Interviewing in the time of Corona

Like many companies across the UK right now, Apolitical made the decision to ask employees to work from home in the interest of their health and safety.

While we’re all incredibly fortunate to be in an industry that allows us to conduct business as usual remotely, one thing that has been an interesting challenge is interviewing for technical roles.

We’re currently trying to find a backend developer with strong devops capabilities to join our engineering team and have had to get creative in our methods.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but hopefully will help others who are also trying to keep interviewing as normal.

Zoom:

Say what you will about video streaming services, but now more than ever are we grateful to live in an age where video conferencing is possible. We like to use Zoom for our interview calls. We tend to structure the interview into two parts, where the candidate can meet multiple members of the team. Having one Zoom link lets the candidate stay in one place while those involved in the interview can join and leave the call when they’re needed.

Think of it as a virtual meeting room.

Live Share:

As part of our interview process, we ask the candidate to pair with one of our engineers on a piece of code from our codebase. Screensharing can be difficult, especially with lag and having to swap control back and forth, so we’re experimenting with using Visual Studio’s Live Share.

This tool allows both the candidate and interviewer to access the code, making it easier to collaborate.

General considerations:

It’s important we find not only technically great developers, but colleagues who will be happy working in a small team for a mission driven company. Usually, at the end of the interview, we invite the candidate to have a coffee with the rest of the product team.

This isn’t part of the formal interview, but it is a good opportunity for the candidate to meet the other people they may be working with, get a feel for the company and how we work together and ask any other questions that might help them make their decision. It’s also nice for both us and them to get to know each other a little better.

Over video, having the entire team join the Zoom call would be excessive, so instead, we can try to ask questions that tells us a bit more about the candidate as a person and allows them to have a relaxed, informal chat with us.

Since video calls can be a little stilted, some question ideas to get this get-to-know-you conversation started are:

• What’s the most interesting thing you’ve read recently?
• Is there anything we didn’t ask you that you’d like us to know about you?
• If you won a holiday to anywhere, where would it be to and why?
• What is your favourite thing about your career?
• What is the best gift you were ever given?
• Tell us about something that made you happy recently.

Conclusion:

The situation we find ourselves in right now is an unusual one and not one we’ve experienced in our lifetime — and hopefully never will again! Naturally, many of us are trying to figure things out as we go along, and while these are some things we’re trying right now, we may find we need to change things up and we’ll adapt to that.

With that being said, if any readers have their own ideas of how to make interviewing easier in this new remote age we find ourselves in, we’d love to read your comments below. Or, if you want to try out our interview process for yourself, you’ll find our open roles here.