Thanks for clarifying how the EOIs work, I had a different impression from the OP.
I still strongly disagree with the following statement:
in some ways CEA is more selective, and in other ways we are less; I think the methodology we used isn’t precise enough to make a stronger statement than ‘we are about the same.’”
Which are the ways in which CEA is less selective? You mentioned in a previous comment that “ we hire a substantially greater percent of applicants who get to the people ops interview stage” and I cited that interpretation in my own comment, but on closer look I don’t think that’s right (or perhaps I’m confused by what you mean by this?) As the OP states “At CEA 1 in 7 of those reaching a people ops interview get hired, compared to 1 in 5 at Ashby” which would have CEA as more selective. And if you look at offer rate (more relevant to the question of selectivity than hire rate) the difference is quite big (1 in 7 at CEA vs. 2 in 5 at Ashby, or 14% vs. 40%, a difference of 2.8x).
The difference is even bigger if you compare offer rate as a percentage of all applicants (2% for CEA vs. 9% at Ashby, or 4.5x) or as a percentage of applicants that passed an initial screen to weed out obviously unqualified applicants (4% for CEA vs. 17% for Ashby, or 4.7x). I also think it is quite notable that CEA’s offer acceptance rate across all roles was 100% vs. 50% for PM roles in the Ashby survey.
This data shows clear, consistent, and large differences all suggesting that CEA is much more selective than the industry benchmark (which itself is likely highly selective since it looks at high tech growth companies). Unless I’m missing some counter-evidence, I think that should be the conclusion. And I think the OP’s summary of the industry benchmark exercise is extremely misleading: “We compared our Product Manager hiring round to industry benchmark data. We found that the probability of an applicant receiving an offer was similar to industry averages.” If CEA made an offer to 1 of 52 applicants, and the benchmark survey had an offer to ~1 in 12, how is that similar?
Thanks yeah sorry, there is a greater change in the percentage of drop off for Ashby on-site → hired, but because we start with a smaller pool we are still more selective. 1 in 7 versus 1 in 5 is the correct comparison.
This data shows clear, consistent, and large differences all suggesting that CEA is much more selective than the industry benchmark
I guess I’m flattered that you trust the research we did here so much, but I think it’s very much not clear:
The number of applicants we get is very heavily influenced by how widely we promote the position, if the job happens to get posted to a job aggregator site, etc. To take a concrete example: six months ago we hired for a PM and got 52 applicants; last month we opened another PM position which got on to some non-EA job boards and got 113 applicants. If we hire one person from each round, I think you will say that we have gotten more than twice as selective, which is I guess kind of true, but our hiring bar hasn’t really changed (the person who we hired last time would be a top candidate this time).
I don’t really know what Ashby’s candidate pool is like, but I would guess their average applicant has more experience than ours – for example: none of our final candidates last round ever even had the job title “product manager” before, though they had had related roles, and in the current round neither of the two people at the furthest round in the process have ever had a PM role. I would be pretty surprised if Ashby’s final rounds were consistently made up of people who had never been PMs before.[1]
The conclusion of this post was “Overall, CEA might be slightly more selective than Ashby’s customers, but it does not seem like the difference is large” and that still seems basically right to me: 1⁄7 vs. 1⁄5 is more selective, but well within the margin of error given how much uncertainty I have.
I think the OP’s summary of the industry benchmark exercise is extremely misleading
Thanks – I just cut that sentence since my inability to communicate my view even with our substantial back-and-forth makes me pessimistic about making a summary.
In general, I would guess that CEA’s applicants have substantially less experience than their for-profit counterparts, as EA is quite young, but our applicants are more impressive given their age. E.g. we get a lot of college student applicants, but those students are going to prestigious universities.
The conclusion of this post was “Overall, CEA might be slightly more selective than Ashby’s customers, but it does not seem like the difference is large” and that still seems basically right to me: 1⁄7 vs. 1⁄5 is more selective, but well within the margin of error given how much uncertainty I have.
