Customer Spotlight — Hiring With Checkly

How ACELR8 and Checkly have worked together to find the best talent in an open, engaging company.

Checkly has been a close client of ours this year. In that time, our Talent Partner Denise Chan has worked with them to create a new hiring structure and technical testing insight. To learn more about Checkly and what makes their company tick, Denise talked to Daniel Paulus, Director of Engineering over at Checkly. Here’s how their conversation went:

Denise: What attracted you to work with Checkly?

What attracted me was the slogan — “It’s very delightful”.

If you are a developer and you try to use the product, you instantly get the idea, and you can see the value.

The other thing, of course, was the founders. They had successful companies before and I have very high confidence that they know what they’re doing.

Denise: What is it that you love about your job?

Engineers always enjoy doing Greenfield projects, because there’s so much freedom.

When I joined the startup, it was basically just four people plus the founding team.

We were scaling up from four engineers to three teams of engineers. This makes it something like a Greenfield project, but with engineering benefits. This is what I love right now — I have a lot of influence and impact in the future, especially in engineering.

Denise: What roles are you hiring for?

We’re looking for Senior Backend Developers, with preferably Software as a Service experience.

Also, we’re open to hiring another mid-level to junior developer as the third hire to complete our backend team. We’re also looking for a Site Reliability Engineer.

Denise: What is your ideal candidate?

Ideally, we would want to hire someone who has done node.js work mostly. But we are open to also looking at other ecosystems. Very senior with software as a service, cloud-native, backend development, and node.js would be a huge plus. But, if you have done something else, then that’s also fine.

Denise: Favourite memory at Checkly?

I’ll give you two:

The first was when we hired a software engineering intern. I was excited to see that she got to deploy her first production code on the fourth day with the company. We invest a lot of energy into having a great onboarding process and to see someone who’s really junior being successful in such a short time was really great.

Secondly, it’s the in-person meetings. We are a remote company, which means everybody works from home or a co-working space. But, twice a year, we have a retreat where all Checkly employees get together from all around the world.

We meet for a week in person, just to socialise and to get to know each other. That’s one of my favourite memories so far.

Denise: What is the best part about the culture at Checkly?

Our great feedback culture, which is important to me. You can see this reflected in the company culture.

In the company, it’s very easy to make it possible for engineers to focus on one thing. There’s no insane time pressure on anything, and people get to focus their time on the important things.

Denise: What’s the best-hidden perk of your job?

I think the best-hidden perk would probably be that, if you’re a developer yourself, it’s pretty rewarding to work on a tool targeted at making developers’ lives easier. Also, we use Checkly internally for our monitoring and testing. We use our product, and I think this is probably the coolest perk to get.

Denise: Describe Checkly in just three words

Delightfully Active Monitoring.

Denise: How would you describe working with ACELR8?

The work was very collaborative. You at ACLER8 have a network of recruiters, and they have a lot of experience.

We can discuss how we can improve our process, leveraging the knowledge that you bring into the company. This was something that I really, really enjoyed,

The same goes for building a shared understanding of the roles that we are looking for. The active communication, discussing the details, looking at candidate profiles together and seeing what works and what doesn’t, that was good.

Mainly though, I was really happy with how you organised everything. All this coordination of candidates, it was taken care of so well. It was really making my life a lot easier. It’s the combination of organising a small pipeline and doing it very accurately with good quality.

I never had to complain once. Secondly, actively working on figuring out what are the right candidate profiles from day one — that was really helpful for me.

That was our conversation with Daniel at Checkly, showing how ACELR8 can really help a company push forward to find the right hires in a fast, efficient fashion. As an embedded recruitment service, we can better understand your culture, structure, and hiring needs.

Interested in joining Checkly? They are currently recruiting. You can find their careers page here.