DEV Community: Willem Wijnans

How to get hired by a remote-first company 🏝️

Willem Wijnans — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 15:52:53 +0000

Remote is so hot right now. However, if you want to work for a remote-first company there are a few things you need to know before applying as the hiring game is vastly different. Here at Aula Education, we get around 10K applicants a year for our tech jobs alone and we’re all about setting our candidates up for success so here are some tips that can be valuable for everyone.

Let’s get started.

courtesy of evernote.com

Before applying

Before you even start looking for jobs, have a deep thinking session with yourself on what it would mean to be a successful remote worker. Before you apply, make sure you got this covered:

Your motivation to go remote 🏃‍♀️

It’s important that you get crystal clear on why you want to go remote and understand the up and downsides of working in a remote-first team. Many candidates only see the positives like “no commute” & “more family time” but are oblivious to the loneliness remote work can introduce in their life. I want you to tell me in a mature way how you plan to go about the limitations of remote work as well.

You’ve invested in the right hardware 💻

Before you start applying, invest in a webcam, a good webcam (I use this one, Techradar 2019 webcams). Doing calls from your integrated laptop camera is just not great. Apart from telling me how serious you take this I clearly feel the difference between an OK and a great setup being on the receiving end. While you are at it, get a good pair of headphones (I use this one, Techradar 2019 headphones).

You acknowledge competition is going to be fierce 🚀

You probably already noticed, but the talent pool for remote companies is mostly unlimited. You are up against the whole world: think Maria from Uruguay, Fredrik from Sweden and Dhruv from India. Think of creative ways you can set yourself apart from the other candidates.

When applying

Now that you’ve taken care of the basics to set you up for success, let’s get started on the ‘applying’ part of landing a remote job. Here are the things I hold in high regard when screening applications:

Remote = async communication ✏️

The one thing that I want to reinforce is that we look for people who can communicate asynchronously. Written communication is a key part of remote work, and it needs to be clear. If you can’t put your thoughts to paper, then you will hold yourself back from being hired in a remote role.

When answering the initial questions (for comparisons, check out Gitlab, Aula, Hotjar, Clevertech starting questions), it’s in your best interests to take your time. It’s clear when a candidate has rushed their responses, so don’t do this, as it often means auto-deny.

Use the third door method🚪

Being successful … it’s just like a nightclub. There are always three ways in. There’s the First Door: the main entrance, where ninety-nine percent of people wait in line, hoping to get in. The Second Door: the VIP entrance, where the billionaires and celebrities slip through. But what no one tells you is that there is always, always… the Third Door. It’s the entrance where you have to jump out of line, run down the alley, bang on the door a hundred times, climb over the dumpster, crack open the window, sneak through the kitchen — there’s always a way in. — Alex Banayan

The ‘third door’ mentality can also help you get hired at a remote company. You can either apply where everyone else is applying and wait in line, or you take the third door. Here are two third door examples I’ve seen at Aula:

Building a custom website as an application

Lukas sent us a website built in react/redux answering the questions we ask + much more. He immediately stood out from the rest and got the final rounds at Aula. We concluded we were not the best match but we did intro him to Sketch where he currently works.

Building your application in Notion

We use Notion extensively and one of our applicants for the PM role built her application in Notion. Got her automatically through to the first screen.

When interviewing

Great, you’ve made it past the resume check! Now comes the interviews, which almost always starts with a screening call. This call is more important than you might want to believe. The person you’ll be speaking with will be your partner if you pass to the later rounds, so, a “this is just a screen ️call, whatever 💅” mentality is something that I strongly advise against (and unfortunately still see a lot).

Talking with the companies recruiter 🤝

Don’t underestimate the power of the recruiter within the remote organisation.

Recruiters working for a company are different than your third party recruiter. While you might be annoyed about the spam you receive from the latter, in-house recruiters are your friends during the hiring process. So come prepared to this first call, do some research on them as they will have on you. Most of the time the recruiter will try to align you with the companies values while extracting a few key traits they need for the role.

Bottom line here: a great recruiter will make you feel energized after the call, they left time in the end to answer your questions and are generally a good sneak peek into what the rest of the company is like.