The 1⁄7 vs. 1⁄5 comparison is based on hire rate, but offer rate is more relevant to selectivity (if you disagree, could you explain why?) The difference in offer rate is 14% for CEA vs. 40% for Ashby; I’d be quite surprised if this large difference is still within your margin of error given your uncertainty.
Stepping back, the key question is whether EA jobs are still hard to get. As you note, any single perspective from CEA’s recruiting data will be imperfect. But they’ll be imperfect in different ways. For example, looking at offer rate as a percentage of applicant could be distorted by large numbers of clearly unqualified applicants, but this can be avoided by looking at offers as a percentage of people who made it past an initial screen or people who made it to a people ops interview. And problems with Ashby as a benchmark don’t apply if you’re assessing CEA’s selectivity in an absolute sense (or relative to benchmarks other than Ashby). If you look across a variety of perspectives and they all tell the same story, that’s probably the right story.
When I look at the different perspectives on the CEA’s recruitment data, they all tell the story that jobs at CEA are (very) hard to get. I don’t see any metrics that suggest the opposite is true, or even that it’s a close call or ambiguous in any way. The perspectives I find compelling (individually, but more so collectively) are:
In an absolute sense, CEA’s offer rates are extremely low, whether one looks at offer rate as a percentage of applicants (1.9%), as a percentage of people who passed a first screen (4.7%) or those who passed a second screen (9.5%). If all you knew about a job was that less than 1 in 50 applicants got an offer, and that less than 1 in 20 people who passed an initial screen got an offer, wouldn’t you consider that job highly selective? I sure would.
CEA’s offer rates are in the same ballpark as the notoriously hyper-selective McKinsey. McKinsey hires ~1% of applicants (vs. ~2% for CEA). If you pass an initial resume screen at McKinsey, you have a ~12.5% chance of getting an offer, which is actually higher than the offer rate for CEA applicants who make it past an initial (~5%) or even a secondary (~10%) screen.
As another way of contextualizing CEA’s selectivity without relying on the Ashby data, even if you pass CEA’s initial screen your expected success rate of ~5% is the same as someone applying to Harvard.
CEA is much more selective than the Ashby benchmark (which itself likely captures selective jobs). That’s true whether you look at offer rates for all candidates (4.7x higher offer rate for Ashby) or offer rates after unqualified people had been screened out (4.5x higher offer rate for Ashby after an initial screen, and 2.8x higher at the people ops/onsite stage). Side note: Given the magnitude and consistency of the finding that CEA is much more selective than Ashby, I do think it belongs in the OP’s Summary section (though it could certainly include a note or footnote regarding how Ashby is an imperfect reference group).
Across all of CEA’s core jobs there was an offer acceptance rate of 100%. This strongly suggests that these candidates, who were presumably very strong applicants, were not choosing between many attractive EA jobs offers.
There’s very strong evidence that in the relatively recent past, EA jobs were quite hard to get. So I think there’s a high burden of proof for anyone making the argument that this situation has changed. I don’t think data presented in this post or the comments meets that burden of proof, and in fact I think that data all strongly supports the notion that EA jobs are still hard to find.
offer rate is more relevant to selectivity (if you disagree, could you explain why?)
I think it’s pretty uncontroversial that our applicants are more dedicated (i.e. more likely to accept an offer). My understanding of Ashby is that it’s used by a bunch of random tech recruiting agencies, and I would guess that their applicants have ~0 pre-existing excitement about the companies they get sent to.
I don’t see any metrics that suggest the opposite is true, or even that it’s a close call or ambiguous in any way.
