Hi there,
If you’ve enjoyed some of the blog posts my wonderful colleagues have posted here on dev.to and would like to get to know the authors in person, today is your lucky day: We’re hiring!
My name is Eka and I'm working in the HR department at epilot. Our mission is to maximize positive employee experience starting with a smooth recruiting process, over to a great onboarding and finally ensuring an enjoyable work atmosphere with e.g. regular get-togethers, providing opportunities for personal development and generally supporting wherever we can.
If you’re curious about our recruiting process and maybe even would yourself wish to become an “epilot” one day (that's what we call ourselves!), read on and we’ll provide you with this post as a cheat sheet on how to get hired!
Application
- What is expected of you?
Just send us your CV. A cover letter would be also appreciated to get to know more about you. A link to a public GitHub account or Portfolio with existing projects is always very exciting for us!
- What happens in the background?
Your application will be carefully reviewed by our colleagues. We like to move fast so don’t be surprised by getting a response even on the same day!
Phone call
- What is expected of you?
Congratulations, you’ve passed the first stage and we’ve invited you for a first phone interview. In the first phone call (about 30min) we want to learn more about you and your past experience. Me or my colleague Nathalie will reach out to you and schedule a first chat with us.
In this call you will get to know an epilot colleague personally and have a discussion on your career (“Where have you been and where are you in your career?”), expectations (“What would you like to do at epilot?”) and practicalities (“Notice period?”, “Are you planning to relocate or work remotely?”). You will also get a chance to ask us about anything regarding your future role or about epilot in general.
- What happens in the background?
Prior to your phone call with our dev colleague, he or she will take a deeper look at your CV and any other information provided e.g. projects on your Github profile. If we have any questions about your CV or portfolio projects, this is when we get to talk about it. Make sure come prepared with stories about teams and projects you've worked on and are especially proud of, or learned something important.
Take-home coding task
- What is expected of you?
If you made it thus far you’ve definitely impressed us! Depending on the position and your prior experience we will might provide you a take-home coding task, or alternatively ask you to walk us through an existing project on your GitHub.
The purpose of this is to both assess your technical experience level and how well you communicate about your code. We definitely don’t expect a perfect solution, but rather a small sample of how you like to work and think about solving problems with code.
The appropriate amount of time and effort spent on the assignment is totally up to you, but you shouldn’t feel pressured to spend more than a half-day’s effort on it. While we appreciate moving fast, we of course understand you are busy so take your time submitting your completed assignment. You will not be rated on the speed of delivery.
- What happens in the background?
After you complete the assignment or provide a link to an existing project for review, one of our dev colleagues (most likely the one you had your first interview with) will carefully review the code and provide feedback. If all goes well, HR will send you an invitation to a final interview!
Final interview
- What is expected of you?
Well done, you've made it this far! The final interview will either be held on-site or as video call. In this final step you will usually meet the dev colleague who reviewed your coding task, Szilard (our CTO) and a team member from HR (me or Nathalie). Everyone knows that interview situations can be stressful, therefore we try to keep the interview more as a dialogue and definitely not as one-way interrogation. Always feel free to ask questions in between and generally come as you are. There is absolutely no need to be nervous at all🙂.
To make you feel comfortable at epilot, in case the final interview will be held in our office in Cologne, we will happily welcome you with a drink of your choice (🥛,☕️,🍵). Unfortunately in case of a final video call we cannot offer you a drink of your choice, but you are free to take your drink of your choice with during the video call🙂.
The final interview is usually divided into the following parts:
Introduction: to make us all comfortable and get to know who the people sitting in front of you, (possibly your new colleagues!) we start off with a short introduction round.
Technical deep-dive: After the introductions we dive right into the technical part. Usually we ask you to walk us through the code sample you provided in the last phase of the process and ask you questions about the solution. As we don’t expect you to spend a lot of time on the code assignment and come up with a perfect solution, we will ask you to think of ways to improve the solution, if this were to be deployed as a real world production application.
We will also discuss more general tech topics related to the position you’re applying for. We like candidates who have opinions on tech and get excited about things!
Cultural and personal fit: In the next part of the final call we will talk about how you think, how you work, how you think things should work, what drives your work and that kind of topics. In that regard we will also give you a glimpse of how we think, work, we think things should work and what drives our work.
Question time: Since this interview is also meant for you to get to know us better (the company, the team, the job position, our tech stack) feel free to ask us about anything on your mind. If you can’t think of anything else, just ask us about our favourite dishes.
Practicalities: If not already done before we will also discuss things like your notice period, relocation plans and compensation.
- What happens in the background?
Before the final interview all participants will prepare any questions they wish to talk about with you: beginning from unanswered questions regarding any question marks in your CV, followed by questions regarding your take-home coding task and also questions regarding the person behind the application. Keep the aforementioned parts of the interview in mind and prepare to give us valuable insights regarding each part.
After the final interview all participants from our side come together and share their feedback with each other. Shortly after the final interview we will get back to you to give you feedback whether we will get you onboard to a common journey or if we will unfortunately go separate ways.
Hired!
Ready for take-off? We are happy to welcome you to the epilot family. You can now proudly call yourself an “epilot”.
The next step in your journey with us will be the onboarding process.
If you reside outside the EU we will assist you with your work permit and relocation. Generally we will provide you with a 90-day plan to help you get started and what to expect in your first days at epilot.
Here’s what you can expect in your first weeks:
- A (virtual) office tour to get to know your workplace and meet your colleagues
- A meeting with HR to clarify any remaining HR related question
- A meeting with your supervisor to discuss your role and responsibilities from day one
- A talk about the vision, mission and culture at epilot with with one of the founders
- A product demo meeting
- Meetings with the heads of departments to get an overview about the product and the business as well as other exciting and fun things awaiting you!
Ready to become part of our awesome journey? Then we're looking forward to talking to you and receiving your application! Check out our open tech positions!
If you have any questions: reach out to me directly at e.terima@epilot.cloud or get in touch with our recruitment team at careers@epilot.cloud
We are looking forward to welcoming you at epilot!
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