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The Hiring Funnel

Let's imagine, for a moment, that instead of looking for a job as a developer, you're looking to hire a developer.

Suppose you're working in HR at a mid-sized tech company, Widgets Inc., and your team needs a new front-end developer. You create a new job listing that describes the skills and traits you're looking for, and post it online.

A few days later, you check in, and you discover that 400 people have applied to the role.

Now, ideally, you would thoroughly evaluate each and every candidate to find the best fit, by having them go through the full interview process. But you can't do that, because you don't have the resources.

Most companies will have at least two interviews: a technical interview, run by one of the developers on the team, and a “culture fit” interview, run by one of the managers. These interviews are expensive. In order to run a technical interview, we have to pull one of our developers away from their work, and we already don't have enough developers (that's why we're hiring a new one!).

And so, companies have found ways to shrink the candidate pool, to reduce the number of applicants who will be given a full interview. I'll be referring to this process as the hiring funnel.

A funnel that starts wide and gets narrow, with 4 levels. “Submitted application”, to “Phone screen”, to “Interviews”, to “Offer”

It's different at every company, and so this funnel is just an example. I've worked for companies where the entire process was two casual conversations with people in leadership positions. I've also gone through a grueling 9-interview marathon that took several months.

It's pretty universal, however, that companies won't be able to grant a full interview to everyone who applies.

This is important to know. So many job-hunting resources focus exclusively on the “technical interview” portion of the process, but that stuff won't help if you never even make it that far!

And so, the first couple of lessons in this module will focus on the top-of-the-funnel stages to this process. You'll learn how we can use cover letters and portfolio sites to boost our chances of making it to the technical interview.