How “Flant” Hires Employees
"Flant" is a technology company. Now we have about 60 people and 7 teams. What is remarkable, almost all of them are engineers in one way or another - including managers who no-no, and write a line or another of code.
Our distinctive feature is the constant study and development of technologies - at this stage they are mainly associated with Kubernetes, but are not limited to them. We carefully run them on dozens of projects with a wide variety of requests, and this greatly expands the horizons of everyone who works with them.
In this article I will tell you how we hire new employees in a fully distributed company and help them join our “stream”. Perhaps this will suggest how to improve something in their teams. We came to our approach after years of trial and error and today we are confident that those people who have been hired can be given root access to client servers.
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Hiring in IT companies is a sore subject: what is the only way for teams to get a new fighter. We haven’t yet found a silver bullet that would help to hire many engineers at once who share our values: we love Open Source, carefully choose whom to work with, and then we give all the best to solve real (and not imaginary!) Problems .
Many of those who appear at interviews or come to us at conferences, they say that they watched our performances on YouTube , read articles on Habré and / or use our developments with GitHub . But the open secret is only one: if you want to find employees in an emerging team, look for them, manually, long and hard.
All interviews and other communications (including even sales) in our company go through Slack (more for text) and Google Meet (video) - they showed themselves best. Prior to this, we have been supporting the self-hosted installation of BigBlueButton for a long time, and we are also continuing to work with our IP-telephony, which is relevant in case of a mess and the remaining need for communication by phone. For the latter, just go to the internal directory of employees, press a button - and the service dials you and the recipient to talk on the phone.
If we go from communications to other features of the working environment, then in general they are shaped by the approach that we are engineers and do not want something to prevent us from solving engineering tasks.
As I managed to say at the very beginning, the secret of finding employees is seen in the painstaking and systematic work on the selection of resumes posted in the public domain. For example, in the same Telegraph there are already about 50 recruitment chats where you can search for candidates (the most useful for us are Devops_jobs , Telegram Job and Work in IT ). In addition, he has proven himself very well and well known to everyone hh ... with one peculiarity: we don’t wait for the candidate to respond to the vacancy we have, and we’ll select a resume from the database, capturing even those who are not actively looking for work, but I am ready to consider interesting offers.
As an example, we present some interesting statistics on how a company recently grew over seven months and a half by 7 DevOps engineers:
When we contacted a potential employee and found out that he is not against getting acquainted, our HR holds the first stage of the interview.
HR's task is to relate the candidate's background to the technology stack that our teams are currently working with. I want to understand that the candidate is familiar well and which areas remain for him while the zone of development and training. If already at this stage our interests do not coincide, we will not be able to offer the prospective employee the ground for implementation, and he probably will not want to move there, to which the soul does not lie.
Much more than “by whom you want to see yourself in five years,” we want to understand what projects the engineer considers to be the coolest in his experience, what drives him, how he prefers to organize his working space. The last question is especially relevant: for a significant part of newbies, working with us is the first experience of remote work.
The interview takes about 30-40 minutes, and we understand whether we are looking in the same direction with the candidate and what to look for in further communication.
At the second stage, the novice gets acquainted with this quest for the engineer on sharpness and technical knowledge. You can use Google, so it's more of a sharpness.
In fact, the engineer is given a virtual Linux-machine with cunning and not-so malicious, broken software and a pack of tasks, most of which need to be solved directly on the virtual machine. The engineer will have to defeat the dragons, demonstrating his possession of the head, console and google. We do not set an obligatory task to defeat them all and to do it ideally, but we want to understand how a person basically approaches the solution of problems in practice, and not in words.
You can use the Internet not only for the reason that the test is closer to real conditions than to the school exam. First of all, we check the basic technical skills and general outlook (in the field of Linux), and not the knowledge of any specific software and its configuration directives. It is important for us to see that a person is able to approach problems systematically and has enough experience to understand which direction to dig at all. One of the typical challenges of any engineer "Flanta" - is to face the unknown, constantly learn, so the flexibility of the mind is not the last value.
Typical situation in a test virtual for candidates who successfully loaded the system
No less important than the technical component of this test is its “hidden” side - the psychological one. Candidates undergoing our very long assignment, we ask you to describe your steps and intermediate results in Slack. In the same place, as a rule, it is possible to clarify some information, receiving feedback ... Analyzing the candidate’s general behavior, his reaction to pop-up problems, informational content and general tone of comments, compliance of actions with the requirements of the task and many other similar factors, we make really significant findings:
Even if not all the characteristics become obvious, we at least get a generalized psychological portrait, which we always take into account when making the final decision (after revealing the questions that concern us at the next stage).