Videocall hygiene 🤞

So this really should be common sense but I do want to stress out the following things that I find important:

Don’t do any of the official video calls outside, on your mobile phone or in a coffee shop. (quick syncs with the recruiter after the first screen are OK)
Make sure things going on in the background are in check. If you have a bed in the background, make sure it’s tidy. Messy kitchen? No thanks.
If you are going to write things down, mention it to the attendees beforehand. (hopefully, the interviewers return the favour)
Check if things work prior to your call. That means your laptop is fully charged, your camera is working (and not smudged), you’ve pre-installed and tested whatever video call tool you are using during the call.
Your position, especially in relation to the sun matters.
Be there earlier than the interview panel.

Take-home tests 🎒

Most companies send you off with something a-sync after the first screen, like some homework or a take-home test for you to complete. Here are some best practices:

Over-communicate: we like it when you show off your a-sync comms during the hiring process, so small updates on what you’ve been working on. Not making the deadline? That’s fine as long as you tell us in advance.
Be wary for “overpromise, underdeliver” syndrome: always go for “underpromise, overdeliver” instead.

Misc 🌈

As much as us companies like to believe that we are in the driving seat when hiring, trust me when I say that we are as much “on interview” as you are. Things to look out for during the hiring process:

How diverse was the interviewing team? Did you speak to a wide variety of people from different backgrounds?
If there were female or interviewers from underrepresented groups, how much were they involved? Did they actively participate or only sat in and listened?
Did you get feedback after every round? The positives but also the areas to improve?
Were the interviews scheduled with your best interest in mind or did you have to juggle unrealistic timezones?
Did you have to tell the same story twice in different interviewing rounds? Were the interviewers aligned?
Did the interviewers come prepared? Did they take the time or seemed rushed?

As a rule of thumb, the hiring process is like a miniature version of the company. If it’s awesome there is a good chance you have found yourself a great place to work. If it’s not, make sure you don’t sign up for something sub-par.

And with this, I leave you to it. I hope this helps you in your quest in finding a remote job.

We are hiring at Aula, find our open jobs at https://aula.education/careers.html

We open-sourced our handbook, you can find all our interview preparations there as well as how we do social life in a remote company or what we think remote work brings us as a company. Check it out:
The Aula Brain

And if you want to learn more about what kind of company we are under the hood, browse to our brand new Key Values profile: https://keyvalues.com/aula-education

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13 crying engineers: a remote culture of care

Willem Wijnans — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 14:12:53 +0000

At Aula, our engineering team perhaps isn’t as outspoken about our feelings as other teams.

Yet, two weeks ago I was part of something magical: my 14 engineering colleagues (including Oliver our CTO) stood all teary-eyed in a circle and shared their appreciation for each other and their commitment to our cause.

As a fully remote team, many of us had never met before. Some of us had met once.

This was a huge personal turning point. ‘Despite’ being remote, our engineering team had built deeply caring relationships with one another. As a company building a communication platform to foster community between students in digital space, this also validated our mission: “it is possible!”.

Here are 3 things we have done to foster an egoless culture of respect and care on our remote engineering team with engineers from 10 countries:

1. Create async spaces for care

Care for each other is not an add-on. When it’s there, it is woven into the fabric of how you collaborate.

Recognising each other as human beings is sometimes forgotten in chat. We encourage everyone to actively do so — even a “Good morning!” at the start of the day with no requests works wonders.

We have also created spaces dedicated to being vulnerable, warm and appreciative, through self-care related topics and non-work jokes. These spaces serve the purpose of making our existing colleagues feel ‘safe’ and constantly remind us that building trust and care is important.

Fredrik sharing some care for his team members in an internal chat group focused on self-care.

Low-quality jokes are welcome 🤓

2. Hire the unsung heroes

People need to feel safe to be vulnerable and show care for each other. The best way to build a safe place: don’t hire big egos.

Yet people who are mindful of people around them are sometimes shy, sometimes nervous, sometimes not great at giving an impressive spiel of why they ‘deserve’ to be part of a company. This has two important implications for how we hire.

Firstly, we do most of our interviewing asynchronously.

Async interview takes away a lot of unnecessary pressure that can make shy candidates underperform. Plus it mirrors how we work, so it’s a better test.