The statement in the post is “CEA might be slightly more selective than Ashby’s customers, but it does not seem like the difference is large”. This seems consistent with the view that CEA is selective? (It also just implies that Ashby is selective, which is a reasonable thing to believe.[1])
--
As a meta point: I kind of get the sense that you feel that this post is intended to be polemical, like we are trying to convince people that CEA isn’t selective or something. But as you originally said: “the authors don’t seem to take an explicit stance on the issue” – we just wanted to share some statistics about our hiring and, at least as evidenced by that first comment of yours, we were somewhat successful in conveying that we didn’t have particularly strong opinions about whether EA jobs are still hard to get.
This post was intended to provide some statistics about our hiring, because we were collecting them for internal purposes anyway so I figured we might as well publish. We threw in the Ashby thing at the end because it was an easily accessible data point, but to be honest I kind of regret doing that – I’m not sure the comparison was useful for many people, and it caused confusion.
Re: offer rate vs hire rate, CEA’s applicants are likely applying to other EA jobs they’d also be dedicated to. CEA may well be more attractive than other EA employers, but I don’t think that’s a given and I’m not sure of the magnitude of any difference there might be. Bigger picture, as I mentioned earlier I think any individual metric is problematic and that we should look at a variety of metrics and see what story they collectively tell.
Re: your meta point, the thing I find confusing is that you “didn’t have particularly strong opinions about whether EA jobs are still hard to get.” There’s a bunch of data, and every data point (CEA’s absolute offer rates at each stage, CEA vs. Ashby at each stage, and CEA vs. other benchmarks like McKinsey and Harvard) supports the idea that EA jobs are hard to get. So I don’t really understand why you present a lot of data that all points the same way, yet remain unconvinced by the conclusion they lead to.
Similarly, I find it confusing that you still seem to endorse the claim that “CEA might be slightly more selective than Ashby’s customers, but it does not seem like the difference is large.” CEA has lower offer rates and lower hire rates at each stage of the process. And in almost every case, the difference is quite large (at least 2x). Even in the one comparison where the difference isn’t huge (hire rates at the person ops/onsite stage), it is still a moderate magnitude (Ashby’s rate is 40% higher than CEA’s) despite the fact that CEA required passing 3 screens to get to that stage vs. 2 for Ashby. I think a more reasonable interpretation of that data would be “It’s very likely that CEA is much more selective than Ashby’s customers, though it’s possible the magnitude of this difference is only moderate (and Ashby is not a perfect reference point.)”
the thing I find confusing is that you “didn’t have particularly strong opinions about whether EA jobs are still hard to get.”… So I don’t really understand why you present a lot of data that all points the same way, yet remain unconvinced by the conclusion they lead to.
I think I’m largely like “bruh, literally zero of our product manager finalist candidates had everhad the title “product manager” before, how could we possibly be more selective than Ashby?”[1]
Some other data points:
When I reach out to people who seem like good fits, they often decline to apply, meaning that they don’t even get into the data set evaluated here
When I asked some people who are well-connected to PMs to pass on the job to others they know, they declined to do so because they thought the PMs they knew would be so unlikely to want it it wasn’t worth even asking
I acknowledge that, if you rely 100% on the data set presented here, maybe you will come to a different conclusion, but I really just don’t think the data set presented here is that compelling.
As mentioned, our candidates are impressive in other ways, and maybe they are more impressive than the average Ashby candidate overall, but I just don’t think we have the evidence to confidently say that.
Hmm, if we are still talking about comparing CEA versus Ashby, I’m not sure this carves reality at the joints: it’s certainly true that people with zero experience have an uphill battle getting hired, but I don’t think CEA is unusual in this regard. (If anything, I would guess that we are more open to people with limited experience.)
Sorry, I’m not sure I understand what your point is. Are you saying that my point 1 is misleading because having even any relevant experience can be a big boost for an applicant’s chances to getting hired by CEA, and any relevant experience isn’t a high bar?
Yeah, job experience seems like a major difference between CEA and Ashby. I’d guess that salary could be quite different too (which might be why the CEA role doesn’t seem interesting to experienced PMs).
