The Art and Science of Hiring for Classy’s Engineering Team

This article is contributed by Golnar Tahriri Amery , Lead Recruiter at Classy.?

Our Engineering hiring process falls somewhere between an art form and a science.?

The art is building a process that evaluates what is important to the team and organization—while also communicating and expressing the value of working on said team.

The science is the objective structure and methodology that helps us more consistently assess candidates and hire the right people.

At Classy , we continuously work to evolve the art and the science of our interviews and resources. Over the past three years, we’ve implemented more standardization and best practices into our hiring process, including interviewer training, clear interview assignments, diversity accountability, and pre-approved question banks for both behavioral and technical questions.

Representation

We pride ourselves in ensuring that the pool of candidates we consider is inclusive and diverse. We strive for at least 50% of the candidates per position pipeline to be from an underrepresented group. With the help of tools like Gem and Greenhouse reporting, we check our pipelines bi-weekly and share them with hiring managers for visibility and accountability.

Accountability is a great starting point. We’ve been moving the needle through a combination of awareness and action. Diversity can mean a variety of things. For Engineering, in particular, women have been historically underrepresented across the industry, and our team is no exception.?

Having visibility into our pool of candidates and understanding what representation is missing gives us the power to change the front end of the process: where we bring in candidates for consideration. We cannot change how candidates perform during interviews, but we can ensure they are brought to the table. In 2022, we hired 16 women into our Product, Design & Engineering organization. 81% were hired in the second half of the year when our Recruiting team focused on setting achievable candidate representation and outreach goals.

Classy’s Hiring teams also do their best to form hiring panels of interviewers with diverse backgrounds and roles. If hiring an Engineer, we make sure their panel includes individuals of varying ethnicity, gender, and job scope.

Having a representative panel helps us have varying perspectives that lead to a more holistic understanding of a candidate. For example, if a candidate comes from a coding boot camp background and their interviewers are a mix of traditional computer science educated individuals, as well as boot camp graduates we can have a good discussion about whether their knowledge is appropriate for the position. Was there a term they didn’t understand that was too academic and rarely used in a professional setting?

There are also differences in emotions that people value across cultures. Some cultures prefer a calm demeanor and others, like European Americans, tend to prefer excitement and passion from a candidate during an interview. Having a panel of interviewers with different cultural backgrounds can help us uncover these nuances when we discuss feedback during debrief meetings and ultimately, help us redirect us from making biased decisions.

Core Competencies

Having a diverse group of candidates doesn’t mean much if you don’t have a clear picture of what core competencies the individual you’re looking to hire must have. Without clarity and direction on what strengths and skills your team is looking for, numerous unconscious biases come into play and incorrectly steer hiring decisions.

Classy provides interviewers with pre-approved question banks for both Behavioral and Technical interview questions to guarantee as much consistency as possible.

Recruiters partner with the hiring manager to confirm what competencies are important in the person we’re looking to hire—both technical and behavioral. Technical competencies can range from problem-solving skills, javascript, AWS, to knowledge of microservice architecture.?

It’s crucial also to consider behavioral competencies when hiring within Product and Engineering. Some of the core behavioral competencies we look for in candidates are their ability to collaborate, communicate ideas, and their aptitude for learning and growth.

Behavioral Interview Process

Before interviewing, all interviewers complete our interactive ‘Interview Essentials Training,’ which guides them through asking behavioral questions and what to look for in candidates’ responses. This training shares best practices around a positive candidate experience and how to mitigate unconscious biases.

Behavioral interviewing is all about asking questions that require the interviewee to pull specific examples from their previous experiences that illustrate a specific competency. From there, the interviewer can follow up and dive deeper into the details of projects they’ve worked on and challenges they’ve encountered.

( i.e. are they solutions-oriented? We’d find out by asking them about a time the candidate has overcome a setback and how they went about it.)

These behavioral competency interviews are just as important for Technical hires as for any other individual we hire in the organization. If we solely focus on technical skills, someone’s inability to communicate their ideas or work as a team could jeopardize project success or team morale when they come on board.

Focusing on core competencies and behavioral questions drawn from past examples and experiences gives us a more objective and standardized way to measure candidates’ abilities.

We also require all interviewers to have a confirmed set of questions they consistently ask each candidate during interviews for a particular position. Having interviewers ask the same questions of each candidate provides a more fair playing field as interviewers analyze candidate responses. Of course, these conversations may lead to more candid follow-up questions, but giving each candidate an equal opportunity to share their relevant experiences is important.

Streamlined Candidate Experience

We aim to learn about each candidate through an intentional interview process that evaluates their competencies and behavioral skills from multiple perspectives in a streamlined experience.

For individual contributor hires, our best-practice guidance is a maximum of 5 formal interviews with the team: 1 introductory phone call with a Recruiter, 1 hour video interview with the hiring manager, ~2 Behavioral interviews, and 1-2 Technical interviews.

We utilize CoderPad to assess technical skills and coding knowledge, which helps us shorten the hiring process.

We make sure there aren’t too many ‘cooks in the kitchen’, but that the interview panel encompasses multiple diverse perspectives. ‘Multiple perspectives’ can mean various things. It can mean having someone from a cross-functional team or a different function participate on the panel or someone with a non-traditional degree or background. It can also mean the panel includes interviewers of diverse ethnicities or genders.

Candidates don’t have to meet with everyone on the team because the team trusts one another’s assessments and opinions.

Our interviewers have clear focus areas they work to uncover during their meeting time, and we do our best to avoid overlapping questions.

A candidate’s career history and ability to speak about technical concepts can often be good indicators of their skills and knowledge.

At the end of the day, these methods help us find and hire the most qualified candidates.?

Interested in joining the team? View our open roles to join Classy’s movement for good.