Expanding the web team at N26

Over the last couple of years, web at N26 has come a long way. We’ve re-launched our website, our web app, and are integrating the web platform as an integral part of our product groups. Growing our platform also meant growing our team, and for Hugo and myself, this was a new experience. One we were eager to approach and get right.

The interview process

I hate interviews, you hate interviews. We all hate bad interviews. They are stressful for candidates, for interviewers, and often involve practices that don’t reflect the day-to-day work of the role (I’m looking at you whiteboard coding tests — but that’s a whole other r̶a̶n̶t̶ article).

Hugo and I both felt strongly about the interview process. We wanted to develop a process that was enjoyable for both parties, didn’t demand too much work from either side (we’re all busy), and also gave us and the candidates enough insight to make a decision. So, here’s a brief outline into how we assess a candidate.

The tech challenge

We are not fans of code challenges, they take a long time to build (shout out to the interviewer that asked me to build a full chat-app with React/Relay), a long time to assess, and don’t always give good insights into practical technical skills. We decided to instead supply a small test via email. It’s nothing too cryptic, but it does involve some thinking. It addresses some fundamentals of web development, it’s fun and should take between a few minutes to half an hour to complete. We don’t want to post it up here, but if you’re interested in what this test is, feel free to apply!

Once a candidate has passed this little test, we will ask them to show us something they’ve already done, or build us a little something of their choice if they don’t have anything online — without spending more than an hour or two on it. This can be an open source contribution, a past project, a cool demo they’ve built, a blog post, a tweet-thread, talk at a conference — anything that tells us a little more about them.

The interview itself

At this point we have a decent idea if the candidate will be a good fit, so we invite them in for a face-to-face interview.

We give them a tour of the office, a lovingly-made coffee of their choice and settle down in a meeting room for a chat. We’ll do the standard interview introductions, a bit about me, a bit about Hugo, the team and company, and ask about them while trying to keep the interview friendly and productive. We won’t ask gotchas, riddles, or trick questions, but we’ll talk about the things that matter in the day-to-day: How do they feel about agile and working in cross-functional teams. Do they have any experience in building accessible products. Are they familiar with ARIA patterns and inclusive design. Do they feel more comfortable in a particular aspect of web development, and so on. We’ll have an idea of where the candidate will fit in the team structure, and the type of skills and profile we are looking for to fill this role, so we make sure we tackle the important topics, and give the candidate plenty of time to ask questions, and feel comfortable about working here.

After this, they go on to meet either our CTO or Director of Software Engineering, and we meet up internally to decide how to move forward.

How it worked out

We managed to get a more diverse pool of candidates for our tech roles, by putting effort into finding diverse candidates, or by running workshops with groups around Berlin.

We hired a more diverse team; half of our new hires are women — which still leaves us more balanced to men in the team, especially in senior roles.

By removing the code challenge and having a relatively short test, we were putting a lot of faith into the interview conversation to work out the technical skills of the candidate.That worked out very well for us and the technical skills always kept up with the assessment from the interview.

We’ve learned that the tech-side is the easy bit — coding style and conventions are automated with Prettier and linting. We have an active and positive code-review culture, everybody can get up to speed with how we work and is also able to contribute to our platform.

We strongly believe the hard part of tech is not learning technologies or writing code. Being able to teach and explain difficult concepts, communicate with other people, being considerate to everyone; these are the challenges engineers — or anyone for that matter — face on a regular basis. That’s why we make sure to hire kind humans and skilled software engineers.

Challenges we face

As with most things we learn, there are challenges along the way and things we can continue to improve. Growing the team is no exception. We’d like to share a couple of the challenges we continue to face, and how we are trying to address these going forward.

Interview bias

By making our interviews more conversational, we run the risk of conducting biased interviews. We need to balance how to keep the candidate relaxed and enjoying the interview, while also making sure we cover the important topics in a non-biased way. Informal interviews in tech can often lead to interviewers just hiring people they get on well with. We try do avoid this by having all the points we would like to cover for the role, and making sure we cover them. We also make sure to leave feedback in our recruiting service immediately after the interview. Over time memory gets less accurate. We tend to remember a general feeling more than the actual facts of the conversation. Leaving feedback immediately stops us from recalling things in an unintentionally biased way. Interview bias is a constant learning for us, and we will keep trying to improve this.

Diversity

Trying to hire a more diverse team is hard and feedback hasn’t always been positive. We’ve had replies on twitter with nonsense hashtags, and people complaining it would be discriminatory not to hire men. It’s a challenge to be constructive all the time. We try to point people to the CODE documentary or explain that building a diverse team, does not mean we are not hiring men. Building a diverse team for us is a focus on finding a wider range of candidates, and actively approaching them. It’s also important to be flexible with interviewing, so that we can cater to people who can’t necessarily afford to spend a full day interviewing, or an entire weekend writing a code challenge.

Building a diverse team is more than just percentages. We’ve managed to hire women to our team, but so far have struggled for more senior roles. Part of a strong team culture is having diversity in leadership and senior positions too. We also realise diversity means more than hiring women, and we are looking at ways we can involve more under-represented groups in our hiring process.

Interested in joining our team as we grow?

We’re hiring again, we are looking for applicants at all levels, so checkout out our job description. Apply or reach out to me or Hugo to find out more.