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Hiring

Hiring is the single most crucial starting point to nurture a healthy culture and productive environment. Going through our hiring process may feel drastically different from other organizations. The difference is because we have been adapting and evolving our approach based on pragmatic needs, technological advancements, and, frankly, how we imagined ourselves in the applicants’ shoes.

We abide by a handful of principles and some supporting methods.

Be objective

The first and foremost principle is to be objective. For us, it’s a straightforward thing to achieve, yet the difficulty lies in abandoning some conventional wisdom – we ignore who you are at the beginning of the hiring process. That means:

  • We do not filter by résumés/CVs.
  • We don’t care if you made funny copy/paste mistakes in the cover letter.
  • We don’t care whether you are associated with any influential figures or institutes by any measures.
  • We don’t care whether you have X years of experience in particular technologies. This has a good side benefit of avoiding awkward situations like the one below.


Instead, we adhere to the following workflow:

  1. Upon application, we give all applicants (and re-applicants) the same opportunity to solve a set of work sample problems (depending on the role). There is no hard deadline as long as the role remains open.
  2. The work sample is entirely open-source, thus open-book by nature, and we try our best to answer questions and provide clarifications for applicants.
  3. Upon submission, we distribute the solutions to colleagues from the relevant teams to review and give their evaluations. We generally advise that applicants not embed any personally identifiable information in the work sample to minimize any potential bias.
  4. We sometimes provide the initial evaluations and request revisions if the applicant wants to follow up for issues that are not off by too much. We then provide a revised assessment. As long as the role remains open, there’s no convention on how often applicants can adjust their work sample solutions.
  5. Successful candidates passing the evaluation would make it to the next stage(s). That’s when we start looking at their résumés and any other references we can passively ingest.

Depending on the role, the work sample becomes an organic filter based on:

  • Applicants’ interests for the job. As companies automate the job listing to multiple venues, so do the applicants automate the process to mass-submit applications.
  • Applicants’ philosophy on whether they prefer this type of “take-home” work sample or in-person whiteboard brainteasers. We don’t try to cater to everyone, and we adopted the former.
  • An asynchronous way from the get-go, as the way we encourage our teams to communicate.

As a result, we save a considerable amount of time scanning through résumés and other references, thus minimizing the human bias factor. For instance, in one of our roles, the historic hiring pipeline looks like below:

pipeline (Note: the eight applicants that did not make it into the “Work Sample” stage was due to the closure of the job posting altogether as we filled the role at the time)

The roughly less than 10% stats on applicants who submit their work sample solutions (thus moved to the “Review” stage) remain mostly true across all our roles.

Besides, being objective allows us to naturally achieve workspace diversity without artificially applying discriminative controls, as we provide equal opportunity for all applicants from the top.

Be culture-defensive

With every human movement in the organization, the collective culture would naturally change (often ever so slightly) to adapt to the new dynamics and personalities. To maximize the possibility of our teams to maintain a high degree of autonomy to solve problems and innovate, we need to be relentless, though within reasons, defensive of our culture and our existing common practices and disciplines.

The second stage of the hiring process is typically an interview. Thanks to the work-sample workflow, we can leverage the interview to:

  • Advocate and communicate with the candidates on what kind of work culture and environment they are entering
  • Preemptively address their potential concerns
  • Or frankly conclude that the work culture we have may not be for everyone

Be curious

The interview stage is also when we should be curious and open-minded. We want to leverage this valuable opportunity to learn more about the candidates:

  • Why did they decide to solve the work sample problems in specific ways
  • What issues and concerns do they have based on what they have learned about us
  • How do they want to advance in terms of their career and technological interests

We should actively emulate the scenario where we do work with such candidates and imagine:

  • If they can be happy, join us to solve problems and innovate, and contribute to our collective productivity and business values
  • If most (ideally all) of us can be compatible with their personalities and professional philosophies

References

EQ Engineering

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