next people in the company down the line will be in a position of "Well, if the CEO is pushing for this candidate, I better not reject this candidate!". In which case, no matter the numbers of steps to filter out, it's a failure.
That of course will vary based on role, experience and location. We have hired people from 50+ countries which is remarkable for a company of 800. We tend not to hire in the most expensive locations because we get fantastic talent who live in less polluted, congested and occasionally self-important environments.
We do pay competitively; we have hired people out of FAANGs, and we constantly benchmark pay against our market data around the world. True remote work is worth an extra 20%, and quality of colleagues and focus is priceless. We also rigorously assess pay raises for gender equity.
* Who was the person coming up with the interview questions?
That would be me, mostly. I generally would have reviewed them, though occasionally some slip by.
Some of the role-specific questions would be from the hiring lead on the role, who is usually a senior person in that part of the business who has been through an onboarding process run by our global head of HR and me, and who handles applications for multiple jobs. These hiring leads are less susceptible to bias, and more experienced, than first-level managers, and it frees the first-level managers to focus on their teams and get good at being managers.
* What is that person's psychological profile?
If you are asking about my psychometric profile, I scored 94 on the test we use. If you really mean psychological profile, I don't know. I've been called all sorts of things over the years, but not by professionals ;)
* What is that person's biggest achievement since high school?
That would depend on what one values.
As a student I helped a small newspaper in Cape Town be one of the first in the world to be online. Started a company, Thawte, that helped lots of businesses outside the US get certificates for secure trading. Sold that well, and then trained to join a flight crew on Soyuz to the ISS. Ran several experiments in space, including the first stem cell experiments, which helped shape stem cell therapy research here on earth. Started a foundation which has funded tens of social change leaders working in health, digital, civil society and environmental areas. Started Ubuntu to democratise access to open source, made some mistakes but stuck with it to help Canonical survive and now thrive. Learned not to yell at people, learned to hire, hired hundreds of people. I also have helped start some botanical gardens because I like them, and am active in helping a small country chart a course for themselves that has made a measurable difference to the lives of that population. What, I wonder, do you value?
* Who are the people working in the team?
They are generally outstanding technically and socially, from all over the world, with a strong sense of shared mission to help open source be easier and cheaper to consume, personally and professionally, for companies and individuals.
* What are those people's psychological profile?
They vary greatly, it's useful to shape teams that complement one another.
* What're their education levels?
Generally but not exclusively they have undergraduate and graduate degrees.
* What're their work experience?
That varies widely, we hire both new graduates and people who could happily retire but like what we do and how we do it.
* What're their biggest achievement since high school?
If you can get a place in the company, you could ask them yourself.
> If you are asking about my psychometric profile, I scored 94 on the test we use.
So you're confirming that these "psychometric profiles" can be summarized as a number. Which means it's very easy to automatically apply a filter (reject any candidate with a score lower than 80), and even if there is no automated filter in place, you understand that people with access to this number will immediately be biased because of it? ("I have to review this candidate, but he fared 70 at the psychometric test, where every other candidate fared 90 or more...", and then obviously, during the interview, and after, the reviewer will be biased by that number.)
To be honest, that seems fair given that they are pretty community focused. You might view it as an unpaid internship, but my own contributions to open source and the community have always gotten me jobs. I view it as extracurricular activity... similar to what they pushed us to do in high school for getting into college.
Sure. But I have a full-time job and a family. Combined with the essay's focus on the candidate's high school career, it's a pretty strong signal I'm too old to work there. I'm sure as hell not going to spend a year of my precious spare time on the gamble it'll get me a job where they expect me to continue working off-hours.
The tragic irony there though is that Canonical commits very little engineering effort to contributing to upstream projects that they don't control. They'll fix a few bugs that are affecting customers, but there's no generalised effort to grow the garden they live in.
Either that was a mistaken position by the hiring lead, or they were just shy to tell you that you were not the best candidate. Either way, my apologies.
Would not recommend working at Canonical. The CTO is incompetent, and bullies people out of the company if they disagree with him. Suggesting that the hiring process might be discriminatory may get you told that you "must live on fairy island" from where you should "send a postcard" on a company-wide email chain.
Please, please, please, find a new CTO. You've been led astray by the current one. Canonical has done amazing work building the foundation of large parts of the tech industry, but that is all despite, not because of, the current CTO. I'd love to continue recommending everything Canonical works on as best-in-class, but that sadly can't happen with the current technical leadership.
The Canonical founder was recently bemoaning the lack of available talent limiting the growth of the company. The issue really seems to be a ridiculous hiring process limiting the available talent pool and therefore limiting company growth.
I’ve seen quite a few suggest that the “labor shortage” of this past year isn’t actually a shortage, but just people believing they’re worth more. Especially in the tech community; people are just more selective about how much BS they put up with in hiring.
Readit News
I’m good at these sorts of written/verbal assessments, and even my eyes start to glaze over just reading the list of questions, let alone thinking about how to answer them. A quality response to this sort of questionnaire would take at least an hour and that’s before you even get into the actual interview process or hear a salary range.
And as dumb as questions about high school and college are for professional job interviews (unless you are hiring straight from undergrad, I just don’t see how this is relevant. And even for college recruits, I have a lot of problems with this approach.), it would be one thing if I thought the recruiter or hiring manager was actually going to read each response from each candidate. But I cannot imagine they will.
For a company that has openly expressed its struggle to hire, it’s stunning to see them double-down on such a terrible recruitment process.
