Once you've found an engineer you want to hire, the final step is presenting them an offer to join your team and convincing them to accept it. This post offers advice for increasing the percentage of the offers you make that are accepted.

In this employee-friendly market, lots of things about the hiring process have changed to accommodate candidates. But companies don’t seem interested in the goodwill they could earn by giving honest, individual feedback. I work at Triplebyte, and over the last year I’ve written over 3,000 detailed, individual rejection emails. When I started, I wondered why no one else did this. Now, I think I know.

This post is advice for early stage startup founders who are hiring their first engineer. At this stage traditional recruiting methods (e.g. hiring a recruiter) won't work as well for you as they do for larger companies.

To get an interview for a technical position, an engineer must run a screening gauntlet. The signals that go into every screening decision, however, are noisy. We can do better. And Bayesian statistics — updating probabilistic beliefs using evidence — can help.

We're excited to announce we've raised a $10 million Series A led by Initialized Capital with participation from our seed investors Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Emmett Shear, Kyle Vogt and Caffeinated Capital. We're also excited to welcome new investors Marissa Mayer and Xavier Niel to the round. We'll be using this investment to build on our momentum last year and help more great people find exciting new companies to join.

My co-worker Daniel is really into Emacs. It’s his primary editor, his grocery list (via org-mode), and #4 of the 6 things he can’t live without on his OkCupid profile. Other engineers in the office, however, prefer Vim (or Sublime Text, or even RubyMine). Naturally, this leads to war. But after months of salvos (VimGolf one-upmanship, gratuitous references to this Stack Overflow question) no clear victor has emerged.

So last week, I set out to see what the Triplebyte data has to say on the issue. Take this with a grain of salt (correlation does not imply causation), but there is a correlation between what editor an engineer uses, their language and OS, and their ability to pass programming interviews. And, according to our data, Vim users pass interviews at a rate ever-so-slightly higher than Emacs users!

We're excited to announce that Triplebyte is now available for engineers and companies in New York!

Until now we've only been working with companies based in the Bay Area and engineers who want to work there. As we've grown, the biggest request we've had from engineers has been expanding to new locations. The most requested location has been New York, we've seen applications to Triplebyte from engineers either based in New York or wanting to relocate there double since the start of this year.

We do a lot of interviewing at Triplebyte. Indeed, over the last 2 years, I've interviewed just over 900 engineers. Whether this was a good use of my time can be debated! (I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat and doubt it.) But regardless, our goal is to improve how engineers are hired. To that end, we run background-blind interviews, looking at coding skills, not credentials or resumes. After an engineer passes our process, they go straight to the final interview at companies we work with (including Apple, Facebook, Dropbox and Stripe). We interview engineers without knowing their backgrounds, and then get to see how they do across multiple top tech companies. This gives us, I think, some of the best available data on interviewing.

Today, we're launching new versions of the Triplebyte process for front-end and mobile engineers. We started Triplebyte to try to fix some of the problems with programming interviews. Over the last two years, we've built a background-blind interview process, and helped hundreds of engineers get jobs. We've worked with people trying to break into their first job (we helped a pizza delivery person get an engineering job at Instacart), and we've worked with credentialed engineers looking for new opportunities (and helped startups hire their first employee). I'm proud of the process we built. We've convinced major companies to waive their phone screens for our candidates, and globally our candidates receive job offers after 1 out of every 2 interviews they do. (This is about twice the average rate in the industry.)