We continue to talk about the internal structure of the Maxillect. We have already talked about the
general principles of hiring remote professionals , adopted in the company. Now let's talk about the details - about exactly what we ask the candidates who came to us for an interview.
Spoiler: alas, but there are no "right answers" to these questions. They simply do not exist.
Hiring remote specialists is a rather difficult task of finding the optimal solution, given the known limitations.
')
On the one hand, you are limited in time. Given the average wages in IT, the cost of downtime for each such specialist is extremely high. If candidates are at the stage of active search, and you allow yourself to think about 3-4 weeks over who to choose, many simply will not wait for an answer - they will agree to an alternative proposal. Those. the decision to hire or refuse must be made very quickly.
On the other hand, it is not so easy to make this decision. We initially refused to practice inviting all potential employees to the office for a personal conversation - we built all the processes remotely. And although many questions allow to close the use of video during the negotiations with the candidate, some of the non-verbal information is thus lost.
In order to reduce the probability of error under these conditions to the minimum (by collecting teams that are efficient in our conditions), we formulated certain limitations for ourselves. In particular, they chose a segment of specialists with which we work - these are midls and seniors.
Juniors, in principle, are harder on the remote - they need more professional communication, the ability to constantly ask someone questions, and the distance format does not contribute to this. The second point is that we focus on the full-time mode of operation: full-time, 5 days a week minus public holidays and vacations.
How are we interviewing
In our company, the recruitment processes are very clear. A candidate goes through several video calls - their number, sequence and the roles of the interviewees depend on the position in question. The purpose of these meetings is not only to check the candidate’s abilities, but, first of all, to tell about the company and the features of the work.
The distributed team has its pros and cons. And since There is no industry-wide practice, each company copes with the minuses in its own way. Not every specialist is ready to adapt flexibly to any work processes, so our task when communicating with a candidate is to find out if we are suitable for each other in principle. And the first interview with the recruiter is devoted mainly to these details of the interaction. Along the way, we evaluate some obvious skills: communication, which becomes critical at a distance, communication style, and other software skills. And by asking some specific questions, we try to predict how the candidate will behave in this or that situation. This article focuses on just parts of these issues. Perhaps, they are no different from the questions that, from my point of view, should be asked at the face-to-face interview (subject to the same approaches to working at the company), however, in a remote format the price of the error is greater.
But before moving from the preface to the point, I note that we never decide on one person’s response (or quality). There is not and can not be any stop list or list of correct / incorrect answers to questions concerning soft skills.
What is important to us?
Are you ready to fine-tune the schedule of your life under the schedule of the team in which you are hired? (Alternative wording - what time do you plan to start working day?)
Why we ask about this: too much time difference is critical for the team, the management and the project as a whole. And this is especially critical if the final project has tight deadlines. Of course, you can build a job “asynchronously” by documenting every action and decision made. But it complicates and bureaucratizes the workflow. We use the advantages of remoteness, while maintaining the optimal, in our opinion, level of labor costs for ensuring the execution of processes. And for this it is important for us to stay in touch with the whole team at least part of the working time.
Practice has shown that plus or minus 3 hours is a time difference that can be overlooked, even with regular calls. Employees from the conditional Omsk can go to work a little later to work with the Muscovites on one task. In fact, the same time shift is obtained in the office when the management admits a non-rigid start of the working day. One is comfortable to work from 9 am, another - after 12, but they are present at the office together for at least 5 hours, so this does not affect the overall performance.
From the point of view of the interview, the key point is that the employee himself must be ready for the team schedule (frequency of releases and mitts) so as not to burn out at long distances. I saw with my own eyes a project manager who had worked for a year with two customers, from Singapore and the USA. A year later, he was simply not in the company - with two children he could not live long according to such a schedule. But this example does not mean that a schedule shift for a family person is impossible. We already have a certain number of employees beyond the Urals, and they are satisfied with everything. So at the interview we ask the candidate if he is ready to live according to the schedule in which the team works. At the same time, we ourselves are ready to adapt to some individual characteristics, for example, a two-hour lunch in the middle of the day.
I note that if a big difference in time has already developed after hiring a person - for example, he changed the team, but at the same time as a specialist himself is very valuable, then you have to work with it. And here there are different solutions to the problems, but everything is very individual.
Are you ready for business trips?
