Recruitment In A Software House – Pagepro P. 1: Online

If you consider becoming a developer, you will have to make yourself ready for different recruitment process in a different software house.

By reading this you will get familiar with the process of recruitment in our company, which will definitely help you get prepared for any other recruitment process.

You will learn:

• How to get prepared and start the recruitment process?
• What makes you a good candidate?
• Which skills and abilities we value the most?
• How to survive code audit and face to face interview?
• Who has the final word if you are a good candidate or not good (yet)?

Phase 1- CV Screening

Every recruitment process in every software house starts from this phase.

When we get your CV, we do a quick first overview of your skills and experience.

If there is any not IT-related experience in your CV, you can take it out. We won’t need it, but we will appreciate information about other activities like sports, work abroad, or languages.

Hint: IT degree is nice to have, but we do not require that as there is a lot of good self-taught developers.

We check each CV individually so there is no such thing as group checks or comparison to other candidates. This step is fully done by our CEO. When he can see you are a good match, he sends your CV further to us.

Just to let you know, we don’t have any HR manager and because we’re receiving many CVs each and every week, we are able to answer only to the most promising candidates (shame on us).

If your CV has a great fit with our needs, you should receive the response in 1 week. If you won’t receive it, don’t worry, there is still a huge chance that we will get back to you in the future.

Phase 2 – Recruitment online task

I suppose any software house has an online recruitment task. If your CV is interesting, as a next step you will get the info about online recruitment task.

All the instructions, requirements and nice-to-have features can be found here on GitHub.

Additionally, we also put some info about what we will check in your code.

We need you to use a specific tech stack to make sure you will be able to follow up on projects pretty quickly.

If you are new in the frontend world, this task can be hard, but if you have any commercial experience this will be a super easy one. There is no deadline, but it’s nice if you will send this back to us in one week.

Phase 3 – Code audit

First, we are choosing one of our senior developers to have a look at the code.

Sometimes we check it the same day, sometimes a few days later – it depends on developers’ availability.

In fact, this step is the most time-consuming one as we need to check the code in many aspects and prepare the document with feedback.

It’s important to do it carefully so both sides will have a benefit – the candidate will get valuable feedback, and Pagepro will improve abilities to generate valuable audits which can be used not only on the future candidates, but also for our clients and other bigger projects.

We have a whole document prepared for that part which guides the code auditor on what he should focus on during the review.

The document contains a list of specific skills with values next to them. Values are ranges points (like 0-1, 0-2, 0-5). Candidate receives them for a specific skill.

We also create a document that describes this process, and we send it back so the candidate is aware what was good and what was not in his code (obviously in our opinion).

We are syntax/style freaks and that’s something we really care about. This is not a kind of skill that you can learn from tutorials – it describes if you are messy or pedantic, and how much attention you actually pay to details.

Additionally, clean code is way easier to check as your eyes won’t get burned from looking at it (it is also a tip for future candidates! – use linters please). This part is done by one (or sometimes two) of our developers, just to ensure the value of a feedback.

Phase 4 – F2F initialization

The final phase of most of online recruitment process in a software house is a summary and internal discussion about the candidate with the team and CEO.

If you wrote a good code, and your code auditor will decide that he want to check your skills face to face, in most cases, that’s how this part ends.

You got your response with a few dates to pick from for the interview. If you are still interested we just schedule a meeting – around 95% of meetings are really face to face, as we also run interviews remotely (Google Hangouts).

If the code auditor has mixed feelings – mostly we send you the feedback, and we ask you to update your code according to the feedback.

We can say that it’s a similar process like you have during the creation of pull requests on repository:

• create PR
• check the code
• add some comments
• update the code
• check the code again
• accept/merge the PR or comment the code again and repeat the steps

If you are making a progress, we will invite you for a meeting. If not, we will just say thanks for now.

This step is done by at least 2 people – the CEO + a developer but very often we ask few developers on what they think, as we want to make sure we won’t let any talent slip away.

Part 1: Summary

As you see we do care about our recruitment process and candidates.

We want to make sure they are well-informed and have a clear future path, as they just deserve that.

We’ve prepared a document that can be used by anyone in our company to see what he should check in future candidate’s profiles, so every person is checked with the same criteria, and none of our developers is fooled by the feelings.

Your code auditor is always well-prepared and knows what to search for in your code.

As I said, this process is time-consuming but every minute is worth it (if you spend it wisely).

You can learn from it and use this knowledge in the future (like we do for company audits or even our internal code reviews).

After online recruitment phase, it is now time to talk face to face.

This process is explained in Recruitment process in Pagepro: Part 2: Offline.