You’d think that async communication would make it harder to tell if people are full of care. Here are some screenshots that beg to differ:

Example of chitchat in our interviewing Slack channel.

Interviewees making friends during the interview process.

Our async interview process in Slack lets candidates get comfortable with several Aula engineers, outside of interviews.

Secondly, we are diligent about creating an interview process that filters for the underlying skills, not the most visible proxies like brand names on your CV or self-assuredness.

All engineering candidates take the time to build a small app using our tech stack as part of the interviews.

There are real downsides to this: we have had to let go of candidates with stellar CVs where other companies cut their interview processes down to 1–2 sync interviews due to the brand names on the candidate’s CV. This meant that the candidate couldn’t be bothered to do 6 hours of coding to interview with us. We aim for very short turnaround times during the interview process on our side, but rigorous testing still takes time from the candidates.

But there are also a real upside: we can hire excellent people that aren’t on the radar of big tech companies. We can give offers with high confidence. We think that’s a competitive advantage.

Read more about our interview process here — it’s public:

Async engineering interviews at Aula

3. Spend your in-person time bonding

Remote work doesn’t mean you never see each other. But the time spent together is all about bonding.

Our development team

Bonding is obviously not an obscure thing; our engineering team spent a week together deeply focused on a full migration to Lambda. Meeting around the kind of technical challenges that brought us all together is a great way to do it.

On our retreat this spring, we also tried something weird and fun: an appreciation session.

We took time out to write out a note of appreciation for all our team members and then took turns to share them with each other. After the initial awkwardness, we unleashed an enormous amount of vulnerability and explicit care for each other. Our team has never felt so ready to build something incredible together.

We’re hiring! If this is the kind of place you’d like to work, check out our open roles.

PS. I am eager to hear how other teams build a culture of care and ensure psychological safety.

I'm Willem Wijnans, and I support women devs.

Willem Wijnans — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 10:42:21 +0000

I will advocate for gender equality by

keeping my hiring pipeline diverse and inclusive. One thing I do is put on a bias filter when I am sourcing for our next hires @ Aula. Try it out yourself: https://unbias.io/

Shoutout to

Jennifer Kim, https://www.jennifer.kim/, for all her hard work on diversity and inclusion

86+ quality candidates for a Software Engineering position, here’s how we did it

Willem Wijnans — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 15:57:52 +0000

Hiring at Slite is, like at any early stage company, mission critical. And like any startup, we have limited visibility. We work ~~hard~~ smart for great candidates to apply to our roles. We invest time and effort reaching out to people, getting Slite on their radar.

On top of that, Slite is a product company. Anyone we engage with to join our team is also a potential Slite user. This goes from people we find ourselves, to people who apply to us. All our hiring efforts could result in a potential new company using Slite. It's fair to say that the better we play the hiring game, the more it can function as a secondary marketing channel.

We want to start sharing our evolving hiring approach. This first post will focus on quick wins any startup can try today, on a limited budget. They helped us get 86 qualified candidates for a Software Engineer open position:

First things first

Slite is at an interesting phase: we're early stage, developing a remote-first culture, face interesting technical challenges and use some of the newest technology out there. In theory, attracting good candidates shouldn't be too complicated. In practice, it's a lot about getting the "first time right".

Getting the word out

We started by getting our name out there, focusing on platforms where startup-minded people are.

Who's hiring by Y Combinator

The best place to start is Y Combinator's monthly "Who's hiring" post. It's a monthly thread on HackerNews called Ask HN: Who's hiring where startups from all over the world post their open jobs to engage with (passive) talent. This post yielded the best results: we got in touch with 13 top notch applications, including Julien, who we ended up hiring.

Fun fact: we'd been in touch with Julien two years ago but he wasn't looking for a job back then. He spotted us on Who's hiring and reached out: if we hadn't posted there, we would've probably missed out on him._

Posting and praying for results does not work here. As with any HackerNews thread, posts with engagement (comments, upvotes) get ranked higher. Encouraging our team to start conversations and answer questions worked wonders. It kept us on the first page for maximum visibility, naturally increasing the number of applicants.

