Why We Don't Invite Groups to Interviews

The title can be parsed ambiguously. At first, I was surprised as I read it as: "We Don't Invite Groups to Interviews. Here's Why." and expected an article focusing on interviewing one team member at a time. It's perhaps better stated as "Why Some Groups Aren't Invited To Interviews".

Back <i>many</i> years ago when I used to interview people for restaurant work we had a stock phrase that we would write on rejected applications: &quot;others more qualified.&quot; It&#x27;s as simple as that. Nothing especially wrong with the candidate, but we had better choices.<p>Interesting to see the same dynamic in place in the gamut between mundane restaurant work and YC applications.

It&#x27;s fine if you don&#x27;t want to tell people since there are legitimate reasons not to. But this is mostly a cop out.<p>We know that YC application reviewers make notes and obviously do some sort of internal ranking. There may be cases where better startups just push slightly &quot;worse&quot; ones down, but there&#x27;s obviously some startups that are passed over for specific reasons that YC knows about. I guarantee most of these reasons&#x2F;notes would be very useful for an early startup.<p>Too bad they&#x27;ll never know.

Somewhere YC is <i>doing</i> ranking of applications. When ranking gets done some function <i>does</i> get applied to each group. It might be beneficial for YC to know how this function works so they can debug it. For instance the YC&#x27;s ranking function can generate set of components that contributes to final rank.<p>If YC wants to scale it is imperative to understand their own ranking ranking function. If we say that I have no idea why group A was considered better than group b then its not very scientific and there can be not much hope to improve something that we don&#x27;t understand. Of course, it&#x27;s different matter if this information is passed back to group because I suspect that would make ranking function more vulnerable to gaming.

I think most people would appreciate some feedback on something they work hard for, even if it&#x27;s just an &quot;atta boy, looks good, keep on going--sorry it didn&#x27;t work out&quot;, or even better some productive feedback (&quot;you need to narrow your focus&quot; or &quot;market already saturated&quot;).<p>I have never applied for YC, but I have applied to other things in life that seem like a black hole from the outside. Just an acknowledgement of something that surely took a lot of time would be a nice gesture. I mean, I&#x27;m sure you&#x27;re nice folks, right? Would you ignore applicants if you met them on the street?

This is just one of those things you learn in life. You&#x27;ll never find out the real reason someone rejected you. It doesn&#x27;t matter if it&#x27;s a girl or an interviewer. That&#x27;s just how it is. The only thing to do is to take your best guess and improve on that next time.<p>Oftentimes, the people doing the rejecting may not even know the real reason. Sure, everyone can come up with something that sounds rational but how do you know it&#x27;s not because you looked at them weird the first time you met because you were nervous?

there is still valuable feedback to be had, no? why are some companies &quot;particularly good&quot; where others don&#x27;t get accepted? &quot;no reason&quot; <i>is</i> paradoxical and i&#x27;m not really convinced it&#x27;s a reason...

Hopefully the one who wrote this article is not a moderator on <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;</a>. Very misleading title.

I think the only useful case for an explanation is if your application was defective per the outline, but I doubt that&#x27;s the main reject reason anyway.

I know this is nitpicking... but that box needs padding.

So just to confirm, if we didn&#x27;t receive an email or any notification on Hacker News, we were not selected, correct? Not sure if we were supposed to receive a &#x27;Sorry&#x27; email.