What to ask for before your first day on a new job

This story is about a so called “test day” — a day to meet your future coworkers, test yourself and sync expectations both your and the company, before anyone says “YES”.

Nice opportunity to work together and finally play with colorful post-its :)

What makes the Test day an important day in your life

Changing a place of work is always a huge step: you decide to take a vague road, again, only someday to figure out whether it works for you or not.

We all been there. We understand.

But your willingness and efforts to live better should be rewarded! And you don’t have to wait and worry for your first day after signing an offer — instead ask your future company for a test day.

And if you consider Innocode as a potential future family 😍, we want to give you an opportunity to come and work with us for one day.

We added a bit of humor to this story, because it’s who we are, but all the things here are real and serious.

We even take vague roads now after working for years in the company. Here — foggy road to customers hytte in Bergen.

Can I come to a test day?

We have 2 ways to get you a test day at Innocode: either you apply to one of our vacancies and our COO, Ira invites you, or you send us an email explaining your need and we get back to you.

Important: if you are a programmer, please, bear in mind that we work preferrably with this stack of technologies: Ruby, Elixir, Angular, React, iOS and Android, Docker, Kubernetes in Lviv (+ .Net since 2018) and WordPress in Kyiv. Meaning, if you code in Python or C, that would be considered as a plus, but we don’t use them. Of course, if you are PMs, QAs, or designer it’s easier for you since these professions can fit in any team ;)

How does the test day look like? Do I need to wear my bowtie?!

Wear fake glasses and a bowtie if that’s real you — for us not what you wear matters, but who you are :)

You can even wear your pajamas.

Agenda for the test days varies, though in general it looks like that:

11:00 — meeting at the office. Your today’s mentor or our office manager shows you around, gets you some drink (no, not that drink) and introduces you to the team. For the test day you can bring your own laptop, or we’ll prepare a working station for you ahead. Also, we ask you to sign NDA.

11:30 — setting the goals for the day with your mentor and the team. Usually these are 2 tasks: one compulsory and the other one optional aka “would be a plus”. Overall, you’ll have around 4 hrs to complete the it!

This photo is funny. Our mentors usually don’t wear ninzya headset, don’t worry. We can’t stop laughing when making this photo — so we have the right to use it finally, don’t we?!

13:00 — lunch for everyone! We love food, love jokes (hopefully you have already understood our Norwegian humor from this article) and would love to get to know you better.

The best way to do that, we believe, is during food consumption! If you have concerns regarding your potential working conditions like “do they really have such a flexible routine?” etc., lunch is the best time to ask questions and hear real answers!

Lyosha’s face when asked if he works on weekend.

17:00 — presenting the results of your test work and sharing the overall impressions of the day. Normally, by that time both sides already know whether expectations have been met.

Sometimes we hold “test days” for students. Here, students from Вільно.Academy came to learn design, frontend and QA.

What awaits me after the Test day?

If that’s a test day after interview, usually we write an official mail with “Yes” + offer or “No”+explanation already the next day. And it’s your turn to say your “Yes” 🙌.

Next, your first official day at Innocode begins, but that’s a totally different story :)

Have you ever had a test day? How was it? What you, as a candidate, would like to learn during such a day? Tell us everything!

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Wanna know more about us? Are we hiring? Yeap. Take a look at our job list here and feel free to explore this Medium!