Interviewing developers remotely

We are growing fast at Clipchamp and hiring great developers has been a priority for us this year. “Clipchamp is hiring!” even became a meme in the Brisbane developers community for a while. When the pandemic struck, we moved early to completely remote work to keep our staff safe and do our part to reduce the spread of the virus.

Did our hiring efforts slow down as a result? Not one bit. This presented new challenges for us. Now we had to interview developers fully remote. To add further challenges we had just changed the interview process for developers and now we had to change it again.

Conducting “remote on-site interviews” meant that we had to set up a video call but also provide a way for candidates to code and create diagrams. We also wanted to alleviate the inevitable nerves and ensure that candidates could get started quickly.

The tools

We were using Coderpad for our technical screens so it was easy to start using it for the remote on-site interviews too.

Online whiteboards were a bit more challenging — most online whiteboards are built for teams so they require you to create an account and sign in. Since we aim to enable candidates to simply jump in straight away we went with Draw Chat because anyone can interact with the whiteboard we create if they have the link. It doesn’t have many features but that’s fine — interview candidates don’t have time to learn how a new tool works before they use it.

“There was no setup needed, everything was super simple. All the google meetings were sent to my personal email and for other aspects (coding challenge, systems design), there was a link to open and I was in ready to code or design” — Saajid Joosab — Software Developer

We used Google Hangouts for the video calls because it’s easy for candidates to jump into a call without installing anything or signing up.

The People

Because the interview process was still new, we only had a few developers at Clipchamp who were comfortable interviewing initially. With all of our new applications, it meant that these developers were roped into interviewing very frequently.

Similar to our process pre-pandemic, every developer who wants to be involved in the hiring process has the opportunity to do so. To solve this we asked every interviewer to find another developer to shadow them so that they could learn how to conduct the interviews as well. Shadowing interviews over video call is pretty easy — just dial in, mute yourself, and turn off the camera. Just make sure that the interviewer introduces the shadow interviewer at the start of the call so that the candidate knows why there’s a mysterious lurker in their interview.

We gather feedback from all of our new hires so that we can constantly improve. For instance, we used to use simple coding puzzles for our technical screening questions but many developers are really put off by these types of puzzle questions in an interview. Even some of the people we hired said that they weren’t a fan of these questions. But we were only asking these screening questions in the first place to save the candidate the trouble of coming into the office for multiple rounds of interviews if they didn’t meet the minimum programming requirements.

Once all of our interviews became remote, a technical screening step didn’t make sense anymore so we simply scrapped it and started candidates on the first technical interview instead. This saved us and the candidates from having to do a whole extra interview and gave our candidates a much better interviewing experience.

It hasn’t been an easy journey, however, our new developers have been excited and motivated to start work with us, so we must be doing something right! Like the meme says, Clipchamp is hiring. So if you’d like to join our team, apply via the careers page linked below.

Clipchampions empower everyone to become a creator of awesome video content. Our work has a real-time impact on over 10M people and counting from basically everywhere except Antarctica. We’re transforming the way people create and we’re only just getting started! See our current opening here >> https://clipchamp.com/en/company/careers/