How to Ensure Great Talent: Our Technical Hiring Process

Vetting technical talent is tough for any team, let alone a startup. Not only are you looking for the usual technical skills — coding proficiency, UX design, cloud computing, etc. — you also need someone with a high level of adaptability, creativity, and bias for action to navigate the scrappy startup space. With limited funds and already higher than average turnover rates, it’s a huge setback for startups to onboard misaligned talent.

At Remedy, we’ve honed our technical hiring process to ensure strong technical skills, a proactive attitude, and effective communication. Take a look into our comprehensive approach to reach team excellence:

Our Interview Process

We break up our hiring process into three distinct interview rounds:

1. Technical & Behavioral Screening

The goal of beginning with a screening round is to narrow down the pool of candidates so that resources aren’t being wasted on poor candidates in later stage interviews.

During Remedy’s hour-long screening round, we look for fit in not only high-level technical abilities, but also communication skills, leadership style, and delivery approach.

1. Technical Skills: To assess technical skills, we dive into the interviewee’s understanding of general technologies, in addition to their primary specialization (such as React, Python, DevOps, etc.) by asking about their prior work experiences. We also check their familiarity with the agile methodologies and frameworks we employ in our development processes to ensure alignment in work styles.
2. Soft Skills: We look for candidates who are proactive, solutions-oriented, creative, adaptable, outgoing, and fast-learning. In order to evaluate whether the interviewee possesses these skills, we ask situational questions vetted by our leadership team of tech experts. These questions require a candidate to react to or work through complex hypothetical situations that help us evaluate how a candidate will perform in a fast-changing and stressful environment.

2. Deep-Dive Technical Interview

At the end of the day, a technical hire is only as good as their technical ability. We need to understand a candidate’s technical knowledge to gauge if they will be able to deliver on projects that require specific technical capabilities, such as Node.js, Python, Flask, React Native, etc.

To assess these skills, one of Remedy’s lead engineers has an in-depth technical discussion with the candidate, tailored to the interviewee’s skillset.

These discussions include:

• Detailed technical questions about the core programming languages and frameworks the candidate is proficient in
• Workflow management knowledge checks to assess familiarity with systems like Scrum and Kanban
• Live-coding exercises that practically evaluate the candidate’s problem-solving approach and coding proficiency
• Red herring problems that require candidates to navigate conflicting requirements we provide to assess their ability to calmly balance conflicting stakeholder needs and high-pressure situations
• Improvement requests that ask engineers to improve upon their initial solutions to evaluate whether they think critically about their own output and are action-oriented

In addition to asking about technical knowledge, Remedy looks for industry expertise in candidates. Because we work in highly regulated industries, such as healthcare and fintech, we look for past experience and knowledge of these verticals to minimize the learning curve once someone joins our team. Understanding how to handle data within each field is key to building quickly and safely, reducing liability.

3. Culture Fit Interview

Finding a culture fit can be the difference between having to staff a new Product Manager each year and retaining the same passionate core tech team for 3+ years. Because Remedy’s tech teams fully integrate into our partners’ internal teams and communication channels, we make sure to hire folks who are personable, communicative, and genuinely care about our partners’ missions.

Once we’ve ensured that a candidate is up-to-par technically, we finish off the interview process with a culture fit interview led by one of our operations managers. During this interview, we look for:

• Problem-Solving Approach: Are they solutions-oriented and proactive? Our teams don’t just deliver on lists of requirements, they proactively help define product strategy.
• Adaptability: How do they handle changes and unexpected challenges? Startups are bound to encounter pivots and obstacles that we help them work through.
• Outcome Orientation: Do they focus on the big picture and deliver results? We don’t measure the success of our teams based on feature output; we care about helping partners’ reach business goals such as product traction, user engagement, revenue growth, and higher valuations.
• Communication Skills: Are they clear, concise, and consistent in their communication style? Given the collaborative nature of our work both within our own teams and with our partners, the ability to communicate is a must.

If a candidate exhibits all these criteria and passes all interview rounds with flying colors, we extend an offer.

Post-Hire: Our Training and Onboarding Process

How long would you say it really takes to know someone? At Remedy, we say about three months. While interviews are a great and necessary introduction to someone’s work abilities, they can’t unveil everything about a person. That’s why we have a Trial Period.

After we hire a new employee, they go through a three-month period where we feel out the chemistry. During this time, an employee goes through a traditional two-week onboarding process before integrating into a project team. This allows us to learn an employee’s working style and identify strengths or weaknesses and determine if the weaknesses are solvable through training and time.

The Trial Period is also a two way street — while we’re evaluating an employee, they’re doing the same. During the three months, HR regularly checks in with the individual during periodic meetings to give and gather feedback, ensuring we are meeting the candidate’s expectations. By doing so, we catch misalignment early on and reduce the risk of high turnover rates, which plague most startups.

At the end of the Trial Period, there is an in-depth meeting between the individual and their manager to review the last three months of work, comb through feedback, and celebrate the conclusion of the trial period.

Overall, the Trial Period ensures that:

• We catch working style red flags early on to assess if they are addressable
• The candidate’s expectations are met to avoid quick turnover and wasted resources
• We can evaluate an individual’s strengths to see where they will have the most success and provide the most value to Remedy

If you’re looking to scale your internal tech team, hopefully this provides some inspiration for ensuring your newest talent aligns with your company goals. Alternatively, if this process sounds like a headache, remember there’s always outsourcing. Check out our blog “How To Choose a Technical Partner” to read about how we recommend approaching scaling your team with an external partner.

Either way, remember that your people are out there, you just need to find them. Good luck interviewing!

Originally published at https://www.remedyproduct.com on July 9, 2024.