Outreachy report #29: January 2022
December cohort
Feedback #3
This was the first round of feedback I dealt with alone as Sage had urgent tasks to take care of. That gave me time and space to do a bit of experimentation with our feedback notes and our reviewing technique.
I prioritized interns that previously had concerning feedback and/or required intervention. I wrote detailed notes on what them and their mentors said and compared it to what they said in previous feedback rounds. If they still required intervention, I would write a summary of their situation and discuss our options with Sage and act on it. If it didn’t, I would set a reminder to keep an eye on their feedback in subsequent submissions.
One remarkable case: an intern told us they are really shy, hesitated to interact with their mentor and wanted to know the perspective of volunteer mentors on asking questions. The intern was afraid of asking too many questions and making their mentor overwork.
I wrote an email offering them my perspective from the few mentorships I did and encouraging them to establish a few lines of communication with their mentor. The intern replied saying they already followed some suggestions, but they still felt isolated. I made them the suggestion of connecting with their peers and share their struggles with other Outreachy interns, as that’s something that did help me during my own Outreachy internship. That did the trick for them – they felt more comfortable talking about the issues they were facing with their fellow interns, which in turn made them more confident to be more open with their mentor!
For interns with no previous concerning feedback, I did what I later called at a glance reviews. I would attentively read their feedback and mark it as approved if there still wasn’t anything concerning about it. If something concerning came up, I would create a new section in our document, write detailed notes and follow what I described a few paragraphs prior.
This system worked really well! I was able to review them all in time.
Hiring
We’re in the final stages of our hiring process. We interviewed all 8 candidates we selected after a holistic review of their performance in the early stages, and we’re at that point where we’re contacting references. Since my reports are public, I will refrain from writing about this stage of the hiring process in more detail until we announce our new community manager–I don’t want to give anyone undue advantage if they come across my blog posts.
I do, however, want to look back at what we did so far and reflect on the many ways running a hiring process changed my perspective of things. I’d say this was the most challenging and difficult task I’ve ever had to complete so far as this is my first time on the other side of a hiring process. Today, I want to talk about reviewing resumés and screening interviews.
Acknowledgments
We took great inspiration from Conservancy’s latest hiring process, and I can’t thank Karen enough for her insightful blog post and even more insightful answers to our many, many questions along the way. Such insights provided us a solid foundation for our own hiring process.
Reviewing resumés
We were quite lenient when screening resumés, but those who personalized their résumé to highlight skills and experience relevant to the job opening had a higher chance of being perceived as strong applicants.
I’m a holistic tech professional. While I’m extremely specialized in open communities and projects, I’ve grown used to wearing many hats. That’s a strength considering my current academic endeavors – what’s an Information Systems professional if not a tech professional with a sharp systemic view? – and my preference for smaller teams, but that can also be a quite challenging position to be when applying to jobs.
That’s why I’ve always preferred applying to few job openings to craft personalized resumés and cover letters. I understand why other people sometimes choose the other way around – getting a job is really tough and automation in hiring processes makes everyone’s lives even tougher. But if you know that your resumé will be reviewed by a human in all the earliest stages of a hiring process, sending a personalized resumé is a better strategy.
Resumés are perceived as the facts about you while cover letters are your elevator pitch. Together, they’re all about the art of telling a good story.
The only thing I’d add to our hiring process in this phase would be a request for a candidate to write a paragraph or two about their views on free and open source software (and ask questions about it in later stages). That would give us a clearer picture of their values and principles, and would allow us to better evaluate whether they align with ours.
Screening interviews
I wasn’t familiar with the concept until we were advised to adopt it. Screening interviews are 15-minute interviews that are all about knowing if your candidate is real, communicates well and can articulate some key ideas in a short time. We had 5 different screeners interviewing 59 candidates. Our screeners were all trusted community members with different backgrounds. Asking their opinion on the candidates provided us a fresh perspective on them.
We’re aware that such interviews can favor those who are more familiar with such practices, so our only conditions to not allow someone to advance to the next stage were (1) if something they said was a red flag (2) if they didn’t attend the interview and didn’t contact us to reschedule it. Our screening interviews were used later in the hiring process as one more source of information on candidates to review them holistically.
We were transparent about what questions we were going to ask and that transparency was deeply appreciated by our candidates. It gave them space and time to prepare.