Hiring Engineers at accuRx
10 lessons our Engineering team has learnt in 2021 and plans for 2022
accuRx has seen huge growth through 2021 — not least to our Engineering team. This year, our team has grown by two and a half times while hiring 29 brilliant new members of staff across seniority levels. These include:
- 22 Product Engineers
- 4 DevOps Engineers
- 3 Engineering Managers
This blog post shares 10 key lessons we’ve learnt through our 2021 engineering recruitment drive and the team’s exciting plans for new accuRx engineering roles in 2022.
accuRx’s 10 lessons for hiring top engineers:
1) Know the candidate experience inside-out
For the first five months of 2021, we engineering managers immersed ourselves in all parts of the interview process. We became experts in our application tracking system, responding directly to candidates, setting up interview times, sending out take home exercises and supplying feedback. This direct interaction was invaluable as it gave us clear insight into what our candidates were experiencing and enabled us to build rapport with them.
2) Do reach-outs on recruiting and network platforms
As engineering managers, we dedicated more time to sending out sourcing emails and found that engineers were more likely to respond to reach outs from people already in the role. We look forward to two engineers joining us in 2022 who initially responded to messages like these.
3) Grow your recruiting team
The engineering hiring market moves fast and, in January 2021, we were struggling to keep pace. We realised we weren’t able to respond to candidates or progress them through the hiring process quickly enough. As incredible as the few members of the Talent Team we had at the time were, it was a lot to ask for them to solely prioritise engineering applications while accuRx is also hiring right the way across the company.
To help, accuRx needed to grow our recruiting team. So the Talent team made two key hires in the spring: a technical recruiter, Lauren (our now not-so-new Talent Associate), and Maria (Candidate Experience Coordinator). Each quickly got to grips with our previous way of working and smoothed out the process as we built our recruiting capacity.
4) Build trust with recruiters
Given we’re still a relatively small team here at accuRx, we also work with external recruiters to help us hire. At the start of 2021, we had a mixed experience with external recruiters. But by the end of the year, we’d established strong working relationships with three recruiters who closely listened to our feedback and were excited by our mission. We now have a high level of trust with these few recruiters and many of our engineers at accuRx have come through this route.
5) Perfect your pitch
As engineering managers, we did our research to understand how best to pitch our roles in job ads and experimented with our job descriptions to see what could help us attract the best applications. We took inspiration from other companies when we weren’t sure how to approach something e.g. hiring an engineer with specific data experience. We also made our job descriptions clear about our salary ranges and benefits.
6) Equip candidates for success
We also made our hiring process transparent for candidates, to give everyone the best chance of understanding how to prepare for interviews and tasks. The aim is to give everyone applying an equal chance of understanding what to prepare for in the interview. Maria offers candidates at the final stage a prep call to answer any questions about the final interviews. We’ve found this can help candidates to feel ready and confident for their interview, having had any lingering questions already answered.
No matter what the outcome of an interview we provide good feedback to candidates, aware that they have invested time with us. We hope the feedback will prove useful to them in the future and help them to understand how we came to the decision (even if they may not necessarily agree with it).
7) Equip interviewers for success
This year, we also invested time to improve the format of interviews. We now provide prompts to questions, guidance on how to determine what level the candidate demonstrated in the interview and how to write supporting evidence for that decision — and we wrote this all in collaboration with engineers!
8) Use engineers to hire engineers
Who better to hire engineers than the people who live and breathe the same profession?! That’s why we got our current engineering team more involved, particularly in assessing exercise submissions and running the final technical interviews. We want engineers to feel confident in being able to run an interview and give good quality feedback.
As we’ve grown, we’ve also onboarded engineering managers into the hiring decision process. Engineering managers run the first stage competency interview, deciding both whether to progress a candidate and also making the final decision based on interview feedback. We regularly rotate owning the hiring process. This gives engineering managers time to focus on both recruitment and other projects, and has enabled us to share the responsibility for new engineering hiring across the team.
9) Understand the value of take home exercises
We introduced a take home exercise for engineering roles, and have devised a system to assess submissions across our engineering team. We’ve set out agreed expectations of how quickly to get back to engineers and aim to take no more than 30 minutes to review and submit a scorecard.
We use dedicated Slack channels for engineers to share what they have learnt and help others understand how we review submissions. We’re aware that take home exercises are not always loved in the tech industry but we’ve found that they give us a high level of confidence about key aspects of the engineering role. Interestingly enough, we have created an exercise that is similar to one the team solved in the early stages of accuRx.
10) Make the candidate experience the best it can be
Given how sought-after engineers are, applicants almost always have other opportunities they’re considering at the time of hiring. Because of that, we’ve honed our hiring process to ensure we provide the best candidate experience possible.
That’s not just about being friendly in interviews or accommodating around a candidate’s schedule, but about painting a picture of what life at accuRx is like. We publicly share things such as our info on our engineering away days, roadmap, progression information and appear on podcasts and other media to get our mission across. This shows candidate engineers the impactful and meaningful work they can do if they join accuRx.
The year ahead: Engineering plans for 2022
As 2022 approaches, we’re determined to build on the lessons shown above as we expand the team further. We plan to continue to hire well into the year and have developed our hiring goals for the first six months. This covers both how our engineering recruitment feeds into accuRx’s strategy and our ambitious objectives to improve the diversity of our workforce.
This year, we improved on the diversity of our engineering team but are aware that we have an imbalance in our most senior technical roles. We’ll continue to work on ways to reach more candidates to consider us and invest more in inclusion projects in the workplace. We’ve worked hard to bring engineers into the team and want to support all engineers growing their careers to feel included in the company.
In 2022, we plan to grow our product teams and make key hires in Security Engineering and Data Engineering. accuRx engineers play a key role in the company’s mission to improve communication between healthcare teams and patients. That means our engineers get to build products that make a meaningful difference to both healthcare professionals and patients. A great example of this is RecordView. We’re always looking to innovate and create more new, exciting products for users in primary and secondary healthcare.
If this post has piqued your interest, check out our roles on accuRx and read more about our work on our Medium page.
