Maintaining an Equitable Engineering Hiring Process

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Loopio has been steadily growing these past number of years, and we have particularly ambitious goals for our Engineering teams. Part of that growth includes hiring thoughtfully for our existing teams, and adding new functional areas into the department.

We are committed to building a world-class workplace for all of our employees, and we recognize that that employee journey does not begin on the first day of work. It starts with the very first touchpoint with our brand and the recruitment team that a candidate (and eventually a Looper) will have!

We have put into practice a hiring experience that strives to be equitable and inclusive for all candidates, regardless of the hiring decision. Here’s our approach.

Our Principles Ensure A Fair Process

In order to ensure a transparent and inclusive process, we are guided by a few principles:

Respect

• We want to start on the right foot and ensure candidates are identified correctly. We ask for accurate name pronunciation and optional pronouns — optional is important to us because we never want candidates to feel forced to disclose information that they are not ready to share. We model this by sharing ours in the interview process
• Candidate experience is a top priority for us and we aim to ensure our full interview process does not take more than 35 days on average for a majority of our roles — this is from recruiter phone interview to offer. We also recognize that some leadership roles will have additional steps and we clearly communicate this in advance
• We provide post-interview feedback for candidates that are interested. We send out a calendar invite that allows them to book a time for a feedback call directly after a technical/skills interview has been conducted

Clarity

• The interview process and average timelines are outlined in the first conversation with the Talent Partner — this helps manage expectations of what will come next
• If ever our timelines exceed our ideal, we will reach out to let candidates know of the status of the interview or role so that they are not in the dark
• Our Talent Partners who shepherd the process are accessible and available throughout the interview process for any questions and follow-up conversations

Fairness

• Each role has a standardized template that is used by our interviewers
• Interviewers are all required to provide scores across 3–5 core role requirements and their final assessment before we debrief on the candidate
• Interview feedback and scorecards are blind to the interviewers to minimize the potential for bias and influence from co-interviewers

Loopio Recruits From A Wide Variety of Talent Pools

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The software-and-tech industry is a notoriously male-dominated, white world. We want to hire diverse candidates, with diversity cutting across the entire spectrum of gender, race, age, sexual identity, and educational/experience background.

Job Boards Provide Access to A Diversified Candidate Pool

While we do post on all the usual job boards — LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor — we have also partnered with organizations that seek to bridge the network gap and break down barriers between under-represented minorities and career opportunities. We work in partnership with organizations such as Black Professionals In Tech Network (BPTN) , QueerTech, Venture for Canada, and Palette Skills to present career opportunities to those who might not otherwise have access to or awareness of them.

Job Postings Are Written To Be Specific

Every hiring manager is provided with a guide on creating inclusive job descriptions. Some ways we think about this are around the impact of gendered language, and how it sustains gender inequality, so our job postings are reviewed for gender-neutrality. We focus on unbiased and objective job descriptions — we’re not creating a laundry list of unnecessary requirements, and instead focus on the essentials needed in the role.

Technical and Behavioural Interviews Provide Clarity on Role Requirements and Allow Candidates to Demonstrate Their Capabilities

A typical interview process within the Engineering organization kicks off with a 30-minute call with our Talent Partner. The conversation is structured to provide the candidates more detail about the opportunity (team, role, and culture) and offers us a deeper view into their background and experience. This call allows us to determine if there is alignment on what the role requires and what the candidate seeks. As an example, a candidate who wants to work in COBOL would not find any good opportunities at Loopio because our platform requires an interest in developing in React and PHP.

Following this, a technical skills interview and a behavioural interview are completed as the final interview stage.

Technical Interview Assesses Knowledge and Skills

For a role in the Engineering organization, the technical interview consists of two parts: technical prescreen and technical skills.

The technical prescreening is usually conducted by the Engineering Manager, who is also often the hiring manager for the position. During the 30-minute session, the candidate has the opportunity to demonstrate their technical expertise by completing a mini-challenge, while also learning more about the Engineering department and the organization as a whole. This stage helps both the candidate and the Manager make informed decisions about the upcoming steps in the hiring process.

After the technical prescreen, the technical skills interviews are conducted by the Team Lead and a Senior or Intermediate Developer (depending on the role), usually within the sub team with the open role. As with all interviews, the interview questions follow a structured template that aims to assess technical aptitude on the backend, frontend or full stack (this varies based on the role).

