How eight engineers were recruited by Badoo in less than 24 hours
Hello everyone! My name’s Jairo and I’m Engineering Manager at Badoo’s offices here in London.
For the past seven years, I’ve been actively involved in the selection process as an interviewer, but I’ve also had quite a lot of experience on the other side. I know that looking for a new job can be a slow and painful process. But at Badoo, we’re starting to do things differently.
In this article I’m going to show you how eight of our engineers were offered a job at Badoo in less than 24 hours.
UPDATE: Interested in attending the next Badoo’s Moscow Recruitment Event? It takes place on 18th — 19th November. Find out more here.
Finding a new job is more than just sending out a CV
Everything starts with a “What if…?”
You might have thought about applying for a position in a different company, sometimes motivated by all those recruiters who message you. Perhaps a former colleague talked to you into the possibility of changing your life and moving abroad. Or maybe you simply feel that a change of workplace will give you the extra motivation you need. A change sounds great initially, but it’s never that simple.
Usually, calls with recruiters are scheduled during working hours, which is always tricky. During these calls, you will be asked to take a code test that, if you are lucky enough, will be during your weekend time. When it comes to the interview stage, you might have to come up with various excuses to leave the office and end up having a formal phone call on a bench in a nearby park (in the cold!). Taking numerous midweek holidays may look strange to your current employer, and after a while, you begin to feel as though you’re cheating on your partner.
Many different excuses, more than ten hours of your time and infinite mid-meeting poker faces later — you receive an offer you’re not satisfied with, or perhaps don’t receive an offer at all. It’s then that you begin to wonder: Why have you put in so much effort? Have you learnt anything? Gained anything? The experience is likely to put you off applications for a while.
And if the job search is tricky, the hiring is even harder. From a company’s perspective, targeting candidates that already have a job is a gamble, and freeing up their schedules is a never an easy task.
Badoo’s Hiring Event
Many companies all over the world organise hiring events with a short turnover (1–2 days) to approach talented engineers — so this idea was nothing new. Having said that, it was the first time for Badoo, so we decided to go all out and host the event in our very own offices over a single weekend.
As the Badoo brand is really well-known in Eastern European countries, and well perceived amongst engineers there, we thought it would be a good idea to test out this shorter selection process in our Moscow office.
The online coding test
Before being invited to the weekend event, we sent out an online test to reduce the number of applicants and to ensure we interview the best fit for our team.
They had to be able to read through and understand technical requirements, as well as give a workable solution in a set amount of time. To ensure this, the time limit had to be adjusted to avoid people with the right solution spending extra time improving the code. Basically, get things done.
For this test, we used an online coding platform able to run code with different inputs, compare the output, then score and automatically rank the candidates. We designed a 90 minute test consisting of three algorithmic problems in Swift/Objective-C/Java and 5 a/b/c/d platform specific problems.
Going straight to onsite interviews
The top 36 performers for iOS and Android were invited to our Moscow office over one weekend. It was then that we checked if these candidates, who performed exceptionally in the code test, were the right fit for Badoo.
To do this, we prepared a pool of questions and problems. In a series of three interviews, the interviewers assessed the same skills with the same questions in the same amount of time: culture fit, platform specific knowledge, architectural skills and communication.
We designed the event so that these interviews took place with the least delay possible so that we could make job offers on the same day. Everything needed to be synchronised to give the interviewers enough time to meet up and share their opinions on the performance of each candidate.
We finished the weekend exhausted, but we’d achieved an important result: eight job offers. Most of these aces that we interviewed have already relocated and are now working with us and enjoying Badoo’s office life in London.
Lessons learned
This was the first event of its kind for Badoo. It took three weeks to organise and we interviewed a total of 36 mobile developers. Out of these we made eight job offers.
The event was great for our prospective candidates, as it cut down the recruitment process dramatically. Once they had taken the online code test, they could get from the first interview to a final job offer in just 2.5 hours. And all in just one day.
For Badoo, it was even better. It gave us the opportunity to get to know all the candidates in a short period of time, reducing costs and allowing us to hire talented candidates quickly and efficiently.
Overall we count this event as a great success and are currently replicating it.
So, if you are an expert in your platform, if you are a problem solver and if you are able to back up your solutions on a whiteboard in front of our engineers, then you are one of us! ❤
UPDATE: Interested in attending the next Badoo’s Moscow Recruitment Event? It takes place on 18th — 19th November. Find out more here.
