What part of the article reads PR speak to you?

I don't know, it is more of a general perception, but if I have to excerpt some typical sentences I could find these:

- "Valuable people deserve a bespoke hiring experience"

- "Hiring good people is one of the most critical activities we do as a company"

etc.

Maybe it is not exactly raw PR speak, maybe it is just empty sentences ballooned with good will and "think positive" attitude, written there in the hope that potential candidate will read them and apply. What worries me is that it looks like genuine and sincere, but it is not.

It's like artificial marple syrup stuffed in a natural marple syrup bottle. And if I have the choice I prefer natural syrup in natural syrup bottle and artificial syrup in artificial syrup bottle over what we have here.

Man, that's pretty pessimistic.

If you want the straight dope — or maple syrup, in your case — here it is: hiring good people is the most important thing we do, and we don't fuck around with that. We fly people in, get them to meet people, and show them how we work because we care about this process. More importantly, we want this relaxed atmosphere so we can see if someone actually would fit in with us. It's a big deal. We have a pretty wildly different culture than most companies, and we want our hiring process to reflect that.

Why would you not spend time on this? Why would you not care? It's literally the most important part of your business.

> we don't fuck around with that. We fly people in, get them to meet people, and show them how we work because we care about this process.

It sounds like you aren't neglecting it.

It just sounded like the author was really surprised that you weren't neglecting him.

Perhaps I've just had good interview experiences, but I've rarely felt like the company I was interviewing at didn't devote resources and energy to hiring. I was more surprised about the little ways they failed than the big ways they succeeded.

Has your experience been different?

> If you want the straight dope

Yes, I want it, and I think most readers want it too.

> We have a pretty wildly different culture than most companies

I think you have a pre-convinced audience here, but maybe you might agree that the OP was not the best proof of this very different culture, and was on the side of diluted and PR-tampered dope full of "nice", "mostly", and other marks.

Note that I would not even notice this PR speak if it was not Github. High expectations.

Have people who you've hired ever complained about "the hiring experience?" It seems to imply extraneous features of a nuts and bolts interview process. Are companies who try to improve the hiring experience actually trying to use this as a positive feature of the company, as a means of differentiation? "This company just asked me questions, but another one gave me cupcakes, too."

Everywhere wants to sound like the best place to work, so it's pretty common to get some fluff in a post like this. But even on top of that, he's rightfully passionate about where he works because from what I hear, GitHub treats it's employees very well

It read as PR to me as well.

First, the circumstances dictate a glowing review, which makes it less believable. Since it appears to be from the official GitHub blog, it's hard to imagine that serious criticism could be aired here. I know there's already selection bias because the author took the job, but taking a job doesn't imply that the interview was well-conducted - I once took a job in which the interview was pretty shoddily conducted. (It was a good place to work, they just weren't great at interviews.)

Second, the author seems to be really excited and delighted about things that aren't that uncommon. Now, that may be a great way to go through life, but I think it hurts the author's credibility a bit. He sounds sort of like the boy who cried wolf, only he the professional who blogged praise. Here are some wordings that I found odd:

+ "I had no idea if they were hiring or not, but a day or two after deciding to send Kyle an email to introduce myself, I was amazed to be chatting to him directly on Skype."

Getting a call back after a cold job email isn't amazing to me.

+ "It was also very much a two-way conversation—Kyle answered all my questions and shared interesting insights into the company as we were talking. It didn’t feel like a typical interview, and it was far from being an adversarial, pressure-filled encounter."

This sound like a typical part of most interviews to me.

+ "We hope skipping the initial paperwork-based screening process makes it clear to the candidate that we’re not playing games—that we’re genuinely interested in them."

Very few of the screening processes I've been through, especially at small companies, were paperwork-based.

+ "Valuable people deserve a bespoke hiring experience, so we go to great lengths to work around interviewees’ existing commitments and schedules, or where people have families to take care of—a little flexibility goes a long way."

I'm not sure exactly what this means, but it sounds a bit like "I can't come in this week, is next week good for you?" "Yes, that'll work. We'll get you the airplane ticket right away", which doesn't sound special or unusual to me (in software).

+ "When anyone joins the GitHub team, we fly them back to San Francisco to spend their first week going through our on-boarding process."

That sounds to me like what it means to be hired by a company that offers relocation benefits - they fly you out, you are the new guy/gal for a week.

I don't mean to imply that the whole thing was overenthusiastic - some of the things he raves about I would have found nice (4 day turnarounds, chauffeurs at the airport). I just thought that, overall, it was a bit overenthusiastic to be read as a non-advert.

Maybe I've just been blessed with good interview experiences, or the author has been cursed with bad ones. It could also be the cultural standards where we're from - he said he was in Australia. I'm from the U.S.

What is your employment history like? Being on Skype with a potential employer sounds incredibly unusual. And getting airfare, limo, and a hotel? What are you, a celebrity?

To back up ionforce, I really don't think it's that unusual. I have had calls immediately back in response to cold e-mails, and it's not unusual to be flown out for on-sites with larger companies. As for Skype, why not?