It sounds like one of the reasons why EA jobs are hard to get (at least for EA candidates) is because EA candidates (typically young people with great academic credentials and strong understanding of EA but relatively little job experience) lack the job experience some roles require. To me this suggests that advising (explicitly or implicitly) young EAs that the most impactful thing they can do is direct work could be counterproductive, and that it might be better to emphasize building career capital.
Thanks for clarifying how the EOIs work, I had a different impression from the OP.
I still strongly disagree with the following statement:
Which are the ways in which CEA is less selective? You mentioned in a previous comment that “ we hire a substantially greater percent of applicants who get to the people ops interview stage” and I cited that interpretation in my own comment, but on closer look I don’t think that’s right (or perhaps I’m confused by what you mean by this?) As the OP states “At CEA 1 in 7 of those reaching a people ops interview get hired, compared to 1 in 5 at Ashby” which would have CEA as more selective. And if you look at offer rate (more relevant to the question of selectivity than hire rate) the difference is quite big (1 in 7 at CEA vs. 2 in 5 at Ashby, or 14% vs. 40%, a difference of 2.8x).
The difference is even bigger if you compare offer rate as a percentage of all applicants (2% for CEA vs. 9% at Ashby, or 4.5x) or as a percentage of applicants that passed an initial screen to weed out obviously unqualified applicants (4% for CEA vs. 17% for Ashby, or 4.7x). I also think it is quite notable that CEA’s offer acceptance rate across all roles was 100% vs. 50% for PM roles in the Ashby survey.
This data shows clear, consistent, and large differences all suggesting that CEA is much more selective than the industry benchmark (which itself is likely highly selective since it looks at high tech growth companies). Unless I’m missing some counter-evidence, I think that should be the conclusion. And I think the OP’s summary of the industry benchmark exercise is extremely misleading: “We compared our Product Manager hiring round to industry benchmark data. We found that the probability of an applicant receiving an offer was similar to industry averages.” If CEA made an offer to 1 of 52 applicants, and the benchmark survey had an offer to ~1 in 12, how is that similar?
Thanks yeah sorry, there is a greater change in the percentage of drop off for Ashby on-site → hired, but because we start with a smaller pool we are still more selective. 1 in 7 versus 1 in 5 is the correct comparison.
I guess I’m flattered that you trust the research we did here so much, but I think it’s very much not clear:
The number of applicants we get is very heavily influenced by how widely we promote the position, if the job happens to get posted to a job aggregator site, etc. To take a concrete example: six months ago we hired for a PM and got 52 applicants; last month we opened another PM position which got on to some non-EA job boards and got 113 applicants. If we hire one person from each round, I think you will say that we have gotten more than twice as selective, which is I guess kind of true, but our hiring bar hasn’t really changed (the person who we hired last time would be a top candidate this time).
I don’t really know what Ashby’s candidate pool is like, but I would guess their average applicant has more experience than ours – for example: none of our final candidates last round ever even had the job title “product manager” before, though they had had related roles, and in the current round neither of the two people at the furthest round in the process have ever had a PM role. I would be pretty surprised if Ashby’s final rounds were consistently made up of people who had never been PMs before.[1]
The conclusion of this post was “Overall, CEA might be slightly more selective than Ashby’s customers, but it does not seem like the difference is large” and that still seems basically right to me: 1⁄7 vs. 1⁄5 is more selective, but well within the margin of error given how much uncertainty I have.
Thanks – I just cut that sentence since my inability to communicate my view even with our substantial back-and-forth makes me pessimistic about making a summary.
In general, I would guess that CEA’s applicants have substantially less experience than their for-profit counterparts, as EA is quite young, but our applicants are more impressive given their age. E.g. we get a lot of college student applicants, but those students are going to prestigious universities.
The 1⁄7 vs. 1⁄5 comparison is based on hire rate, but offer rate is more relevant to selectivity (if you disagree, could you explain why?) The difference in offer rate is 14% for CEA vs. 40% for Ashby; I’d be quite surprised if this large difference is still within your margin of error given your uncertainty.
