It depends entirely on priorities and circumstance. Some folks are willing and able to wait to work somewhere they feel is a perfect fit for them, or special in some other way; others may be interested in transitioning to new work ASAP (or need to, for financial reasons).
When I left my last job, I quit without having anything lined up, and was fortunate enough to have a bit of buffer to take some time off to recuperate and search for new work. I got some promising interviews, but none were like my interviews with the company I work for now. I rejected a number of offers while still in the process with my current company (with the full understanding that there was no guarantee of anything waiting for me). My priority at the time was finding somewhere where I knew I would love to work, and not getting back to work as soon as I could. For me, it paid off to wait.
Our interview process is pretty involved, and not for nothing — we get a lot of applicants, screen heavily, and put in a lot of time and effort into each individual candidate at every stage. We don't have dedicated recruiters, and besides our ops team, we've got individual developers, designers, product managers, support folks, etc. involved in hiring for their respective domains. Our interviews are humane, first and foremost, and a good number of candidates I've gotten to speak to have described the process as refreshing (well, relative to the general hell that is interviewing). The general process is: written questionnaire, two interviews (one technical/skill-focused, one non-technical), and a chat with execs.
It's completely understandable if this process doesn't work for all candidates; we've made great progress tightening up the process, shortening it without compromising on quality, and have invested a lot of time in tooling to help us out to speed things up. But it also works exceptionally well for us and the folks we're lucky to work with (~0.1–1% hire rate depending on position) — since I started a few years ago, the company has more than doubled in size (from a small to a medium company), and in that time, we've had a total of 2 individuals decide it wasn't a good fit for them. The company culture is like nothing else, and it's an amazing place to work.
0.1-1% hire rate based on applicants, or based on candidates interviewed? 0.1% hire rate of candidates interviewed doesn't seem compatible with your described growth rate, even if you very conservatively assumes you spend 1 hour interviewing each candidate, thats 25 weeks of straight interviewing per candidate hired. And thats 1 hour of time across the whole company, if you have 2 interviewers spend an hour each, thats now 50 employee-weeks, or an entire year. To double the company size in 5 years, you would have needed to spend 1/5th of your entire tenure interviewing. If you go up to 10 total hours spent per candidate (including all interviewers, recruiters, and time spend in discussion and negotiation) it becomes straight up impossible.
So to be clear for a given position you get 100 to 1000 resumes, then interview how many of those before deciding on 1 person? I am curious what the funnel looks like.
It depends entirely on the size and quality of the candidate pool, but I'd say very roughly:
* Initial candidate screening reduces the pool by 85–95% (leaving 5–15% of the initial pool)
* Interview #1 reduces the pool further by 50–66% (leaving ~3–4% of the initial pool)
* Interview #2 reduces the pool further by another 66–75% (leaving ~1–2% of the initial pool)
* Final chat usually doesn't reduce the pool, but it's one last pass for additional signal
* We choose a single candidate of whoever remains
For a position with 400 applicants, it could look like
* Initial screening leaves 40 candidates for interview #1
* Interview #1 leaves 15 candidates for interview #2
* Interview #2 leaves 4 candidates for final chat
* We pick from those final 4
When I left my last job, I quit without having anything lined up, and was fortunate enough to have a bit of buffer to take some time off to recuperate and search for new work. I got some promising interviews, but none were like my interviews with the company I work for now. I rejected a number of offers while still in the process with my current company (with the full understanding that there was no guarantee of anything waiting for me). My priority at the time was finding somewhere where I knew I would love to work, and not getting back to work as soon as I could. For me, it paid off to wait.
Our interview process is pretty involved, and not for nothing — we get a lot of applicants, screen heavily, and put in a lot of time and effort into each individual candidate at every stage. We don't have dedicated recruiters, and besides our ops team, we've got individual developers, designers, product managers, support folks, etc. involved in hiring for their respective domains. Our interviews are humane, first and foremost, and a good number of candidates I've gotten to speak to have described the process as refreshing (well, relative to the general hell that is interviewing). The general process is: written questionnaire, two interviews (one technical/skill-focused, one non-technical), and a chat with execs.
It's completely understandable if this process doesn't work for all candidates; we've made great progress tightening up the process, shortening it without compromising on quality, and have invested a lot of time in tooling to help us out to speed things up. But it also works exceptionally well for us and the folks we're lucky to work with (~0.1–1% hire rate depending on position) — since I started a few years ago, the company has more than doubled in size (from a small to a medium company), and in that time, we've had a total of 2 individuals decide it wasn't a good fit for them. The company culture is like nothing else, and it's an amazing place to work.