Our task is really long - on average, they spend about 9 hours on it (including all kinds of lunches and other breaks, if the candidate does them at will). Despite this, more than 80% of those who passed the test speak positively about this test and thank for it at will (that is, before we even ask for feedback). However, we understand that this is too much - therefore (and due to several other reasons) we are currently preparing a significantly updated version of the task, which will be not only shorter, but no less fascinating and, we hope, effective.
When the test task is completed, it is time to communicate with the team members. They will be interviewed directly by the people who can become the heads of the engineer. We separately teach our team leaders to prepare and conduct interviews so that communication does not “get stuck” in some narrow topics, be interesting to both parties, and do not cause severe stress. Shattered nerves are a bad helper in answering questions.
Timlid should be able to ask technical questions, understand what project management paradigm a candidate has lived in, be able to talk about his work at the company and explain how he will live in his team. After all, if the candidate passes - tmlid needs to understand how to “embed” a person into your team, what to pay attention to in the first place. On average, such an interview takes about an hour.
After (and, frankly, sometimes even in time - through a brief exchange of thoughts in Slack), the team leaders decide who among them wants to take the engineer to his Padawans and which team a person with such talents will be more useful (and the team will be more useful his). The final step is to send a job offer to the candidate.
On the decision of the candidate to accept the job offer, the first part of our cooperation ends. If we have received agreement, then a new and very exciting stage begins - the exit to work and the subsequent adaptation. I will tell about it in the following article.
UPDATED (03.08 09:21) : the second part of the article was published and is called “ How“ Flant ”helps newcomers ”.
Our distinctive feature is the constant study and development of technologies - at this stage they are mainly associated with Kubernetes, but are not limited to them. We carefully run them on dozens of projects with a wide variety of requests, and this greatly expands the horizons of everyone who works with them.
In this article I will tell you how we hire new employees in a fully distributed company and help them join our “stream”. Perhaps this will suggest how to improve something in their teams. We came to our approach after years of trial and error and today we are confident that those people who have been hired can be given root access to client servers.
')
Searches and acquaintance
Hiring in IT companies is a sore subject: what is the only way for teams to get a new fighter. We haven’t yet found a silver bullet that would help to hire many engineers at once who share our values: we love Open Source, carefully choose whom to work with, and then we give all the best to solve real (and not imaginary!) Problems .
Many of those who appear at interviews or come to us at conferences, they say that they watched our performances on YouTube , read articles on Habré and / or use our developments with GitHub . But the open secret is only one: if you want to find employees in an emerging team, look for them, manually, long and hard.
All interviews and other communications (including even sales) in our company go through Slack (more for text) and Google Meet (video) - they showed themselves best. Prior to this, we have been supporting the self-hosted installation of BigBlueButton for a long time, and we are also continuing to work with our IP-telephony, which is relevant in case of a mess and the remaining need for communication by phone. For the latter, just go to the internal directory of employees, press a button - and the service dials you and the recipient to talk on the phone.
If we go from communications to other features of the working environment, then in general they are shaped by the approach that we are engineers and do not want something to prevent us from solving engineering tasks.
- Schedule? Relatively free, if you need to go for a walk - write to the Slack channel, make sure that there are no appointments and promises to the client ... and please. We try to be in touch from 11:00 to 19:00 Moscow time, but in the century of victorious telecommunications, this is all a solvable task.
- Dress code? Just keep to the limits of decency. In my opinion, this is a great experience - going to work in slippers and shorts. Of course, we still want to see people live and communicate face to face. Therefore, at least once a year we gather at corporate events, with families. Of course, travel (as well as all business trips) is paid by the company. And those living in relative proximity to offices (in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod) can drop in on the last Friday of the month to eat pizza, drink something tasty, play PS or just talk about technology.
- Speaking of holivar: we are against authoritarianism. If you speak for the cause, then you can at least put your thoughts to the technical director. To hell with the formalities - first thing and the right decisions!
Hiring: Stage 0 - Selection
As I managed to say at the very beginning, the secret of finding employees is seen in the painstaking and systematic work on the selection of resumes posted in the public domain. For example, in the same Telegraph there are already about 50 recruitment chats where you can search for candidates (the most useful for us are Devops_jobs , Telegram Job and Work in IT ). In addition, he has proven himself very well and well known to everyone hh ... with one peculiarity: we don’t wait for the candidate to respond to the vacancy we have, and we’ll select a resume from the database, capturing even those who are not actively looking for work, but I am ready to consider interesting offers.