The candidate will then be led through a series of technical questions — mainly focused on problem solving. In this interview, we’re not expecting a perfect response but are measuring for the right level of technical aptitude. As well, we are trying to understand how the candidate approaches the problem. Do they jump right in or do they ask clarifying questions? Do they try to solve the entire problem or do they break it down into a smaller subset and iterate on that?

Additionally, we look to evaluate how they communicate with the interviewers, both to get answers to clarifying questions and to describe their thought process and methods. When asked to review their answer(s), are they able to reason about code and suggest improvements such as naming, performance, and breaking things into functions if they didn’t already?

For a junior developer, we want to know that they have some basic skills and are able to use the information from interviewers to work through the problem solution. For a senior developer, we want to know that they are able to demonstrate understanding and practice of more advanced coding skills and methods.

Behavioural Interview Assesses Soft Skills

Moving on to the behavioural interview, the goal here is to evaluate candidates based on their previous behaviour in a work setting. The premise is that past performance is the best indicator of future performance. At Loopio, this is called the Quest Interview.

Candidates will be asked questions to help discover how the interviewee acted in specific employment-related situations in the past. Interviewers are looking for examples of Loopio values — Grit, Curiosity, Candor, Mastery, and Support. Furthermore, we want to understand how they’re reflecting on past experiences and thoughts around professional growth. We also continue to touch on past work experiences in more depth and its connections to the role.

Throughout the entire process, there is ample opportunity for candidates to ask questions, and they are very much encouraged to do so. The interview process is a two-way street: the candidate is interviewing us as an organization and the interviewers as potential team members as much as we are interviewing them.

Using a Standardized Scoring Rubric Removes Bias from the Decisioning Process

All interviews for the same position are carried out using the same set of questions. Upon interview completion, each interviewer fills out individual scoring rubrics and submits a final rating without discussing their perceptions with others. This ensures that individual evaluations are carried out independently. In a follow-up meeting, the Hiring Manager along with the interview team will then discuss each candidate and evaluation rubric before making a final decision. This allows interviewers to clarify unclear or unspecific feedback, and to identify any potential instances of unconscious bias.

At Loopio, interviewers attend a workshop on Inclusive Interviewing in order to learn methods and techniques for creating objective decision criteria and assessing competency and cultural contribution. The goal of this is to equip them with skills for fairly and effectively finding great hires to join the team while creating an inclusive candidate experience.

Loopio’s recruitment process.

The Offer Presentation Humanizes Candidates

Successful candidates will be contacted by the Hiring Manager to set up what is called an Offer Presentation. In the Offer Presentation, the Talent Partner and Hiring Manager will talk through a slide deck that contains details of the offer that is being made to the candidate such as base salary, benefits, equity options, and paid time off (PTO).

We have heard that this Offer Presentation is typically the clincher. It makes candidates feel very special, that they are sought after and courted. It makes them feel valued and seen as individuals with skills and experiences that were deemed to be so valuable that Loopio wanted to tell them this in person. As far as we know, this is a practice unique to Loopio.

The Proof Is In the Pudding

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In summary, candidates can expect to go through the following steps as part of the interview process for most of our Engineering roles:

1. 30-minute initial call with a Talent Partner
2. 30-minute virtual technical prescreen interview with the Engineering Manager
3. 60- to 90-minute virtual technical interview with the Team Lead or Manager, and Software Developer(s)
4. 60- to 90-minute virtual behavioral interview with the People Team and Hiring Manager
5. 30-minute Offer Presentation

As you can see, the sequence of interviews is not particularly different from any other company. However, we know that ours is a strong process because of the following reasons:

• Candidate feedback is consistently positive, whether or not the interview is a successful one for them. We are told that their experience of the entire process is one of curiosity and compassion — the Loopio team genuinely cares about trying to understand them and their skills, and what they bring to the table
• We have seen rapid growth within EPD in 24 months, including a 70% makeup of the team that has been with Loopio for under two years. These folks would have hired and onboarded fully remotely in this time period. This attraction to Loopio is connected back to our teams, leadership, the work, and growth opportunities that are offered

Loopio provides autonomous, challenging work that allows each employee to master their craft. Our goal is to attract and retain people who are naturally curious, have grit, and are eager to grow and build their careers. Are you one of them? Learn more about How We Hire and come join us!

This article was co-authored by Aida Rahim, Data Scientist on the Data Enablement Team, and Yeniffer Pang-Chung, Director of Talent Experience.