# Q2 Hiring Retrospective — wins and learnings

**[SATIRE]** — by Office of the Hiring Committee, Cromulent AI (Series B)

FROM: Office of the Hiring Committee, Cromulent AI (Series B)
TO: All Engineering
CC: People Ops, Finance (for the numbers, not the implications)
RE: Q2 Hiring Retrospective — wins and learnings
STATUS: Confidential (please forward widely)

Summary. This quarter the committee invested 140 engineer-hours interviewing 31 candidates across 7 rounds each, achieving our best-ever rejection accuracy of 100% among candidates who later shipped products at competitors. Headcount filled: 0. The committee considers this a strong validation of process and recommends scaling it.

Win: process integrity. Candidate #14 passed all nine rounds, including the optional tenth. Reference checks described him as "the best engineer I've worked with" (flagged: hyperbole). Unfortunately, the role was eliminated in the June re-org to offset the cost of the nine rounds. The committee notes that the system worked exactly as designed.

Learning: the bar. Candidate #22 built the open-source scheduler our entire platform runs on. Several panellists recognised her name from our own incident channel. She was unable, however, to invert a binary tree under time pressure while three people watched in silence, and the committee agreed unanimously that we cannot lower the bar.

Metric of the quarter. Average time-to-offer reached 11.4 weeks. Finance asked the committee to confirm that 140 engineer-hours at blended senior rates is approximately £19,600 of payroll spent producing zero hires. The committee confirms the arithmetic and has removed Finance from this distribution list.

Q3 action items. (1) Add a round. The committee feels there is a gap between the values round and the panel where a candidate could, in theory, briefly relax. (2) Update the careers page to say "we move fast."


> ⚠️ SATIRE — clearly labelled fiction. Do not cite as real events.

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