How to get a job @ Sqreen
Part two: the expert screen
This is part two in our series on “How to get a job @ Sqreen”.
A quick recap
Why are we sharing the details of our hiring process? Two reasons:
- To give future Sqreen candidates more information about what to expect during their interview process; and
- To help other startups kickstart the creation of their own hiring process with concrete templates.
Becoming a Sqreener
Joining Sqreen today takes seven steps and looks a little like this:
- Talent Sqreen
- Expert Sqreen
- Technical Sqreen
- Welcome to the Sqreenhouse
- Founder Sqreen
- Reference Sqreen
- Sqreen Offer
Today, we’ll explore in detail the second step, the Expert Sqreen.
What do you mean by expert?
In larger companies, the second step in a hiring process would usually be done by what we call a hiring manager. For example, your Head of Sales may be the hiring manager for an account executive role. But in startups, the line manager may not have role-specific knowledge for every candidate they hire. For example, your CTO might not be the most knowledgable person about mobile development.
As such, at Sqreen the second step is done by a subject matter expert — this could be the hiring manager, it could be a peer or it could even be an external party like an advisor or someone in a similar role in another company (for example, I sometimes do expert calls for Talent Manager roles in other startups).
In Paris as we’re hiring in our back end development team it’ll often be Benoit who leads the Expert Sqreen, for agent roles it’ll be Jb, for sales roles in SF it could be Pierre or Lucas.
What’s an Expert Sqreen?
This consists of a 30-minute video call (we use Zoom).
Like the Talent Sqreen, it has two goals, the first and most important is to give the candidate really concrete information about Sqreen, relevant to the role we’re discussing. That may be explaining our platform, technology and roadmap for product engineering roles; or our current MRR, conversion rates and product market fit for sales roles.
The second is to quickly and painlessly assess if they’re likely to be able to help solve the specific challenges we have, and if they’ll enjoy doing so.
Find an example script for agent engineers that we use on Github here.
The introduction
The Expert Sqreener leading the call starts by thanking the candidate for their time and asking a quick verifying question to let the candidate know they don’t need to start all over again from the beginning. A poor candidate experience often stems from a lack of communication between interviewers, the candidate shouldn’t have to repeat themselves endlessly on basic background information.
This question might be as simple as “I understand you’re currently working at FictionalTechCompanyZ as a technical manager but you’d love to move into a pure tech role — is that correct?”
Then they’ll check what the candidate ‘gets’ about Sqreen from the previous call, to know where they should focus on giving more information, and what has already been understood.
Sharing Sqreen stories
An important part of our Expert Sqreen is giving the candidate insight into why the interviewer joined Sqreen themselves, and why they continue to love what they’re doing. It is also an opportunity to hear about Sqreen from someone who is, by design, more neutral than a recruiter or a founder can be.
It has the added benefit of giving your team members more agency and ownership over the full hiring process. I count on them to help convince candidates to join us, in a very authentic non-salesy way; they don’t simply slot into the process as a yes / no gateway.
Role-specific questions
The crux of the Expert Sqreen can be found here — in the asking of role-specific questions. For a security engineer role, Jb may ask: “Have you ever exploited an SQL injection?” For the back end, Benoit may wonder how much the candidate knows about the databases they don’t use everyday. For an account executive it could be asking how they manage to hit targets when something changes mid-month.
The goal of these questions is to ascertain a base level of the candidate’s subject matter expertise, and also to see how likely it is that the candidate will succeed at the next step in the process: a do-at-home exercise.
Logistics and timeline
As at every step, the interviewer checks whether the candidate has any questions about Sqreen, the team, or the role itself. And they explain the next step of our process and give a timeline for when they can expect to hear from us next.
So…how do you get a job at Sqreen?
At each step of our process, we fill out assessment grids with the key attributes required to advance to the next stage.
We use assessment grids to try to keep our criteria for evaluating candidates as objective and consistent as possible. Having a common, shared vocabulary helps us reduce bias.
We calibrate and adjust these grids as often as necessary. For example, if a candidate meets all the criteria in the grid, but we’re unenthusiastic about moving forward, there is either a problem with the criteria, or there is some sort of subjective bias at play. Or in the opposite case, if we’re enthusiastic about someone who hasn’t demonstrated the required skills, we should think a little harder about why that might be.
For the Expert Sqreen for an agent engineer role, it looks something like this:
Subject matter experts, what are you testing for at this stage? What are we missing, and what could we do better?
Stay tuned for part three: the Technical Sqreen! And if you’d like to experience the Expert Sqreen for yourself, I’d love to chat!
