An Overview of our Recruiting Process at UW Blueprint

We’ve been working hard to make the recruiting process more transparent and fair over the past few years and we’re excited to share some of that with you today. We started with very adhoc on-the-fly decision making, but we now have a fairly concrete process with clear rubrics and consistent evaluations.

1. Headcount decisions

First, we figure out how large we want our team. We typically have 5 teams of around 8–10 people (1 project lead, 1 product manager, 2 designers, and 4–6 developers), but the number of teams depends on the number of projects we have scoped out. We want to make sure that Blueprint still feels like a community even as we scale and take on more projects.

We had almost 50 returning members for the Winter 2021 term which left no headcount for any external applicants, so we’re experimenting with a larger team this term. We’ll take a look at how it goes and adjust for our Spring 2021 recruitment.

2. Application Review

We look at a balance of role-specific skills, passion for social good, teamwork, and drive to learn throughout the whole process.

There’s naturally going to be variance in how different people think of these values, so we run recruitment training to ensure that all application reviewers understand the rubric and have fair scoring. Before anyone evaluates external applications, members have to evaluate a list of baseline apps so we can calibrate their scores later on. (If someone is a hard marker, we’ll curve up the applications they review proportional to how hard they mark.)

Every application is read by three people in that role, then the scores are normalized using the calibration data and averaged to produce a score. For each role, we look at the number of open positions and interview as many people as we can. To give some more concrete numbers, we had 60 applicants for PM last term for 4 positions and we ended up interviewing 9 people.

3. Interview

We look for the same things in the interview, but we dive a little bit deeper and we try to get a sense of what project team the applicant might fit on. We hire for the best possible teams, which might not necessarily be the top N candidates. Every interview has two interviewers and we ask both of them to write feedback separately afterwards.

4. Deliberation

After we’ve interviewed everyone, we go through all the application review and interview feedback to build our final team. We try to ensure that teams have a diverse range of experiences and technical skills to balance each other out.

How do interested candidates stand out in the application process? / What does an ideal candidate look like?

We’re consistently impressed by how talented the people that apply to Blueprint are and we unfortunately have to turn away many talented candidates. Even if you don’t get in the first time, we’d encourage folks to apply again! Many current Blueprint members applied several times before getting in.

We also encourage candidates to highlight their role-specific skills, their passion for social good, and past teamwork experience throughout the recruitment process since all of them are equally important. We love seeing applicants who can help level up other members on their team and who can take initiative to scope out their team’s tasks based on the client’s needs.

When we look at developer candidates, we loosely categorize them as junior/intermediate/senior based on their school term and look for skills relative to their experience. For junior candidates, we don’t expect them to know how to do everything! We’re focused more on how fast they can learn and how they can collaborate with the rest of their team to contribute. As candidates get more experience, we expect them to have more hard technical skills and more leadership/mentorship skills. For intermediate and senior level candidates, we prioritize past web experience more heavily. We also want people who can explain technical concepts clearly and make software architecture decisions.

What do all Blueprint members have in common? What values do all Blueprint members share that makes this club so unique/different?

When we look at all the members that have stuck around for several years, what stands out to us is how much they care about their community — both the Blueprint community and the wider community. Long-standing members execute really well on their projects and provide a lot of value for the clients we work with, but they also mentor our junior members so that they can give back in the future. They help improve our processes and organizational structure so Blueprint can improve every term.

We think it’s important to have discussions about how we can use our skills and the privilege that comes along with it for good, so it’s nice to have a place where we can have those discussions. We hope that Blueprint continues to be a place where we can challenge each other and help each other grow.