We believe that our hiring process should be fair and repeatable.
- Define a need and expectation for hiring
- Candidate
- Screen
- Interview & Pair
- Decide
- Hire
Our pipeline is tracked in a SharePoint Document.
As described in our Roles at Scope Web document, candidates must be judged against a specific role with the needs and expectations of that role explicitly defined. This allows us to judge candidates like for like and also keeps us focused on the reason for a hire.
Once we have a need and expectation for a role we will then reach out our marketing efforts to advertise the role on our site and elsewhere. We will also hand the role to trusted recruiters and spread the word amongst our existing staff.
When a candidate gets in touch we place them in our SharePoint Excel sheet. We then use this Excel sheet to track the candidate across our pipeline. The Excel sheet should contain all details we have on the candidate including but not limited to:
- Email address
- GitHub profile
- Covering letter
- CV
- LinkedIn profile
We then need to screen the candidate in order to determine what role they are a good fit for. At this stage its worth keeping an open mind as to what role the candidate might fill, however the need and expectation for that role must have already been set.
We use the following steps in order to determine a role for the candidate:
- Review application (CV, GitHub, LinkedIn, covering letter)
- 20 minute phone conversation
- Remote test
We first review a candidates application to ensure the later steps are worth our while. This decision should be based on merits, nothing but a lack of merits should disqualify someone from this stage. The candidate can proceed past this step if we can answer yes to the following question:
Does their application contain experience to indicate that they may be able to meet our expectations of one or more roles?
We then start a phone call with the candidate to give a brief overview of Scope and what we stand for. This is an important chance to sell our vision to the candidate. We also describe the role(s) we think they are a good fit for, followed by some questions used for screening:
- Does the candidate like the sound of the role?
- Can the candidate provide examples of why they would be able to fulfil the expectations of the role and possibly that of traits for the role? (See engineer expectations for an example)
- Is the candidate able to work remotely or in the US? (We do not sponsor visas, yet.)
Provided all went well during the phone conversation we will provide a remote test. We provide remote tests for each role. They test the extent of a candidate's exposure to common practices we expect from them. In other words they check a minimum level of expectations we have for any particular role.
The remote test will have a marking guide so that applications can be judged objectively against a set of criteria. We will also provide the marking guide to candidates so that they can see exactly what we are looking for.
A few things to note about the remote test:
- If a candidate has a significant portfolio of code samples that pass our marking guide then they can skip the remote test altogether
- If 80% or more is scored on the test the candidate automatically qualifies for the next step
- A remote test will take a lot longer for a less experienced candidate but should still be passable
- A submission cannot be judged on any other criteria than that of the marking guide
We currently only have a remote test for our Engineer role.
The candidate is invited into a meeting with our executives for an hour and a half. We split this time as follows:
- Further introduction to Scope (10 minutes)
- Discussion of previous experience (20 minutes)
- Pairing session (30 minutes)
- Problem solving (20 minutes)
- Questions (10 minutes)
We usually ask the candidate if they have any more questions about what we do, and what the role looks like. It also helps break the ice of the interview conditions.
We then ask the candidate to explain how they got to where they are now. We dig into examples of challenges, what their process looked like and how that differs from their ideal process.
We are particularly looking for strong indications that they:
- can meet our expectations for the role
- can meet our expectations for any traits we see them immediately tackling
- can grow with us
- are proactive and problem solvers
- take responsibility for past failings rather than blame others
After this introduction we usually pair with a candidate on a problem for 30 minutes. This step is used to see how well a candidate communicates and works with us. Of course it is a pressured environment, however we try and make the candidate at ease by sharing some of the work and discussing the problem with them.
Our current Engineer pairing task can be found in this SharePoint document. (Sorry if you're a candidate looking at this, we do not hand out these questions in advance.)
We follow up with some more technical, deeper thinking questions documented in this SharePoint document. (Sorry if you're a candidate looking at this, we do not hand out these questions in advance.)
Finally we answer any questions the candidate may have.
We will hire a candidate if all interviewers answer yes to all of the following questions:
- Do we have a strong indication based on their past experience that they will be able to fulfil our expectations for their role and traits?
- Do we have a strong indication based on their pairing session that they will be able to fulfil our expectations for their role and traits?
- Do we have a strong indication based on their problem solving that they will be able to fulfil our expecations for their role and traits?
Once we've determined that a candidate is going to be a good hire for us and the candidate thinks we're a good fit for their next role, we will offer them the position. We will prepare a contract and send it to them as soon as possible.
After this the on-boarding process begins.