Stepping back, the key question is whether EA jobs are still hard to get. As you note, any single perspective from CEA’s recruiting data will be imperfect. But they’ll be imperfect in different ways. For example, looking at offer rate as a percentage of applicant could be distorted by large numbers of clearly unqualified applicants, but this can be avoided by looking at offers as a percentage of people who made it past an initial screen or people who made it to a people ops interview. And problems with Ashby as a benchmark don’t apply if you’re assessing CEA’s selectivity in an absolute sense (or relative to benchmarks other than Ashby). If you look across a variety of perspectives and they all tell the same story, that’s probably the right story.
When I look at the different perspectives on the CEA’s recruitment data, they all tell the story that jobs at CEA are (very) hard to get. I don’t see any metrics that suggest the opposite is true, or even that it’s a close call or ambiguous in any way. The perspectives I find compelling (individually, but more so collectively) are:
In an absolute sense, CEA’s offer rates are extremely low, whether one looks at offer rate as a percentage of applicants (1.9%), as a percentage of people who passed a first screen (4.7%) or those who passed a second screen (9.5%). If all you knew about a job was that less than 1 in 50 applicants got an offer, and that less than 1 in 20 people who passed an initial screen got an offer, wouldn’t you consider that job highly selective? I sure would.
CEA’s offer rates are in the same ballpark as the notoriously hyper-selective McKinsey. McKinsey hires ~1% of applicants (vs. ~2% for CEA). If you pass an initial resume screen at McKinsey, you have a ~12.5% chance of getting an offer, which is actually higher than the offer rate for CEA applicants who make it past an initial (~5%) or even a secondary (~10%) screen.
As another way of contextualizing CEA’s selectivity without relying on the Ashby data, even if you pass CEA’s initial screen your expected success rate of ~5% is the same as someone applying to Harvard.
CEA is much more selective than the Ashby benchmark (which itself likely captures selective jobs). That’s true whether you look at offer rates for all candidates (4.7x higher offer rate for Ashby) or offer rates after unqualified people had been screened out (4.5x higher offer rate for Ashby after an initial screen, and 2.8x higher at the people ops/onsite stage). Side note: Given the magnitude and consistency of the finding that CEA is much more selective than Ashby, I do think it belongs in the OP’s Summary section (though it could certainly include a note or footnote regarding how Ashby is an imperfect reference group).
Across all of CEA’s core jobs there was an offer acceptance rate of 100%. This strongly suggests that these candidates, who were presumably very strong applicants, were not choosing between many attractive EA jobs offers.
There’s very strong evidence that in the relatively recent past, EA jobs were quite hard to get. So I think there’s a high burden of proof for anyone making the argument that this situation has changed. I don’t think data presented in this post or the comments meets that burden of proof, and in fact I think that data all strongly supports the notion that EA jobs are still hard to find.
I think it’s pretty uncontroversial that our applicants are more dedicated (i.e. more likely to accept an offer). My understanding of Ashby is that it’s used by a bunch of random tech recruiting agencies, and I would guess that their applicants have ~0 pre-existing excitement about the companies they get sent to.
The statement in the post is “CEA might be slightly more selective than Ashby’s customers, but it does not seem like the difference is large”. This seems consistent with the view that CEA is selective? (It also just implies that Ashby is selective, which is a reasonable thing to believe.[1])
--
As a meta point: I kind of get the sense that you feel that this post is intended to be polemical, like we are trying to convince people that CEA isn’t selective or something. But as you originally said: “the authors don’t seem to take an explicit stance on the issue” – we just wanted to share some statistics about our hiring and, at least as evidenced by that first comment of yours, we were somewhat successful in conveying that we didn’t have particularly strong opinions about whether EA jobs are still hard to get.
