This comment came across as unnecessarily aggressive to me.
The original post is a newsletter that seems to be trying to paint everyone in their best light. That’s a nice thing to do! The epistemic status of the post (hype) also feels pretty clear already.
I’m sorry to hear about your negative experience with GiveWell’s hiring cycle.
I think that it’s easy to under-estimate how hard it is to hire well though. For comparison, you can honestly give all the same complaints about the hiring practice of my parent company (Google).
It is slow, with many friends of mine experiencing up to a year of gap between application and eventual decision.
Later interviewers have no context on your performance on earlier parts of the application. This is actually deliberate though, since we want to get independent signal at each step. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was deliberate at GiveWell as well.
You often aren’t told what is important at each interview stage. You’re just posed technical or behavioral questions, and then you have to figure out what’s important to solve the problem. Again, this is somewhat deliberate to see if candidates are able to think through what the important parts of an issue are.
You certainly aren’t given feedback for improvement after rejection. An explicit part of interviewer training is noting that we shouldn’t say anything about a candidate’s performance (good or bad) to the candidate, for fear of legal repercussions. Some EA orgs have chosen to give rejection feedback despite this, but it seems to be both not standard and not necessarily wise for the organization.
Interviewing and hiring just kind of sucks. I’d love it if GiveWell was unusually excellent here, but I think that it’s at least important to recognize that their hiring practices are pretty normal.