Building a great dev team is a huge challenge for most tech companies. Hiring is hard and time consuming. Getting the right people on board while making sure they fit the company’s culture when building a remote team, makes things even slightly more difficult. That’s why we want to share how, at Nuclia, we do our hiring process. Let’s start!
Our hiring principles: Be kind. Be serious & demanding. Be fast
Our hiring process goes around those principles. They define the way we communicate with candidates and the way we interview and have conversations with them. Let’s see what they mean to us:
– Be kind
We (try to) answer all candidates with a personalised message even if we know they are not a good fit. We extremely respect the time of anyone applying to any of our positions and despite the answer being “it’s not yet our time to work together”, we always want to keep an open door.
– Be serious and demanding
We like to keep short meetings with candidates. If in the first interview, we think we are not a good match, we let the candidate know. We give feedback and ask for feedback. We thank the candidate for the time spent with us and the interest in joining our team.
– Be fast
We don’t want to waste time nor make others waste it.
If we think we’ve found a good candidate we move forward fast. If not, we are also fast on the answer.
Our hiring process in 4 steps
1st step: an about 45 minutes conversation between the candidate and the founders.
At Nuclia we strongly believe that brilliant technical skills are as important as fitting in with the company’s values and culture.
That’s why we like, as founders, to have an initial conversation with any potential good candidate. We like investing time getting to know people that one day might be part of the team.
This first meeting is just a casual conversation where we talk about Nuclia and the product vision, we talk about technology, hobbies, sports, games, philosophy, and other topics that help us to get a first impression on the candidate. If this conversation goes well, we ask the candidate to answer a technical test.
2nd step: the technical test.
At Nuclia we are organised in squads. The test is specific to each squad.
Our rules on the test are:
– No time.
There is no specific time to answer the test. From 3 days to 3 weeks. We don’t mind. We understand everybody has their own life and sometimes it is difficult to find the time for such things.
– Send the code.
Once the test is done, we ask the candidate to send us the code. We review it.
If we like what we see, we set a day for a test presentation in front of the team.
If we don’t like what we see, we give feedback to the candidate and let him/her know that he/she does not fit in our team and we thank them for the time spent writing the test.
3rd step: the test presentation. An about 1 hour conversation.
When a candidate does a test presentation, we want to understand the “whys” of the code. We go deep to understand the reasoning behind decisions. We ask a lot. We want to give room to the candidate to explain anything relevant on the code.
Presentation is done in front of the squad members, even if we also usually invite team members from other squads to join the conversation. For us it is as important to write very good code as to be able to have good communication skills when talking to others. Once the presentation is done, we have a talk among Nuclia’s team members and discuss our impressions on the candidate.
4th step: the final talk. An about 30 minutes conversation.
If everything has been successful, we ask to have a very last conversation. This is the conversation before extending an offer. This last step is a one-to-one talk between the candidate and the CEO.
That conversation covers many broad topics: candidate expectations, job conditions, expectation alignments between the candidate and the company and vice versa, etc…
In less than 24 hours, the candidate gets an official offer to join Nuclia’s family.
At every hiring we do try to make the process a bit better. We ask candidates a lot where we can improve, how they felt about the process and what they disliked. So far, we are happy with the results.
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Photo by Saksham Gangwar on Unsplash
