Recruiting Process

Purpose

To transparently define a replicable recruiting process for the Countable team.

Scope

Covers why we recruit the way we do, and the hiring process all the way up to onboarding.

Background

A study of 200 Silicon Valley startups investigated the effect of 3 hiring policies:

  1. The “star” blueprint which sought the best technical candidates;
  2. The “commitment” blueprint which hired based on values;
  3. And the “professional” blueprint which commoditized skills.

The commitment blueprint was starkly the best, with zero failures in the 2000 market bubble and triple the chance of making an IPO the next best model.

Two other models, the “autocratic” and “beaurocratic” performed even worse than the aforementioned three.

Recruiting for Staff Contractors

Countable has two “tracks” for our team members. Outside consultants, and staff contractors. This page is about hiring the latter team members who work a set number of hours per week. The former category are for more specialized people, often with existing consulting businesses, and there’s no process for working with them currently but they are typically hired based on a quote for a specific deliverable.

Everything that follows is for Staff Contractors, not outside consultants.

Use these Countable Job Postings.

Recruiting Process

Finding the best people is one of the top challenges in our industry, so we need every advantage we can find in this way. Our strategy:

  • Having our process act as a “funnel” for the right applicants.
  • Being clear about our high expectations, compensation range, technology used, culture, and that we’re remote in the posting. This will help prevent anyone who doesn’t like the above from applying.
  • Having a specific instruction in the application for cover letter formatting to filter mass applications out.
  • Having a friendly letter to acknowledge the people who made it part way into the process. It’s great to feel empathy for candidates, and we want to help them with their future applications. This is important because 99% or more candidates won’t be accepted, and it reduces pressure on staff to make exceptions to our process.
  • Avoiding any non-meritocratic bias. Gender, ethnic, and other irrelevant bias are not only unethical, they lower the hiring bar by considering information that’s not related to performance.
  • Always be hiring. Rather than reacting to specific capacity needs, we want to get the right people on the bus. If outstanding people are identified by our team, they’re added to a list that we stay in touch with and “court” over time, just as with any good client or partner relationship.
  • We work hard to be a place that ambitious people want to work. Ideally we want virtuous cycle where if we have a culture fit, we probably want to hire that person, and they’ll be more likely to want to work here too. For this, we have to communicate our mission, vision and values within our philosophy documentation.

Another goal is to always try to screen people earlier. The first stages of the screening process are cheaper, so we want to avoid letting anyone into phase 2 if we can somehow tell they’ll be rejected there in phase 1, etc. In a perfect “oracle” screening process, our first stage would advance the exact people that will mostly quickly achieve our mission while adhering to our values, and we’d just hire those immediately.

First response

If if the candidate didn’t correctly format their cover letter, there’s no need to respond as it’s likely a mass/automated application.

Otherwise, when you receive an application:

Thanks for applying. We will be in touch if you're short-listed for an interview!

Initial Screening

  • We should always have active job postings for positions as long as we’d consider the best possible applicant if they did happen to apply.
  • We should improve our company profile on recruiting platforms (etc) so the right people will apply.

Point System

Due to the volume of resumes in initial screenings, we need a quick, quanitiative way to screen them. This is far from perfect, but early screening is optimized to avoid “type 2 errors” not “type 1 errors”. Awarding half points is fine. Use your best judgement.

  • 1 point for communication. No point awarded if candidates who miss the cover letter formatting requirement, or make other basic mistakes that waste time.
  • 1 point for for writing ability. Reject if you see poor English, grammar errors, spelling mistakes in the cover letter, or have trouble understanding the person.
  • 1 point for having 2 or more years of technical experience in all requested domains/technologies. Or, 1 year and a relevant bachelor’s degree or higher.
  • 1 point for a well designed/formatted resume that is easy to read and highlights relevant information.
  • 1 point for portfolio links. Candidate should have at least one link to good quality content they built, which looks professional, intuitive and has a good user experience. This can be on a platform like Dribbble, Behance, GitHub.
  • 1 point for the person having been vetted by a reputable 3rd party. Examples that provide some objective measurement could include increasing company revenue or another metric at their previous job, trusted referral, an open source project or contributions (GitHub stars), a well-developed professional profile that’s been curated with care such as Dribbble, going to a top school and receiving academic honours, having worked somewhere with a stringent screening like Google. Other accomplishments you can identify count to but these may be more difficult to measure quickly.

Candidates with less than 4 points are rejected outright. Those with 4 points other than “communication ability” can be offered a chance to re-read the application and format it correctly, answering the hidden question. This is required for them to advance.

Pre-interview screening

Send a form with key questions that can be answered offline to save time during the interview. Share the resume with the team members this person would work with, if hired. Anyone can basically veto them, but must explain a good reason.

Interview

Ask the Candidate to meet you on whereby.com, and to schedule the time with you. Chat with the candidate and rate their communication ability. We are marking their ability to create clarity, and to give and respond to “belonging cues”.

The candidate must manages to meet you (the interviewer) without exchanging more than 3 messages on each side. If they don’t know how to write an email with all the information necessary to proceed, they will waste our team’s time, and unfortunately should not be interviewed.

  • For the first part of the interview, use video. 1 point if the user maintains eye contact at least 50% of the time, AND you feel they’re constructively working to see if there’s a fit.
  • DEPRECATED: For the second part, use instant messaging with cameras off. The candidate should They respond quickly in IM, not making you wait. More than 10s for a response is too long (if it’s happening frequently). This is worth 1 point.
  • 1 point if the English (written and spoken) is perfect or near perfect. Neither side should need to repeat themselves, and communication is very clear. You know what the person means when they speak.
  • 1 point if the conversation flows fluidly with both sides speaking and the speaker switches frequently. The candidate asks questions on their own to facilitate this.
  • 1 point if the candidate answers questions clearly and understands what’s been asked.