This post was intended to provide some statistics about our hiring, because we were collecting them for internal purposes anyway so I figured we might as well publish. We threw in the Ashby thing at the end because it was an easily accessible data point, but to be honest I kind of regret doing that – I’m not sure the comparison was useful for many people, and it caused confusion.
It sounds to me like you think Ashby is selective: “the Ashby benchmark (which itself likely captures selective jobs).”
Re: offer rate vs hire rate, CEA’s applicants are likely applying to other EA jobs they’d also be dedicated to. CEA may well be more attractive than other EA employers, but I don’t think that’s a given and I’m not sure of the magnitude of any difference there might be. Bigger picture, as I mentioned earlier I think any individual metric is problematic and that we should look at a variety of metrics and see what story they collectively tell.
Re: your meta point, the thing I find confusing is that you “didn’t have particularly strong opinions about whether EA jobs are still hard to get.” There’s a bunch of data, and every data point (CEA’s absolute offer rates at each stage, CEA vs. Ashby at each stage, and CEA vs. other benchmarks like McKinsey and Harvard) supports the idea that EA jobs are hard to get. So I don’t really understand why you present a lot of data that all points the same way, yet remain unconvinced by the conclusion they lead to.
Similarly, I find it confusing that you still seem to endorse the claim that “CEA might be slightly more selective than Ashby’s customers, but it does not seem like the difference is large.” CEA has lower offer rates and lower hire rates at each stage of the process. And in almost every case, the difference is quite large (at least 2x). Even in the one comparison where the difference isn’t huge (hire rates at the person ops/onsite stage), it is still a moderate magnitude (Ashby’s rate is 40% higher than CEA’s) despite the fact that CEA required passing 3 screens to get to that stage vs. 2 for Ashby. I think a more reasonable interpretation of that data would be “It’s very likely that CEA is much more selective than Ashby’s customers, though it’s possible the magnitude of this difference is only moderate (and Ashby is not a perfect reference point.)”
I think I’m largely like “bruh, literally zero of our product manager finalist candidates had ever had the title “product manager” before, how could we possibly be more selective than Ashby?”[1]
Some other data points:
When I reach out to people who seem like good fits, they often decline to apply, meaning that they don’t even get into the data set evaluated here
When I asked some people who are well-connected to PMs to pass on the job to others they know, they declined to do so because they thought the PMs they knew would be so unlikely to want it it wasn’t worth even asking
I acknowledge that, if you rely 100% on the data set presented here, maybe you will come to a different conclusion, but I really just don’t think the data set presented here is that compelling.
As mentioned, our candidates are impressive in other ways, and maybe they are more impressive than the average Ashby candidate overall, but I just don’t think we have the evidence to confidently say that.
It sounds like there are two, separate things going on:
Jobs at CEA are very hard to get, even for candidates with impressive resumes overall.
CEA finds it hard to get applicants that have particular desirable qualities like previous experience in the same role.
Hmm, if we are still talking about comparing CEA versus Ashby, I’m not sure this carves reality at the joints: it’s certainly true that people with zero experience have an uphill battle getting hired, but I don’t think CEA is unusual in this regard. (If anything, I would guess that we are more open to people with limited experience.)
Sorry, I’m not sure I understand what your point is. Are you saying that my point 1 is misleading because having even any relevant experience can be a big boost for an applicant’s chances to getting hired by CEA, and any relevant experience isn’t a high bar?
Yeah, job experience seems like a major difference between CEA and Ashby. I’d guess that salary could be quite different too (which might be why the CEA role doesn’t seem interesting to experienced PMs).
It sounds like one of the reasons why EA jobs are hard to get (at least for EA candidates) is because EA candidates (typically young people with great academic credentials and strong understanding of EA but relatively little job experience) lack the job experience some roles require. To me this suggests that advising (explicitly or implicitly) young EAs that the most impactful thing they can do is direct work could be counterproductive, and that it might be better to emphasize building career capital.