The people who you want for this job probably have better things to do than waste an hour or more answering an overly-long questionnaire before they even find out the salary range.
Maybe I'm an outlier, but it would take me way longer than that. At least a couple hours.
I guess it explains the plummeting quality of the technical decisions they make.
None of the interviewers asked anything about tech. Absolutely nothing. All of the questions were in the style of “if you were a (blank), what type of (blank) would you be?”. And each interviewer asked the same questions in the same order working off the same interview sheet. By the third 30min interview I was concerned that I was stuck in some sort of time paradox. By the fourth 30min interview I just wanted to get out of there.
They ended up offering me the position but I declined. Don’t know what happened but they felt very disorganized to me.
Very frustrating. You likely dodged a huge bullet by declining the offer.
Not only this but on Glassdoor I found dozens of people saying that they ghost you before the hiring manager interview so you could spend tens of hours interviewing and never speak to anyone on the team.
edit: I just checked my calendar and I had nine meetings/interviews with Cruise before they rejected me.
These are almost always extremely discriminatory when it comes to neurodiverse populations and I'm saddened that Canonical uses the equivalent of phrenology in its hiring process.
sigh
I mean, there are plenty of bad tests out there (Meyers Briggs etc.), but good aptitude and personality tests might well be the best (objective, reliable, valid...) tests of aptitude and personality there are, no?
I personally screened 40,000 resumes last year, and hired 100+ people into the company. It has been very exciting to see how we are lifting our confidence and aspirations as a result.
Also, 40,000 resumes screened means an average of more than 100 resumes per day, every day of the year. Again, do you think it's normal for the CEO of a big company to be spending their time doing this?
And finally, don't you think the whole process is biased by the fact that you review the resumes? Let's say you personally approve a resume, don't you think the next people in the company down the line will be in a position of "Well, if the CEO is pushing for this candidate, I better not reject this candidate!". In which case, no matter the numbers of steps to filter out, it's a failure.
Deleted Comment
* What is the salary range?
* Who was the person coming up with the interview questions?
* What is that person's psychological profile?
* What is that person's biggest achievement since high school?
* Who are the people working in the team?
* What are those people's psychological profile?
* What're their education levels?
* What're their work experience?
* What're their biggest achievement since high school?
That of course will vary based on role, experience and location. We have hired people from 50+ countries which is remarkable for a company of 800. We tend not to hire in the most expensive locations because we get fantastic talent who live in less polluted, congested and occasionally self-important environments.
We do pay competitively; we have hired people out of FAANGs, and we constantly benchmark pay against our market data around the world. True remote work is worth an extra 20%, and quality of colleagues and focus is priceless. We also rigorously assess pay raises for gender equity.
* Who was the person coming up with the interview questions?
That would be me, mostly. I generally would have reviewed them, though occasionally some slip by.
Some of the role-specific questions would be from the hiring lead on the role, who is usually a senior person in that part of the business who has been through an onboarding process run by our global head of HR and me, and who handles applications for multiple jobs. These hiring leads are less susceptible to bias, and more experienced, than first-level managers, and it frees the first-level managers to focus on their teams and get good at being managers.
* What is that person's psychological profile?
If you are asking about my psychometric profile, I scored 94 on the test we use. If you really mean psychological profile, I don't know. I've been called all sorts of things over the years, but not by professionals ;)
* What is that person's biggest achievement since high school?
That would depend on what one values.
As a student I helped a small newspaper in Cape Town be one of the first in the world to be online. Started a company, Thawte, that helped lots of businesses outside the US get certificates for secure trading. Sold that well, and then trained to join a flight crew on Soyuz to the ISS. Ran several experiments in space, including the first stem cell experiments, which helped shape stem cell therapy research here on earth. Started a foundation which has funded tens of social change leaders working in health, digital, civil society and environmental areas. Started Ubuntu to democratise access to open source, made some mistakes but stuck with it to help Canonical survive and now thrive. Learned not to yell at people, learned to hire, hired hundreds of people. I also have helped start some botanical gardens because I like them, and am active in helping a small country chart a course for themselves that has made a measurable difference to the lives of that population. What, I wonder, do you value?
* Who are the people working in the team?
They are generally outstanding technically and socially, from all over the world, with a strong sense of shared mission to help open source be easier and cheaper to consume, personally and professionally, for companies and individuals.
* What are those people's psychological profile?
They vary greatly, it's useful to shape teams that complement one another.
* What're their education levels?
Generally but not exclusively they have undergraduate and graduate degrees.
* What're their work experience?
That varies widely, we hire both new graduates and people who could happily retire but like what we do and how we do it.
* What're their biggest achievement since high school?
If you can get a place in the company, you could ask them yourself.
So you're confirming that these "psychometric profiles" can be summarized as a number. Which means it's very easy to automatically apply a filter (reject any candidate with a score lower than 80), and even if there is no automated filter in place, you understand that people with access to this number will immediately be biased because of it? ("I have to review this candidate, but he fared 70 at the psychometric test, where every other candidate fared 90 or more...", and then obviously, during the interview, and after, the reviewer will be biased by that number.)
Deleted Comment
Can the title be updated with the other half of the sentence?
Maybe it should be renamed to something more succinct, e.g. "Canonical's bulls*t Hiring Process"
That's Debian not Ubuntu/Canonical.
Happens when you surround yourself with sycophants and can’t see it.
But the kinds of people this filter likely selects for doesn't seem like what I'd be interested in, just strange.
Deleted Comment