AngelList

AngelList can also get you quality candidates in little time, with a small budget. It's a platform for startup-minded people, so you can't go wrong there. Simply creating a company page and posting open positions brought us 26 applicants, including 7 relevant matches:

Although we haven't hired anyone through AngelList yet, it's a quick win. It takes close to no time to qualify candidates who are interested in Slite.

Bonus: since Product Hunt was bought by AngelList, a small "Hiring" tag will appear on your Product Hunt profile, next to your name. For example, we recently launched Slite's mobile app, giving us extra free visibility to relevant people.

Going out there ourselves

Now that we've ensured generating the right kind of interest by being vocal on relevant channels, we wanted to share a bit on how we go around sourcing candidates ourselves and reaching out to them.

In our experience, a successful hiring strategy should combine both. Get quality inbound applicants (volume) and support the hiring funnel by reaching out to interesting people (quality).

Remember that you're working for the long-run. The people you reach out to might not be on the lookout _right now _but will keep you in mind when they are.

What works for us

So how do we find who to reach out to?

We first decided to narrow down our talent pool as much as possible, so we could do pin-point searching. We set the following criteria to achieve maximum success:

Remote first — we focus on people who have worked remotely before
Domain — we look for people who have previously worked for a startup, specifically for a productivity app
Tech — we look for experts in Nodejs & Graphql, as our biggest challenge is around delivering Slite public api
Profile — we're drawn to candidates with side-projects/speakers at conferences/tech bloggers/leadership skills

Then, we drew out a list of all the companies that might have the kind of engineers we're looking for:

This is a living document in Slite, to which we regularly add companies to stay up to date on the domain. Now, where do we go look for people who fit this criteria?

We built a Linkedin search filter for these companies that notifies us weekly on all of their employees' activity:

Relevant newsletters

We're also interested by active people in the open-source community, who write and/or speak about relevant technical topics. Scouting on newsletters like Node Weekly, GraphQL Weekly & Dev.to brings us about two relevant people per week with whom to start conversations about what they built and why we like it.

Medium

Medium is also a wonderful place for us to write about how we solve our technical challenges and how we're building our tool. But it's an equally great place to find people interested in solving the same kinds of problems we're solving. A super simple medium search with GraphQL and NodeJS delivers passionate writers to our doorstep every day:

We try to send at least five highly relevant emails per week to people we believe would be a good fit for Slite. Did you notice those 13 people in the "Talent Pool" in one of the above images? Consider those 13 our passive, highly relevant candidates found using the methods I just described.

The actual reach out

In the early days, we were sending out emails out to candidates mainly explaining what Slite is instead of focusing on what makes them interesting to us.

Read this one here:
Reach out from Pierre to Lead Engineer

We changed our tactics last November and switched to writing emails that focus entirely on the recipient, and less about us. Here are some examples:

Hiring passive candidates like this takes time, but it really pays off. Creating your own pipeline gives you full control over it and ensures it's always filled with the relevant, qualified people for the job. We're positive that every minute we spend on this important initiative is invaluable for us as a business.

Treat your candidates as potential customers

One other important thing we want to get across is how to treat all the people you interact with while hiring. We haven't been the best at this and are still learning how to do this effectively.

One thing we can share with you: rejecting candidates with a standard denial email is not wise when you're a product company (or any other company for what it's worth). The way we interact with candidates is a direct reflection of our business and brand.

However, as we were fumbling with our new hiring system, Homerun, it sent out a mass denial batch, which we immediately regretted! We totally forgot to take into account that all these people are potential customers. So we tried our mistake:

Vincent really appreciated our honesty and even tweeted about it:

https://twitter.com/\_cmdv\_/status/1060141615824674816

For denying applicants, we now have a standard rule which reads: anyone who puts an effort in writing their application (in our case a clear motivation on why they want to work at Slite) can expect an effort from us in return. In this case, giving them insight on why we feel we're not a match right now.

Closing words

Hiring is hard and it will always be hard. Often delivering quality means delivering something that is hard to scale. That's why we focus on getting as many relevant candidates in through being alive on platforms like Y Combinator, Angel & Product Hunt while actively doing the work ourselves when it comes to passive talent.

If you keep investing time in hiring and are willing to do the things that are needed to scale, success will almost always follow.