How to select the best people, while staying human
At buildo, we’re constantly scouting for talented individuals to join our team, but we’re also extremely careful in selecting them, since we prefer growing slowly with the right people, rather than quickly at any cost.
In this blog post, we’ll provide an overview of the principles that guide our selection process and how it plays out in practice.
Our principles
Here’s what guides the design of our selection process:
Ask questions that matter
It’s easy to fall into the trap of Google-style interview questions focused on extra-hard and abstract problems; in our experience, however, such questions usually fall short of evaluating the skills that matter for the actual job the candidate will be doing.
So, we ask questions that we genuinely think will predict how well the candidate will perform in the job for which they’re applying.
This doesn’t mean avoiding theoretical or hard questions, but when we ask them, it’s because we think they matter.
Be respectful of people’s time
Applying for a job is a demanding task for both the candidate and the company. We acknowledge this by trying to be efficient and respectful of people’s time. A few examples:
- The level of effort required for each selection step starts low (a quick call) and grows moving forward (a take-home project). This way, we demand more effort only when we’re more confident that the selection will be a success.
- When a candidate gets to the last step, we require a few hours of their time for a take-home project. We pay for this time, regardless of the selection result.
- If we aren’t convinced at any point in the selection process, we let the candidate know, to avoid wasting their time with more steps than necessary.
- We have an open discussion about salary expectations during the first contact with the candidate, and we move forward only if our ranges overlap. This prevents going through the entire selection process only to discover a significant mismatch in expectations at the end.
Be human
Some companies try to prune candidates by assigning them online tests, take-home projects, or other demanding tasks from the start.
Setting aside the huge amount of time and effort these steps usually require (we discussed above how we don’t think it’s fair to demand a lot of effort early in the process), this also means the candidate’s first contact with the company is a cold — often automated — step.
We don’t like that. The initial step of our selection process is a phone call. The goal of this quick and informal chat is to get to know the person behind the CV, tell our story, and answer any questions the candidate may have.
Be open
The entire process is not only meant to select the right candidate but also for the candidate to choose the right company. It’s a two-way conversation, which involves being open about respective expectations and goals.
For this reason, we always leave time for questions during every step of the process, and the answers aren’t vetted in any way: a candidate can ask anything of anyone involved in the process and will get an honest answer about buildo.
Our selection process
With that in mind, here’s what our selection process looks like:
First contact
If we find a candidate’s CV interesting, we schedule a phone call to get to know each other and tell our stories. This step usually takes 20 to 30 minutes, which we think is a reasonable investment of time on both sides.
Technical interview
If we’re hiring for a technical position (generally developers or designers), we usually do a 1-hour long technical interview, during which we focus on assessing the hard skills we deem necessary for the position.
We customarily assign two interviewers per candidate and rotate them regularly across candidates to help mitigate possible biases.
Behavioral interview
If we’re happy with the hard skills, we then move on to evaluate soft skills. Some people may think this is a formality, but — as we said before — we care a lot about the people we hire and not just because of their technical skills. We care about factors such as the ability to collaborate with co-workers, teaching skills, empathy, and so on.
It’s a crucial step in our process; we’ve rejected candidates with the required technical skills because their soft skills didn’t meet our requirements.
Take-home project
The final step of the selection process is a take-home project. For this, we usually assign a very small, but extremely realistic, task that the candidate has to do independently and then deliver a solution. It varies depending on our main focus, but in general:
- We’re always clear about the expected effort (e.g., 4 to 6 hours of work) so that candidates can pace themselves and not put in more effort than expected;
- We give plenty of time to complete it, knowing that most people already have full-time jobs (e.g., we may give a week to complete a 4-hour project);
- We pay for the expected effort upon completion (not the success) of the task.
In conclusion
We hope you’ve enjoyed this brief overview of our selection process and the principles behind it.
In the end, even though we hire only a small number of the people we interview, we strive to make every interaction with buildo a positive experience by keeping our selection process fair, meaningful, respectful, and human.
If you’re interested in knowing more about working at buildo, check out our website at https://www.buildo.io/careers
