Joining our Tech team: A cheat sheet on why and how to become one of us!
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Who are we? Why do we believe that the way we approach work gives us a competitive advantage and enables each team member to grow professionally? What are the steps you have to follow in order to become one of us? Learn all about us, Dialectica’s Tech Team, and the hiring process we’ve created alongside our Talent Acquisition team and get ready to join us.
Who are we?
At Dialectica, we know that technology can shape and disrupt a whole industry globally, while speed is everything in the business world and that’s why we invest heavily in our proprietary technology and data assets that enable us to deliver more value faster. Our company’s mission is to innovate how business professionals share knowledge and gain access to primary research worldwide and our technology is what powers this mission and helps us achieve it.
At the moment, our department counts over 25 individuals and the vast majority of our members are based in Athens. Our growing teams are cross-functional, complete with Front-End and Back-End engineers, QA, DevOps, Product Managers and Designers and we are recruiting for more Front-End, Back-End and Full Stack Engineers.
We use Scrum to organize our software development process. We work with 2-week sprints, do our sprint planning, sprint reviews and retrospectives. And, of course, our daily stand ups. We also use Kanban (with a limited preset capacity) to handle urgent bug fixing and avoid disrupting our product development process.
Scrum embodies our belief of empowered and autonomous teams. However, we are not dogmatic. We believe that methodologies are tools to be used and not an end goal by themselves. If we collectively believe that there might be a better way to do something or that we can test a different approach, then we go ahead and give it a try. Then we evaluate the end result based on data and adjust things in order to improve next time. We try to be agile not only in our software development, but also on a process level.
How do we approach work?
Our mentality about the way we work is based on three principles: efficiency, effectiveness, professional development and growth.
We encourage everyone in the team to speak up and voice their opinion when they see that something can be improved. We are open but pragmatic, and we value transparency and candor. If you bring a suggestion to the team in order to improve things and provide data to support it, then we will openly discuss it as a team and adopt it if it makes sense.
We also recognize that our working relationship with the company is a two-way street: we put the work in and the company rewards us with our salary and our benefits or rewards, as well as the opportunities to learn and grow as professionals. We put the second on an equal pedestal with the first, because investing in our people is one of our core values, both for Dialectica and for our team.
When it comes to product management, we put great emphasis on product discovery and validation and we firmly believe that a feature is considered ‘done’ when it is validated with customers (i.e. when we have verified that it fulfills the purpose that we built it for), and not just when released in production. We also prefer process over ad-hoc heroics. As such, we have codified our approach to product management in a set of principles that we try to follow when building our products:
- We take a customer-centric approach
- We value data over opinions
- We strive for outcomes over outputs
- We think big but start small
- We favor simplicity over complex solutions
How to join us?
Our team focuses on building Dialectica’s own proprietary technology and has a clear vision to roll out more information services software products in the future. Over the last year we’ve hired almost 20 Software Engineers and we are actively recruiting. In order to identify the best tech talent out there, we’ve built the following robust hiring process for our department, alongside our experienced Talent Acquisition team:
- Application: We use our initial application process to understand how you approach software development or design problems and see how you’ve put your skills and knowledge into practice in the past; either via an application form and/or via a programming test. These questions are our first point of reference for your work. Before we look at your CV, your time in the industry, your Github or your portfolio, we’ll look at your answers.
- First Interview (Phone/Video): This is an opportunity to get to know each other and discuss your experience and the way you’re currently working. During our call, we’ll talk about the projects you were involved in in your career, challenges you’ve faced, your perception of an ideal work environment and working relationship with your supervisor and all logistics (compensation, benefits, relocation options if you are currently based in a different country, etc.) and why you want to work for Dialectica. We will share with you our team’s structure, current projects, challenges and opportunities, and how your day to day will look like. A successful call leaves us with a clear picture of the way you frame problems and how you take design decisions. If we see you can handle software development problems end-to-end, communicate your work clearly, have the right experience and skills for our team, we’ll invite you to the next stage.
- Example Task: In this stage, we’ll give you a small task to see how you respond to a real-life challenge. We usually give you 5–7 days for you to work on it. Please note that we welcome any amount of research that helps you come to your solution. Then we review it, discuss your approach and answer your questions in a brief call meeting, where we will also challenge your choices to get an understanding of how you make decisions and the trade-offs they bring.
- Second Interview: Now it’s time for our team leaders and executives to meet you and for you to meet them as well and chat about how you reflect on yourself, your strengths and your weaknesses, your career, what skills you would like to develop and how you envision your future within Dialectica. Understanding whether you fit our team and company culture is also really important and this is why throughout our hiring process, we will help you get to know our values, who we are, where we’re going and how we’re getting there.
- Job Offer: With the interview, case study and final executive interview, we have everything we need to make a decision. If you’re successful, our PeopleOps team will inform you regarding your candidacy, book a call to share the offer details followed by the written version of it.
