We interview and make hires within a week from our first meet–it's a commitment.
and take disciplined action. Therefore we are very intentional in the way we conduct our hiring process. I wanted to write about our perspective so that candidates could know what to expect and give everyone an equal chance in this process. The goal is not to trick the people into failing the interviews but making sure we hire the right people. It means that as we opt-in to hire, the candidates can do the same knowingly, and the inverse is also true; the candidates can opt-out if they recognize that Flint is not for them.
Screening Interview
In the screening interview, a 30-minute meeting, I have two prompts for you.
• What is your background, and what are you looking for in your next role?
• Why this role, and why Flint?
I care to learn more about you, what you did in your past, what you studied, and how you learn. I look for early culture and engineering fit here. I want to hire
,
,
, and
people with similar technical and product inclinations as the rest of the team. I'm looking for evidence that you are a potential fit.
smart
disciplined
empathetic
humble
Team Interviews: Technical Interview
In the technical interview, an hour-long meeting, we do two things, a knowledge check which entails asking about fundamentals of programming; I'm not looking for exact answers, but rather letting you demonstrate your communication skills in explaining simple to advanced
functional programming
concepts and how they're used in programming and why they're important. Candidates who can clearly and concisely explain the knowledge in theory and in practice perform best here.
The second thing is to go through a problem-solving exercise where I give a business-level problem, ask for an algorithmic solution, and to optimize it. We typically spend 25% of the time on the knowledge questions and 75% on problem-solving. It's important that I see how people solve problems, what questions you ask, and what you are concerned with. It's another opportunity for you to showcase a fit with our product-led culture.
Team Interviews: Culture Fit
The culture fit is an hour-long interview, typically with two non-engineering people, where we seek to validate that you indeed subscribe to our values, are able to exhibit them, and we share with you what it looks like in practice. Here you get an exclusive time to ask more about how we behave as a group and what we care about the most.
Founder Inteview
The founder interview is also a culture fit interview, where you meet with a founder of Flint. It's an opportunity to learn more about what Flint is all about and who are the people that lead it.
Conclusion
This process is on the longer side of hiring processes, and it's challenging for the candidates. It requires a significant amount of time, and we are cognizant of it. However, we subscribe to the idea that an early startup should hire slow and the right people as they will have a huge impact on the organization's future and the ongoing evolution of our culture. Furthermore, we want each hire to raise the bar so that we can keep on getting better as a whole, and there are few substitutes to the time we spend making sure of this.
One challenge I often get when I talk about sharing this level of detail with candidates before the interview is if I'm worried that the wrong people will be able to cheat their way into the org. Although that is always a risk, I think the benefits of sharing this with the right people outweigh that risk. If you demonstrate that you are disciplined, humble, empathetic, capable of solving difficult and complex problems, that you master the technical aspects, and that you can solve problems in a product-led mindset, you'll thrive in this organization.