As an example, we present some interesting statistics on how a company recently grew over seven months and a half by 7 DevOps engineers:
- We selected about 150 resumes suitable for our profile, and conducted 78 initial interviews (I will describe in more detail what each stage of hiring includes).
- According to the results of the interview, 32 candidates were invited to the second stage - the technical task. Successfully coped with him waiting for the final test - communication with timlidah.
- At this stage, we communicated with 11 candidates and made a positive decision on 7 of them.
Hiring: Stage 1 - interview-acquaintance
When we contacted a potential employee and found out that he is not against getting acquainted, our HR holds the first stage of the interview.
HR's task is to relate the candidate's background to the technology stack that our teams are currently working with. I want to understand that the candidate is familiar well and which areas remain for him while the zone of development and training. If already at this stage our interests do not coincide, we will not be able to offer the prospective employee the ground for implementation, and he probably will not want to move there, to which the soul does not lie.
Much more than “by whom you want to see yourself in five years,” we want to understand what projects the engineer considers to be the coolest in his experience, what drives him, how he prefers to organize his working space. The last question is especially relevant: for a significant part of newbies, working with us is the first experience of remote work.
The interview takes about 30-40 minutes, and we understand whether we are looking in the same direction with the candidate and what to look for in further communication.
Hiring: Stage 2 - Terms of Reference
At the second stage, the novice gets acquainted with this quest for the engineer on sharpness and technical knowledge. You can use Google, so it's more of a sharpness.
In fact, the engineer is given a virtual Linux-machine with cunning and not-so malicious, broken software and a pack of tasks, most of which need to be solved directly on the virtual machine. The engineer will have to defeat the dragons, demonstrating his possession of the head, console and google. We do not set an obligatory task to defeat them all and to do it ideally, but we want to understand how a person basically approaches the solution of problems in practice, and not in words.
You can use the Internet not only for the reason that the test is closer to real conditions than to the school exam. First of all, we check the basic technical skills and general outlook (in the field of Linux), and not the knowledge of any specific software and its configuration directives. It is important for us to see that a person is able to approach problems systematically and has enough experience to understand which direction to dig at all. One of the typical challenges of any engineer "Flanta" - is to face the unknown, constantly learn, so the flexibility of the mind is not the last value.
Typical situation in a test virtual for candidates who successfully loaded the system
No less important than the technical component of this test is its “hidden” side - the psychological one. Candidates undergoing our very long assignment, we ask you to describe your steps and intermediate results in Slack. In the same place, as a rule, it is possible to clarify some information, receiving feedback ... Analyzing the candidate’s general behavior, his reaction to pop-up problems, informational content and general tone of comments, compliance of actions with the requirements of the task and many other similar factors, we make really significant findings:
- Is this person motivated to work with us?
- Is this a team player and is he predisposed to frequent communication?
- Is it able to solve problems?
- Does it follow specific instructions?
- Is it inventive in finding technical solutions?
- ...
Even if not all the characteristics become obvious, we at least get a generalized psychological portrait, which we always take into account when making the final decision (after revealing the questions that concern us at the next stage).
Our task is really long - on average, they spend about 9 hours on it (including all kinds of lunches and other breaks, if the candidate does them at will). Despite this, more than 80% of those who passed the test speak positively about this test and thank for it at will (that is, before we even ask for feedback). However, we understand that this is too much - therefore (and due to several other reasons) we are currently preparing a significantly updated version of the task, which will be not only shorter, but no less fascinating and, we hope, effective.
Hiring: Stage 3 - Final Interview
When the test task is completed, it is time to communicate with the team members. They will be interviewed directly by the people who can become the heads of the engineer. We separately teach our team leaders to prepare and conduct interviews so that communication does not “get stuck” in some narrow topics, be interesting to both parties, and do not cause severe stress. Shattered nerves are a bad helper in answering questions.
Timlid should be able to ask technical questions, understand what project management paradigm a candidate has lived in, be able to talk about his work at the company and explain how he will live in his team. After all, if the candidate passes - tmlid needs to understand how to “embed” a person into your team, what to pay attention to in the first place. On average, such an interview takes about an hour.
After (and, frankly, sometimes even in time - through a brief exchange of thoughts in Slack), the team leaders decide who among them wants to take the engineer to his Padawans and which team a person with such talents will be more useful (and the team will be more useful his). The final step is to send a job offer to the candidate.
Conclusion
On the decision of the candidate to accept the job offer, the first part of our cooperation ends. If we have received agreement, then a new and very exciting stage begins - the exit to work and the subsequent adaptation. I will tell about it in the following article.
UPDATED (03.08 09:21) : the second part of the article was published and is called “ How“ Flant ”helps newcomers ”.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/417725/
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