If the pre-interview screening is completed with an 100% score, the candidate will receive a video interview with the leader of the team they’re applying for, and with the director of our company. The selection critieria at this point are for very promising candidates, and are specfic to each team. The guideline for advancement:

  • Interview questions are not open-sourced here, because it was give too much advantage to the people who happen to see this page.
  • If in doubt, reject the candidate. Hiring the wrong person results in a type 2 error.
  • Consider that “before you make an offer to someone, think about whether you’d like to have 10 times as many people like them in your company.”

Technical Test

Now, answer their questions about the company. Candidates with 4 or 5 stars may now take the technical screening. This consists of a simulation of the actual work we expect them to be able to do very effectively. If any of these criteria are missed, reject the candidate.

  • The technical test should be performed with a 90% score.
  • The technical test represents baseline work and should be completed effortlessly by the candidate.
  • If the candidate wastes any time of their own or the interviewer’s time with unnecessary or unclear communication, they will be rejected.

Non-acceptance Letter

If someone is interviewed but not accepted, respond as follows (subject: We've Decided On Other Candidates) :

Hello, and thanks again for your application.
We want to notify you that we won't be moving you to the next step in our selection process.
We have an extremely selective process and less than 1% of candidates are selected so you've
done well to make it to this point. We wish you great luck in future job applications.

if the Candidate has made it to the Technical Test stage, the lead of the team they’re applying for should also write a personal note with explanation of scoring, how to do better next time, and if they have a 80% or better score that we will consider them for future positions.

Internship

If the candidate is accepted, they will be given an offer letter to work with us for 3 weeks and both sides can evaluate if they want to continue at the end. We should aim to accept 1 in 3 people in this step of the process overall to ensure we’re proactively evaluating.

Research

Useful stats for our recruiting strategy.

Research on the #1 thing developers look for in a job:

  • The compensation and benefits offered - 18.3%
  • The languages, frameworks, and other technologies I’d be working with - 17.3%
  • Opportunities for professional development - 16.0%
  • The office environment or company culture - 13.6%
  • The opportunity to work from home/remotely - 10.3%

Temporary Workers Hiring Flow

This is a suggested hiring flow to make your life easier and standardize our process while recruiting temporary staff. On this case, I’m using Upwork platform to accomplish this goal, but you can adapt this system according to your needs.

Pre-Requisite Tools

  1. Download Upwork app to receive instant notifications from potential leads when they answer to your offer. It’s an important step because most freelancers are in different timezones, so you’ll have a huge gap in communication if you don’t respond to them right away.
  2. Use a timezone conversion system like Savvy Time, to schedule the meetings that should occur after the initial screening.
  3. Use any video-chat service, like Whereby to schedule an interview with your best candidates.
  4. You can check for more tools at our peopleops folder

Initial Screening

  1. Create an account at Upwork and click on the CTA “Post a Job” to create a post according to your needs. Make sure you include all relevant keywords in your new ad since it will improve your lead capturing.
  2. Once it’s created, check it by clicking at the navbar: JOBS > MY JOBS. It will appear at “My Postings” section, where you can see how many proposals you received and how many people messaged you.
  3. After some time you’d receive your first leads if you’ve set your job post correctly.
    • If not, delete it and create another, making sure you’re entering relevant keywords to it. If you’re unsure about the job requirements, ask your supervisor’s assistance.
  4. At “REVIEW PROPOSALS” step, click on “Filters”. Now you should shortlist(click on the thumbs-up icon) the candidates that pass the following suggested minimum criteria:
  • Earned amount > 10k
  • Job success > 90%
  • Hours billed: 100+
  • English level: conversational
  • Talent type: freelancers & agencies
  1. Now send a message to the selected ones, asking for a quick (15 min) video chat interview. Check what timezone he’s in, and use a time zone conversion tool to make sure it will match yours.
  2. It’s important to remember scheduling the interview time in an Alarm app (any app that remembers you about it) since once you get 2+ interviews on the same day, you’ll have a hard time trying to remember when exactly did you scheduled what meeting. Be careful to not confusing timezones!

Scheduling

  • Please use Calendly to schedule your meetings and avoid timezone issues.

Interviewing

  • Prepare yourself for the interview. Take a look at our standard interview questions and pick the ones that you find relevant for the situation
  • Communicate with your supervisor about the scheduled meetings, since they should participate as well.
  • On this step you and your selected candidate should join a video-chat meeting room, so you can have a quick conversation and get non-verbal cues about the lead personality traits, values, etc.
  • Here is a link to the Countable video chat room

Tests

  • Try to use our internal technical test, if possible.

  1. A small test to deliver at a pre-determined date. (For example, build the application XYZ with the following features until a certain date)

  2. For developers, one suggestion would be services like (we still exploring options):

    2.1) Hacker Rank

Contract signature

  • Once selected a candidate, your supervisor should proceed with the contract signature by using a HelloSign template, that provides legally binding electronic signatures.
  • Once everything is prepared at HelloSign, send the document to the signature to your candidate’s email.
  • Once your contract is signed, ask your candidate national ID document.
  • Confirm if the provided document name matches with what was inserted into the contract.

Onboarding

  • After you’ve successfully completed the previous step and collected the candidate documents (save it at our peopleops folder or send it to your supervisor)
  • You should add the candidate to the following services:
    • Project’s Trello board
    • Slack (Ask your supervisor to add him, to avoid privacy issues)
    • Bitbucket
    • Google Drive folder

Referrals

For anyone who gives us a referral, ask “would you vouch that this person is a good fit and good performer?”. We need to make sure referrals are given on this basis, and not just trying to help a friend get a job. When making a referral, the referrer must consider it a great fit for both sides.