Our approach to hiring
Although we’re a small team, we’ve put a great deal of thought into how we hire at Sparksuite. We believe that our team members are our greatest asset, so we want to create processes that help us identify and recruit the very best. We also strive to create a positive experience for every candidate, regardless of whether we extend an offer.
This post covers how we hire at Sparksuite, so candidates have a better idea of what to expect, and so other companies can learn from the ways we’ve been intentional with hiring at our company.
As a note, all hiring across our family of companies is consolidated through Sparksuite. Not only does this streamline operations for us, but it ensures candidates can be confident that working for any of our companies is a rewarding experience.
A positive experience for every candidate
Our goal is for all candidates to have a pleasant experience from start to finish. Several factors contribute toward this, and we’ve made an effort to be thoughtful about each one.
Starting with the job listing, our focus is on being transparent, clear, and honest. A listing that’s lacking in any of these areas rarely benefits anyone — greatly heightening the risk of a negative experience for candidates (and often the company too). For us, that means we take a lot of time carefully writing and reviewing the job description such that it accurately and clearly conveys all the information a candidate would want to know before applying. In particular, we ensure the description accurately reflects the job’s responsibilities & day-to-day activities, and that we honestly identify the skills & experience a candidate would need to succeed.
Transparency is a core value at our company, and we take this a step further in our job listings by linking to our transparent employee handbook and open salary calculator. Here, candidates can find complete details about our benefits & perks and can see how their pay will grow over time. Plus, for good measure, our job listings also highlight our Instagram feed, which showcases what it’s like to work in the Sparksuite family of companies.
Another aspect that promotes a positive experience: being respectful of candidates’ time. To achieve that, we keep the application short and sweet — only requesting the information we actually need — and we strive to move efficiently and quickly throughout the interview process. We want to give every candidate the opportunity to move from one stage to the next, while only taking the necessary amount of time to determine whether the candidate has the potential to be successful going forward. We’ll always convey in advance how long we expect each interview to take, and we’ll do everything we can to stay within that timeframe. Additionally, we use a self-scheduling tool that allows candidates to easily select a convenient interview time — avoiding back-and-forth over email.
And while there are many other smaller details we’ve paid attention to, the final one that makes a big difference is clear communication. This is especially important when it comes to the interviews. We explain what each interview looks like when we invite candidates to schedule. Then, we’ll start each interview by confirming how long we expect it to take, and we’ll finish each interview by indicating when candidates should expect to hear back from us. We’ll never leave a candidate hanging — they’ll always hear back from us on whether they’re moving forward. Finally, we allow candidates to ask clarifying questions toward the end of each interview, to ensure we haven’t missed anything.
Identifying the best talent
The other major goal for us, like every company, is to find the candidates who are most likely to be successful on the job. There’s nothing about our process that is particularly revolutionary on its own; however, it’s the culmination of many small things that helps us identify talent that might be overlooked by other companies.
In some cases, it’s not what we do, but what we don’t do that matters. For instance, we don’t utilize any automated filtering of applications or resumes; instead, every application is carefully reviewed by a human. We also never require a certain number of years of experience or educational background. We’ve found that these credentials are far too loosely correlated with a candidate’s ability to succeed, that they’re not worth relying on.
At the end of the day, we intentionally only apply light filtering at the application stage. We recognize that there’s very little information at this point that can be used to reliably measure a candidate’s potential for success, and we want to give every candidate a fair chance to demonstrate their skills. This, then, is the other reason why we aim to only take the necessary amount of time in each interview: by keeping the first round or two on the shorter side, we can move a larger number of candidates past the application stage — significantly reducing the likelihood of eliminating a candidate who could be a great fit.
With a larger number of candidates flowing through the interview process, it becomes even more important that we design our interviews to be fine-tuned at gauging candidates’ potential for success. For us, we focus on doing that in two main ways:
- Interviews and particularly their exercises are designed to replicate day-to-day responsibilities as closely as possible.
- Interviews are designed to cut through the noise and tease out the skills and experience a candidate has accumulated over time.
The best way to discern whether a candidate would perform the responsibilities of a role well is to distill those responsibilities into a miniature exercise and objectively measure that candidate’s performance. It’s not worth asking candidates questions or walking them through exercises that aren’t reflective of the actual job. During these, we also give candidates opportunities to explain their thought processes and reasoning methods, as we believe this provides a great deal of insight too.
Our interviews are also designed to focus on evaluating the candidate’s skills and experience they’ve accumulated over time, rather than the things they’ve memorized or prepared for the night before. On the rare occasion that we expect preparation before an interview, we make that clear in advance and expect it to take a minimal amount of time. But overwhelmingly, we’re looking for candidates whose skills and talents have become instinctual, as this will result in a stronger probability of success.
We also do our best to not let a candidate’s nervousness or confidence level impact the way we objectively measure their potential for success. This cuts both ways. Some candidates are clearly nervous, but our interview process allows us to see attributes and talents that we believe would make them successful on the job. Conversely, some candidates are overly confident in their skills, when they are clearly lacking the necessary requirements to succeed. Part of how we see through both nervousness and overconfidence is by not using recruiters to perform interviews. Instead, interviews are conducted by team members who are experts in their own right. Furthermore, we start every in-person interview at a nearby coffee shop, which allows us to get to know the candidate better and build rapport in an informal environment, helping them ease their nerves and perform their best on the more technical parts that usually follow back at our office.
Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that we take a good deal of time preparing interviewers to conduct interviews, with detailed internal documentation about how to conduct the interviews and what to look for when evaluating candidates. This helps us make as much of an apples-to-apples comparison as possible between each candidate. Additionally, at least two interviewers participate in each interview, so there’s more than one viewpoint on each candidate.
Conclusion
Hiring is a significant investment of time and thought for our company, and we’re constantly iterating on and improving our processes. We do this not because hiring is the most fun thing we do (far from it), but because we value hiring the best candidates, and we enjoy reaping the rewards of doing so. Plus, we work hard to retain our team members for a long time, so the investment is made worth it.
If we seem like the type of company you’d want to work for, and you want to experience our hiring process first-hand, check to see if we’re hiring!
