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How We Hire Software Craftspeople

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Any organization is the sum of its people and employees are its main spokespeople. Human capital is our most valued asset. So, hiring suitable candidates, who share the same values and core principles as Incubyte is our biggest imperative.

To do this, we handle our recruitment process and like to take our time evaluating all aspects of applicants before we make them a part of our team. Our interview process is designed to help us understand the breadth and depth of a candidate’s technical expertise, soft skills as well as more intangible things like values and principles. The latter also being an intrinsic screening criterion, both during the hiring process as well as after joining, we hold our people to very high personal values. Integrity, honesty and accountability, among others, are non-negotiable and we try to gauge each through the entire process.

The end-to-end employee selection process has five steps:

1. Coding Test:

Candidates take an online coding test and send us a link to their Git repo. The instructions are simple…they need to code up the problem using Test Driven Development.

Our goals at this interview stage are to:

a) Finding potential candidates who invest their time in taking our hiring test, and so are interested in becoming a part of our current team

b) Evaluate their thought process, problem-solving skills and concept clarity.

2. Phone interview:

This is usually a 30-minute call with our hiring team for us to get to know each other and see if our values and interests align. We start with open-ended questions and gradually go through past experiences, a few background checks; explain the role and gauge where their interests lie. At this stage, we are more interested in the mindset and understanding the criteria that are important for the candidate, in work and life! We are also happy to answer any and every question that the candidate might have for us.

3. Technical Interview:

Next up is a technical/functional conversation with one of our software engineers. The goal here is for us to get a better understanding of technical skills and a glimpse into their developer intelligence. This is a great opportunity for the candidate to ask questions and know more about the company culture from the current employees.

4. Live Coding Session:

This remote interview of programming session with one (or more) of our Craftspeople, with the choice of IDE and tooling left to the applicant. In this phase, we tackle a coding kata together, to help us, deep-dive, into their coding language and software design skills, their inclination and ability to pair and their willingness for feedback. This is also a really good platform for candidates to point us to snippets of code or past work they’ve done that showcase their talent.

5. The Finale:

This is a call with the talent makers(our founders) to determine alignment in attitude, emotional intelligence and work philosophy. This may also include a short coding session and some technical questions. It is mostly an open-ended casual conversation to see if we like each other and our expectations are aligned.

In the end, post all the reference checks, if there is a unanimous thumbs up from everyone involved in the process, the applicant is now a colleague and the onboarding process begins!

Having said that, it is not easy to find potential employees with the high technical, personal and cultural values that we hold oh, so dear! Our hiring ratio is less than 0.20% of people we talk to, so don’t feel disheartened. We always give constructive feedback and are more than happy to talk to a candidate again once they have honed their skills!

Our process is hard and time-consuming, but we are invested in it, are constantly looking to improve it, and do whatever it takes to find that person from the talent pool, who will help us learn, grow, and become smarter together.

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