Jackrabbit Mobile Playbook: Hiring

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Jackrabbit Mobile

Published in

Don't Panic, Just Hire

5 min readJul 17, 2016

Hiring

Recruiting

We’re always recruiting and keeping an eye out for who we’d like to have join our team because we’re constantly meeting new people and frequently starting new projects that require an evolving set of skills. We feel that the best candidates are the ones we really get to know, so our interview process focuses on learning about each other.

We have a our jobs page here and applications can be submitted to us via AngelList.

Skillsets that we most commonly recruit:

Mobile Developers
UI/UX Designers
Project Managers
Web Developers
Backend Developers

Our hiring process is based on Topgrading and we manage it using AngelList Track.

Interview Process

Initial Screen

We receive a lot of applications from a wide range of people. The first step is to verify that we’re a potential fit to work together by understanding the candidate’s experience, skills, and goals. A potential fit is someone that has the technical skills to be successful, has experience applying them in a similar environment, and someone who would benefit and grow from working at Jackrabbit.

We first evaluate that fit with a few questions about a candidate’s experience and goals, and exercises to illustrate their abilities.

Intro Call

The second step is to have an intro call to get to know each other. This will be a 10 to 20-minute Google Hangout with someone at Jackrabbit where we’ll get to share more about Jackrabbit’s history and mission, and are excited to learn more about their experience and goals.

We find that video conferencing helps to get to know each other, especially if we haven’t met in-person before.

Here we’re looking to follow up and dive deeper into the initial questions we asked. We’re feeling out each other and it’s important that both parties evaluate if we could see ourselves working together.

References and Work Samples

Before the technical interview we’ll ask to see some more of the candidate’s previous work. For developers we like to see GitHub repositories, for designers we like to see portfolios, and for project managers we like to see case studies. Live material is the best, such as links to apps on the App Store, open source projects, or active production webapps.

Technical Interview

The next step is a technical interview with someone on our team. If the candidate is an iOS developer then we’ll have them sit down with one of our iOS developers to talk through the technical details of their experience, strengths, and preferences. We’ll ask technical questions to gauge familiarity with the tools, techniques, and processes we follow. We’ll also work through a short exercise together, typically either a coding problem for developers, a creative session for designers, or an agile exercise for project managers.

Culture Interview

The last step is to have a culture interview on-site with a few members of our team. We may include managers and people from different teams, who’ll will be given a short brief, but we want them to form their own opinions about the candidate. We want the candidate to get a feel for what it would be like to work at our company as much as we want our team to to get a feel for what it would be like to work with them.

Offer

Contract-to-hire period

Hiring starts with a three month contract-to-hire relationship. We typically like to have a specific project in mind that we’ll start working on together. This lets us both test out the relationship over an extended period of time to verify that it is a good fit and that we both enjoy working together. We have a Contractor Agreement that outlines the terms and responsibilities that we’ll sign together and get started.

During this time it’s important to join team meetings and team events, ask a lot of questions, get settled in with our tools and processes, and understand how we operate. We’ll have a monthly check-in along the way.

Employment

We’ll send you an offer letter, which formalizes the details of the offer and the position, and sign an employment agreement, which covers the terms and policies of working with Jackrabbit and our customers.

Onboarding

First day

Welcome! First day means breakfast tacos and introductions! You’ll typically start on a Monday or Thursday morning so that you can meet everyone at Team Meeting.

Then you’ll sit down with the Partners and your team lead for an onboarding meeting. You already know us pretty well by now, but we’ll go over some history about the company, our values, and our plans for the future. We’ll talk through day-to-day responsibilities and operations, and have lots of time for questions.

We’ll create all of your accounts, starting with your Jackrabbit email address, and help you get set up with all of the tools you’ll need, such as Slack, Harvest, Trello, and more.

First month

We’ll schedule a 1-month check-in to formally sit down and review how everything is going.

The first month starts with getting familiar with everyone on the team, projects and Labs that we’re working on, and comfortable with the tools and working environment. We find that’s best done by shadowing projects, all the departments at Jackrabbit, from Sales to Design, and working 1–1 with a senior member of the team.

Quarterly Reviews

Every quarter you’ll have a one-on-one review meeting with one of the Partners or team leads. This is a time to sit down and evaluate the past quarter, progress towards goals, and be aligned for the future. We’ll provide feedback on strengths and weaknesses, but we believe it’s even more important to hear your thoughts on your self-evaluation, so we can goal set together.

We want to make sure you’re working on what you want to work on, and growing in the direction you want to grow, so that we all enjoy what we’re doing, and do our best work together