One of my favorite aspects of working at a tech startup is having the opportunity to help grow and nurture the engineering culture. At Highfive, we have always been thoughtful about the kind of engineering environment we are creating. A big part of this involves obsessing over how to recruit the very best talent we can find.

A little over a year ago, when there were only a couple of engineers on the team, each of us had our own unique interviewing style, mostly influenced by our experiences at companies like Apple, Google, Jawbone and Palm. This was a great start because it meant we had a lot of perspectives on how to conduct effective interviews. It also naturally created a sort of ‘grading system’ for our candidates. The problem was that we were all grading on different scales!

Furthermore, we observed that the interview feedback that each of us gave during our huddles focused more on the aspects of the interview that went wrong, rather than the aspects that were great. So we set out to make the interview process better.

We started by making sure that we agreed on the core characteristics of a Highfive engineer: smart, communicative, resourceful, selfless and possessing a genuine passion for solving difficult problems. We also agreed that these characteristics show up in many guises across several key areas such as coding, algorithms, domain experience and software design and architecture. The challenge then was how to effectively identify those characteristics.

So we changed the rules of our interview game. Rather than focusing on where a candidate fails, we now focus on trying to make the candidate shine. This subtle shift in thinking has made a huge difference in the way we interview. The way we see it, a Highfive interviewer’s primary job is to give the candidate the best opportunity to show their strengths. We defined a strength as something that the candidate possesses in greater quantity than 50% of the engineering team at Highfive. This definition ensures that we are constantly hiring above the mean talent level.

There are several things we do to help our candidates show their strengths. First, we encourage them to bring their own laptops and development environments to the interview. We are not religious about the candidate’s choice of programming language, or IDE (although you will certainly score more points from yours truly if you show off that lovely Emacs user interface…hehehe). We find that this makes our candidates feel very much at home.

Another way we help our candidates shine is to give them the option to deliver a 30 minute presentation on any technical topic. The goal is for the candidate to showcase their mastery of a technical domain, and more importantly, their ability to educate others. Communication and transparency are very important to us as a company.

Lastly, we make sure that every candidate goes through a “fit” interview. This interview focuses on strengths that are not easily discoverable in the more technical sessions; strengths like emotional intelligence, positive attitude and integrity. Conversation topics range from the candidate’s first interaction with computers to a particularly thorny technical challenge they overcame. Every conversation is custom made for the candidate. The fit interview is extremely important, because it unearths deeper insights into the kind of teammate the candidate could be.

Another important element of our new interview approach is that each interviewer jots down down their thoughts about the candidate, including the strengths they found, right after the interview without looking at other interviewers’ submissions. Once all the feedback is in, we huddle to talk about how the interviews went. Submitting our individual thoughts and observations before the huddle frees us to share without being swayed or unintentionally swaying the opinions of others. In other words, everyone has a voice and we’re less susceptible to “group think”.

Our engineering interview process at Highfive has come a long way, but it’s by no means perfect. Like many things in engineering, it’s still under construction and open to iteration, as we strive to make the interviewing experience at Highfive as awesome as the product we are building!

Join us. We’re hiring!

We’re looking for the best and brightest people to join us on our mission of reimagining the way people communicate at work. If you are a company builder looking for a big challenge, let’s talk. Check out our career listings here. For more great reading from Highfive, check out our blog here.