Why we ask it: it is not even a question, but a story about how we are to work together. In the remote format, all the same problems of the team, management and soft skills of individual developers as in the office, however, there is a certain communication barrier on the remote, which turns all these pitfalls into real rocky reefs. A personal meeting, albeit briefly, is a way to remove or at least slightly lower this barrier.
We distinguish three types of business trips that are really effective in our format:
- weekly onboarding in a team;
- Retrospective of the previous and planning the next major release;
- holidays and team building.
In all cases, the duration of the trip should not exceed 3-4 days, since we work mainly with seniors, and for the most part these are family people. Having children, leaving for more than a week is difficult. Even if the trip lasts 5 business days, the person arrives home on Saturday and has a weekend break. And from Monday - back to work. It is hard, and we understand it. So a long collaboration from one location is, of course, great, but in our case is not available.
What tasks did you solve at a previous job? What did you personally suggest to do?
Why we ask it: for successful interaction with a remote employee, not only his experience and a set of technical skills is important. In this mode, proactivity is very necessary. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to ask directly about how proactive a person is, so we rate this quality in his story about previous projects. We look at both the construction of phrases and the essence that the candidate expresses, trying to understand how ready he is to take the initiative in solving current problems.
By the way, in answering this question both managerial skills and the maturity of a specialist appear as a separate structural unit. This is also useful on the remote. And in hiring, we take into account all the information that we manage to collect, including that the teams are balanced and do not conflict inside due to the fact that five generators of ideas gathered, conditionally speaking, but not a single person capable of realizing all this.
What have you learned lately?
Why we ask it: self-learning is very important in remote work. And this is another quality, which will not be able to ask a direct question. Moreover, the actual knowledge of the candidate is also completely not equivalent to the ability to receive them independently. Therefore, it remains only to ask about where a person is moving in the field of self-education.
What do you like about work?
Why we ask it: our work (both the format and the nature of the tasks) is structured in such a way that we need resultants. They are usually very much needed in development offices, but, unfortunately, there are fewer result-takers in the labor market than process workers. And if in the office you can put up with it, periodically coming and personally kicking the processor, then in the remote format such an assumption will not work.
To what extent a person is focused on the result, we estimate the answer to this question. Naturally, in the end, we look not only at this answer, but also at the whole conversation.
Why can not complete the task?
Why do we ask this: the purpose of this question is to
get an idea of ​​how responsible the candidate is, how he perceives the work and its role in it. The answer to this question reveals the very interesting features of the candidates.
In some cases, a discussion of outstanding tasks leads us to the topic of controlling one’s own state. We are not machines - physical and emotional health always affects performance. And if in the office the manager can keep track of such things and send employees home when they clearly fail (he can give a vacation or sick leave, depending on the reasons for a sharp drop in productivity), then the situation is different on the remote. Timlid / leader sees nothing but the obvious. And many remote employees had previously encountered the attitude that “since you are at home, work and be sick”.
So for their part, they are accustomed every time to rape their bodies so as not to seem idlers. And this is also a problem, since a sick person not only works more slowly, but also, most likely, will give a lower-quality solution (which will also have to be corrected later). So, monitoring one’s own condition is also a face of responsibility to the team.
A few months ago, I was on TeamLead Conf, and colleagues there offered other questions to assess responsibility. For example, “how will you part with your current job”? I agree that this question also talks a lot about the candidate. If you don’t want to hire a responsible (critical for business) position of a person who will gladly run away from the previous employer even tomorrow, without preparing the ground for this. Similarly, he will run away from you later.
Instead of totals
I did not specifically write the “correct answers” ​​in any of the questions, because, I repeat, they do not exist. As mentioned above, we never rate candidates by one or more answers. We always make a detailed matrix of qualities, according to which we select a person to match the company and its values.
Of course, our questions are not limited to this list. We are also waiting for questions from the candidates themselves - about everything that concerns them in the context of relations with our company.
If you are an IT profile specialist, come to us. We work completely remotely, which means that we do not have discrimination for those who for some reason do not get into the office. We build strong teams of interesting people with whom it is easy to even talk. We do not hang on qualified staff for training and do not prohibit the management of our own projects.
If you are hiring yourself, perhaps you have some interesting life hacking? Share in the comments!
Author: Sergey Marina, Maxillect
PS We publish our articles on several sites Runet. Subscribe to our pages on the
VK ,
FB or
Telegram channel to find out about all our publications and other news from Maxilect.