Palantir Path: A holistic effort to hire a more balanced intern class (2024)

Recruiters are a company’s gatekeepers, and the choices we make have lasting and far-reaching impact on both the candidates we screen and the organizations we recruit for. As a Palantir recruiter, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we can reach beyond our traditional sourcing and hiring strategies and connect with candidates who bring a broader set of experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds to our company.

My passion is driven by personal experience: my motivation and inspiration come from my father, who immigrated to the United States from Argentina. He started his career working the graveyard shift cleaning commercial airplanes while attending school during the day where he studied aerospace engineering. The company he worked for recognized his hard work, determination, and potential; and it supported his growth and transition into a role as a Principal Engineer (a position he still holds today). I came into my role as a Palantir recruiter wanting to open the door for talented people like my father — people whose stories and potential are greater than the credentials on their resume. Through my father’s example, I saw firsthand that smart, driven people who can thrive at an organization can come from all walks of life, and their paths don’t have to be linear.

As part of Palantir’s Diversity & Inclusion team, I’ve taken part in several efforts to help us further diversity and strengthen our workforce. In this post, I’m excited to share our journey in developing the Palantir Path internship, a program that yielded an entire class of interns whose backgrounds are different from our typical intern candidates.

We wanted interns in our program to join an operational product or business team, contribute real code, and deploy on business-critical assignments. Most importantly, we aimed to set these interns up with roles that aligned well with their strengths, and pair them with leads and mentors who invested deeply in their growth. We identified business stakeholders who were willing to own and drive this experiment with us, and gained the leadership support we needed in order to bring these ideas to life. With help from Ali, a fellow Palantirian and Forward Deployed Software Engineer, we structured a pilot internship program called Path, a name that speaks to our belief that everyone’s career journey is different and worthy of consideration. Path not only hit upon each of our goals, but also used an entirely different, bespoke evaluation methodology focused more on students’ capacity to learn — and less on their credentials — to identify our inaugural intern class.

Our traditional recruiting process for gauging technical ability is optimized to handle the volume of candidates we process each year, and it begins with a resume review. Following the resume review is a coding challenge. We understood that this existing process wouldn’t allow us to find the types of students we wanted for Path: students who have technical aptitude and learning velocity, but whose resumes don’t yet reflect the type of credentials we typically look for in new hires at Palantir.

As such, we decided to get rid of the resume review, opting instead to have written essays and a coding challenge stand in as the main factors in the application. The essays were intended to give us a way to assess candidates’ motivation and other qualities that we value at Palantir.

Upon receipt of each application, we manually anonymized the submission. (As an aside, this was actually quite labor-intensive. Our Applicant Tracking System cannot handle a totally anonymized process, so we built a custom Atlassian JIRA board and ran the process there manually. There were no indicators of name, gender, school, or previous experience on their JIRA ticket, which is what we used to collect scores for the essays and the coding challenge.) We then combined scores for the essays and the coding submission to create one overall score per candidate, which we used to decide which candidates would advance to the next round and come onsite for interviews. Some candidates who were invited to the onsite round spiked in the essay component, while others spiked technically; still others had strong scores across both aspects of the application. Once the resumes were revealed during our prep for the onsite stage, we saw that several applicants who advanced were candidates that we most likely would have missed out on had we incorporated a resume review into the application process.

As a part of our onsite interview round, we developed a new interview we dubbed the “learning” interview. The process involved working through a technical problem with a Palantir engineer who acted as a human StackOverflow, allowing the candidate to ask questions during the interview. The intent was to assess a student’s capacity to learn new concepts and leverage the resources available to them. We had a hypothesis that some of the students coming in with less industry experience might lack some of the fundamentals, but with investment, would learn at a fast rate. We decided not to index on where their current skills were (a term we referred to as “y-intercept”), but instead focused on their learning curve (or “slope”).

In addition to critically reviewing our hiring process, we also made concerted efforts to be more creative and expansive in our top-of-funnel sourcing, and to advertise this opportunity to students from underrepresented communities in our outreach efforts. By implementing these changes, we saw an extremely diverse applicant pool and outstanding pass-through rates throughout the entire Path pipeline. This year, 63% of Path applicants, and ultimately 67% of hires, identified with at least one underrepresented community. We also saw variety in the college programs represented: we hired 17 Path interns from 14 different programs — many from schools where we had no prior on-campus recruiting presence.

We had strong conviction in Path, but it succeeded even beyond our expectations. The students we hired were truly impressive. We made return offers to 12 of the 13 members of the Summer 2018 cohort, and 11 accepted. It goes without saying that 91% is an exceptional acceptance rate.

Due to this success, our entire recruiting team was rightly interested in how they could implement learnings from Path into their individual pipelines. As part of the larger US college hiring strategy, we focused on branding and outreach, running Piazza campaigns, attending conferences and setting sourcing goals for recruiters — all targeted at improving representation in our workforce. These efforts resulted in 46% of our US college hires (new grads and interns) identifying with at least one underrepresented community.

Some elements of the Path process have already made their way into our regular hiring process. For example, we hear interviewers use terms to describe a candidate’s current skills and capacity to improve that were coined specifically for the Path learning interview. Because they’ve seen exceptional outcomes from highly motivated Path interns, hiring managers feel more comfortable extending offers to candidates whose technical skills are still forming.

Moreover, several additional teams are interested in bringing on Path interns in the future. Growing the program means expanding our internal resources — we need more people to grade essays, interview, and mentor — and fortunately many Palantirians are passionate about this initiative, and eager to get involved. We hired 17 Path interns for 2019 and hope to expand the program in coming years as more teams continue to contribute more resources toward the process.

The outreach we did for Path helped us understand how to engage populations we hadn’t reached before. Though we still invest deeply with a small number of schools with top-ranked CS programs, we’ve simultaneously and meaningfully shifted focus to include a broader number of schools — including schools that have more diverse student populations. We have a lot of work to do, both to educate new communities on what Palantir does, and to enhance our reputation as a welcoming and supportive place for everyone.