Yeah but how hard was it to hire new people? There is a direct correlation. It's super easy to hire people at Netflix. It is literally just up to the hiring manager.
The flip side is that it is also easy to fire, so you can quickly correct any mistakes you may have made in hiring.
This of course means more churn. But to someone working there, this felt like a good thing. It means you didn't have people just biding their time like you see in most big companies.
Never once did I think, "how does that person still have a job?" Unlike the other big companies I've worked for, where there is always at least one person who you know is just floating as long as they can and getting away with it.
Well, there can be some challenges to get people to apply to the archaic job board and they often don't recognize the brand. It's certainly easier to hire at Netflix being a well known consumer brand.
How's the interview process though? Do managers get to hand pick candidates, without them being subjected to a grueling full day onsite with 6-8 employees?
I'd say that's the biggest issue to hire. Even if referred and highly recommended, it's trivial to be rejected due to any one interviewer having a bad day or an impossible bar.
The candidate is found, either by the hiring manager themself, through an internal referral, or via the internal sourcers/recruiters (shout out to them for being amazing at their job!)
The hiring manager sets up an interview panel, where they recruit relevant stakeholders (in the case of an engineer, this was usually peer engineers and sometimes other managers who that team worked with a lot).
The panel is usually around four hours, with four or five people, including the manager, someone from HR, and some future peers.
If that goes well, then a second panel is set up for round two, also about four hours, which usually involves a Director or VP or two, maybe another higher up peer or sibling team peer or manager, and a higher up manager from HR.
Throughout the day, the hiring manager solicits feedback from the interviewers, usually within 15 minutes of them finishing.
The final decision rests solely with the hiring manager, but usually most of the feedback needed to be positive to move forward. The manager could also stop the process at any time. So if all the feedback was "meh", they could save everyone some time and cut it short.
Out of town candidates would have the both panels set for one long day, or sometimes the afternoon and following morning, so for out of town candidates who got all the way through, it could be pretty grueling.
After all that, if the hiring manager decides to hire you, you could get an offer before you even leave, or within a day or two usually, unless there were multiple people for one position, and then you had to wait for them all (although if you were amazing you'd get an offer anyway and then if someone else was good they would get an offer too).
For me personally, the entire process from first contact to signing offer papers was less than a week, and that was pretty typical at the time.
Thanks for the description. Sounds like the typical very difficult full day interview as in every other big tech company, so it doesn't seem to me to be easy to hire or to be hired by any stretch.
In some respects it is very similar, but I think the key differences were that the manager has complete discretion. Even if everyone said no, they could still hire you (as unwise as that might be). There was no hiring committee, no one had veto power.
But yes, you still had to pass a series of interviews. :)
