As a recruiter, one of the things I am most often asked is how to get over pre-interview jitters. Whether it’s prepping for an introductory phone call, or planning for a Zoom presentation, job-seekers want to know what they can do to quash their nerves and let their skills and abilities shine.
Interviewing is a skill and, like most skills, you can find improvement with preparation and practice. While my team of Dyspatchios can’t help you practice, we have put together this overview of our recruitment process to help you prepare for each step along the way!
We review applications as they arrive, looking for those who clearly align with the goals of our job postings. While we’re not looking for a perfect skills-match, we do hope to find candidates who show enthusiasm for our projects, tech stack, and mission.
The first step in our interview process is the manager call, a 30 minute Zoom video call between chosen candidates and the hiring manager. These calls cover your background and experience, as well as your interest in joining our team. You can prepare for these calls by reviewing our job post, your application materials, and taking a look at our website and social media accounts, to get a sense of our projects, vision, and ways of working.
For technical roles, the next step in our interview process is a technical assessment. This helps us ensure that candidates moving forward have the level of technical proficiency needed to be successful in the role as we have designed it. Here are three recent examples of our technical screens:
- For a recent junior developer position we had candidates participate in a pair programming session with one of our senior devs using CoderPad. Working in a language of their choice, the candidates walked our dev through solving a simple problem. There are a lot of great resources online to help you prep for technical screens – our team recommends HackerRank.
- When searching for a product designer, we had candidates spend 60 minutes speaking with two members of our Product team via Zoom. The conversation covered previous design experience and core design competencies. We also asked each candidate to walk our team through a portfolio piece, explaining their design decisions and techniques. To prepare for this kind of conversation, consider walking a friend through some of your favourite portfolio works, and articulating why these pieces still connect with you.
- We asked software developer candidates to meet with two people from our engineering team to do a live coding exercise on CodeSandbox, building a simple component using React to display data retrieved from an API. A collaborative process, our interviewers provided guidance, answered questions, and bounced ideas back-and-forth with the candidates — just like how we work together everyday!
We want our candidates to meet Dyspatchios from the team they’re interviewing for, as well as folks they’ll work with from different departments. For candidates who have been successful in their manager call and technical assessment, we’ll arrange one or two more Zoom interviews, with the hiring manager and other folks you would work with closely. In one section, you’ll discuss your previous experience and projects, as well as your style of working. In another session you’ll meet with some potential co-workers to talk about how our team works and communicates, as well as our shared values.
For preparation, we always suggest spending a little time getting to know more about our products (Dyspatch and Sendwithus). Also, if you have some time to check out our values, it may help you understand a little more about what drives a lot of our decision making day-to-day. Our values can be found on our careers page. You can also see what our #dyspatchios have been up to on our Instagram, and learn more about their backgrounds on LinkedIn.
We care about seeing our candidates succeed at the interview stage and we understand that interviews can be daunting! We don’t ask trick questions and we won’t ask you what kind of tree you’d like to be; we want to learn about the unique skills and experiences you’ve gained. You’re welcome to reuse strong examples across our different interview segments, and to ask our interviewers clarifying questions if you’re unsure about something.
One of our interviewers will take the role of the “moderator” during our interviews, and will ensure you can hear & see our team clearly, and know what to do if tech challenges arise. They’ll also introduce our team, giving some short details about their roles and backgrounds before asking you to do the same. We ask everyone we speak with if they need any accommodations, as we want to ensure you’re as comfortable as can be, and we don’t mind shifting our schedules to accommodate candidates with strict work or care schedules.
And that’s it! Hopefully seeing our end-to-end recruitment process helps you get ready for the conversations you may be having. Fundamentally, we want to get to know you, your interests and skills, and figure out how your previous experiences (professional or otherwise!) align with where we’re headed.
