A Rapid Recruitment Process

Problem

"I was working for Wonga and needed to hire really quickly, as we wanted to have hired 100 engineers in a year. We were really lucky in terms of being able to find a large number of engineers to hire rapidly. A large engineering company had recently shut down, so we hired outside agents to take the engineers from the company as quickly as possible. But, how did we go through the recruiting process so quickly?"

Actions taken

"We had to spend time setting up a detailed recruiting process, and make it as lean and fast as possible, and repeatable as possible. We did this by setting up a multi-step process. First, the candidate would have a screening phone call with an engineer who would be in their team, and they would then be asked to do a 20-minute online test to help us judge whether they were at the right level. Following this, they would do a one to two-hour online coding session with two other team members, where they would write code, and they would then undergo a final interview with our CTO and the founder of the company. We would always have an offer ready to go before the final interview, so that if it went well we could offer the candidate a job before they even walked out of the door."

Lessons learned

"Include the team's that you are hiring candidates for in the interview process, and have them help you on deciding on the tests they want to use for the interviews, as every team is slightly different. In addition, ensure that the engineers are hiring people who are better than themselves, so you know your company will benefit from the new hire. Finally, make sure you have a clear path in terms of your recruiting process, and constantly work on refining it. We checked our process every six months to check whether our tests were valid and whether giving the information we needed."