Outreachy report #28: December 2021
Happy New Year! 🎆 I’m so excited about what 2022 will bring!
Hiring
I had some expectations for the written exercise results: I expected this to be the “make it or break it” moment of our hiring process (dramatically decreasing the amount of candidates we’d work with from then) and hoped it would surprise us completely. I was correct on both counts: we went from 49 eligible candidates to 12 candidates advancing to interviews with either Sage Sharp or myself, and some of the candidates we considered strong from the beginning didn’t even make to our list of candidates of interest in any tier!
Sage and I had slightly different reviewing styles, but both of us had no idea about who the author of the answers were during the process. This allowed us to judge their answers as is, and rank candidates accordingly. Each one of us had three lists: first, second and third tier.
After we finally consolidated our lists, went through them together – deanonymizing everyone – and considered:
- Whether both of us included that candidate in any of our lists
- What made us include candidate X or Y in a specific list
- The strengths of all candidates at hand
We ended up with 12 top candidates. Some of them emailed us before we could email them, telling us they got another job offer aligned; some of them told us that after we contacted them. 7 candidates already scheduled an 1 hour interview with us.
This interview will be a behavioral interview. Sage and I came up with a list of questions for the candidate and a list of questions we expect candidates to ask us. They include topics such as:
- Work they are find passionate
- Work they find challenging
- Their communication and collaboration style
- How they prefer to communicate with remote team members
- Time management
- Team interpersonal dynamics
From our list, I believe all of them would be offered contract positions. The candidates we had in Canada and the United States have other jobs aligned and withdrew their applications.
December cohort
Intern chats
We deployed a couple of changes to the intern chats this round:
Our first intern chat introduced them to topics related to remote working. We talked about work-life balance, having your own dedicated work space, communication styles and tools, and so on. We noticed that this chat encouraged interns to be more mindful about the amount of time spent working; many of them mentioned actively trying to find a better balance between work and personal life in their first feedback.
Our second intern chat, Everybody Struggles, was hosted on an exclusive Interns & Alums stream. We asked mentors that are also alums to not read the chat log, and tried our best to give our interns space to talk about their own personal struggles.
Feedback #1
Starting this round, we will collect feedback from mentors and interns four times and only two rounds of feedback will be associated with interns’ payments. We expect that collecting more feedback more frequently will help us identify any issues sooner, which in turn will allow us to intervene sooner if needed.
But collecting Feedback #1 so soon sometimes will mean not having much to act on. Overall, we had only a couple of issues that required following up with interns and mentors once. We didn’t have any high complexity problems to address this time, which allowed me to take some time off during the week of December 13th to schedule (and recover from) a surgery I needed for years.