During the past months we have doubled the size of our team (just approaching 50 now). Here is a short post summarising the things we’ve done to improve our hiring process, the things that worked well, and those things that didn’t work out so well. These notes originated as an exercise to help grow the product team (mainly Designers and Engineers) and now some parts of it are being applied to the other teams in the company (Business Development, Community and Marketing).
1.Finding people
One of the best things about design and development is that there is already a community, a network that goes further than LinkedIn connection. For us, the best tool to find new people has been the networks of our colleagues. Even having that as the main channel of acquiring new interesting profiles, having a jobs page and communicating on social networks is key for us. We use mainly twitter, although in some particular cases (Sales reps, and Operations) LinkedIn has been critical. Being an Open Source company has helped a lot with this too.
For us, job portals didn’t work well.
2.Interview process
We do 3 different interviews to technical people:
- First contact — Screening: We have a talk over the phone about previous experience of the applicant, we give a company and a product overview and we talk about the details of the job. If after this it looks like it’s could work, we pass to next phase.
- Second contact — Technical Interview(s): We normally ask people to pass by the office in order to have a session about technology, if it is not possible we keep going with Hangouts or Skype. This meeting is done by a person that will potentially work with the guy that is being interviewed. Technical sessions are about discovering how the applicant thinks and approaches some particular technical challenges (How a cache works and how you would implement it?, how would you import 1 million points in the database?, …). With designers, we normally ask for a challenge to be solved using just paper and pencils or in the white board, although after that they can go as far as they want. We often do this exercise 2 times with 2 different interviewers. After doing so, we share our conclusions in a Google doc or in Slack.
- Third contact — Culture: We have a pretty strong company culture. We believe company culture is key for the company success. Even if someone is the best developer / designer in the world, not fitting in our company culture is a blocker. This interview is usually the last one of the process and it has to be done by one of the persons in the Executive Board, not matter which department he manages. This is the point that most people don’t pass.
Company Culture Interview is the one that most people don’t pass.
- Fourth contact — Trial period: We love to be opportunistic when hiring. We cannot say no to some people that come to talk to us, that fit on the company and that we would love to hire just because we don’t have that hiring process on the roadmap. When this happens, we normally propose a paid trial period of 2 to 3 weeks. So far it has worked great.
3.On-boarding
Hiring doesn’t make any sense if you don’t have a proper on-boarding process designed to be applied when a new person joins the company. We created a github wiki for the first day. It goes from who you should ask for your email account to the way we use slack for communicating internally.
We also have a document that specifies the budget that each person has for buying their laptop, screen, etc… so anybody in the company can decide how they work. Of course we always try to recycle the computers and the screens that we have around. To help during the on-boarding process we assign a buddy who takes care of everything the new person needs during the first 5 days.
4.Perks
We think perks have to be just that, perks. We believe that the best perks are those that let you to work in the best way you can imagine. We don’t have fixed working hours, people can work remotely whenever they want (we tend to think that people comes to the office because they see value on that), we have a company house in Madrid so remote employees can come and spend some time in the City. Optionality is the best thing you can give to someone.
5.Extra ball: Why didn’t you hire a HR person?
Although we wanted to, we just didn’t succeed. We didn’t find a great fit for the company and we couldn’t wait any longer to ramp up the hiring processes, so we went for it. Then we realised that the process was working great so we didn’t stop!
Hiring is such a key thing when growing and the biggest opportunity to meet awesome people that will potentially share the journey with you. Devote some time for it.
