By Chris Doyle, CTO
At Ascent, we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about our technical hiring process and how it reflects our tech team values. We view our hiring process not just as our chance to evaluate candidates, but our best opportunity to give candidates an opportunity to evaluate us. To that end, we like to be as transparent as possible about our process and what kind of experience a candidate can expect when they interview at Ascent.
Below is a pretty detailed look at our technical hiring process. If you’re interested in learning more about Ascent and potentially going through this process yourself, take a look at our open technical roles and feel free to apply!
STEP 1: Introductory Conversation with the Hiring Manager
Let’s introduce ourselves to each other! Typically we either grab coffee or hop on a Google Hangout for 30 minutes. During this time the hiring manager explains more about Ascent, our values, our product, and the open role. The candidate can also share a bit about their technical background and especially what they’d like their next career step to look like. We end by talking about our hiring process, our technical values, and next steps.
STEP 2: Continued Conversations with the Team
If both the candidate and the hiring manager want to move forward, we next have the candidate chat with a couple other members of the team, including potentially the tech lead or others. At this time, we get into more depth with the technical problems we solve on the team and learn more about how the candidate operates.
STEP 3: Take-Home Technical Exercise
In parallel with scheduling and having the conversation with other members of the team, we also ask you to spend a couple of hours at your leisure working on a technical exercise. We give you a week so that you don’t feel undue pressure, but generally candidates spend about two hours altogether on this exercise.
After completing the exercise, we spend around an hour with the candidate on Hangouts walking through it, asking about specific technical decisions or tradeoffs, and inquiring about possible extensions to the work and how the candidate might approach them. Finally, we provide more opportunity for the candidate to ask us questions!
STEP 4: Onsite Half-Day
If all has gone well up to this point, we’ll be eager to introduce the candidate to other folks on the team with a series of in-office discussions that take place over about four hours. During this time, the candidate will meet with more members of the team — both technical and non-technical — to discuss the role, the relationship between tech, product, and customers, and the candidate’s past experiences.
STEP 5: Offer
Within a couple of days of meeting, the team internally will meet to share their experiences with the candidate. We use an internal rubric centered on our values to remove as much bias as possible from our evaluation. Ultimately the hiring manager will make a final decision about extending an offer to the candidate. If we’re lucky enough to be able to make an offer, the hiring manager will reach out to the candidate with the details of the offer and give the candidate some time to consider their decision.
STEP 6: Onboarding
If the candidate accepts our offer, we first get extremely excited at the prospect of welcoming a new team member! Then we put together a comprehensive onboarding plan, including a first day schedule, a first three month plan based on the work available and our perception of the candidate’s strengths and growth opportunities during the hiring process, a one-pager with links to all our important documents (e.g. Employee Manual, Tech Team Onboarding Guide, links to various benefits and tech accounts), and we order a computer for the candidate. We also appoint a current team member as the candidate’s onboarding buddy, and we set up a Day 1 welcome lunch with the candidate and the team.
Then, we get to work!
Interested in joining the Ascent team? Check out our open roles below!
