How we hired a team of 8 excellent web developers in 9 month
Blade is a scale-up company with a presence in Europe and the United States. The core of the business is a cloud computer focused on gaming and made for nomad people (like me) who want a great computer everywhere.
The context
I was hired by Blade mid 2017 to be their second web developer. The purpose was to create the sales website and the customer space. At the time there were just 50 people working for Blade, now there are 220.
Starting from scratch and reaching a client base of 65 000 customers is a big challenge and of course we need more people to help us, including R&D projects and related products such as our own hardware Shadow Ghost.
We are based in Paris, France, and Mountain View, California, where hiring developers is highly competitive. We started with a step by step process which took around three to four weeks but this process length caused us to miss interesting applicants.
We determined our process was very long and it didn’t reach its desired purpose. Good people get a lot of proposals and often choose the company with the fastest process. So we started to rethink our process:
First principle, stop being afraid of people
We hire people who want to make the best things in the world.
Steve Jobs
The first is a technical test: developers who come to us already have a job or have done internships and personal projects. We have to believe them about their skills they market to us, and this for three reasons:
- they are leaving a job for another, to start a new challenge. It is also a leap into unknown for them
- Recruitment won’t ever be an exact science, there is always a risk. In France there is a four month trial period for every new work contract.
- It is hard to assess every aspect of a candidate (skill fit, motivation fit, cultural fit) but working as a true hiring team with teammates, HR and founders helped us improve the chances of success.
We want the best people and to give them the best candidate experience possible. We offer a pleasant work experience in both of our offices, with good conditions and an inspriring atmosphere. Our used technologies are modern with solutions like Symfony, Mongo and Node.js and open to further improvements. Obviously we have the will to change the way the public perceives the PC. And People want to join us for these vision and goal.
The new process now takes half a day and we know immediately if we are comfortable with the applicant or not: First an HR interview, a dev interview (with technical assessment), meeting with a founder (yes, every hiring is so important to us that our founders meet with every potential hire!) then a decision and hiring proposal.
Conclusion
it works!
We hired very nice and involved people in a short time-frame and what matters the most: they are here for the long run!
