Dear Hiring Manager

In this episode, I chat with Jean-Denis Greze, CTO of Plaid and Tido Carriero former CPO of Segment / SVP of Twilio. We talk about several interesting topics around engineering recruitment. They share the importance of a Job Kit and how this can help tech companies hire and attract the right talent. We talk about the areas companies go wrong most, debate whether soft skills interviews are beneficial or have more downside, and discuss what make a good interviewing question.

Jean-Denis and Tido Carriero have created an open source job kit for companies to use and build off of! You can find that here: https://www.hatchways.io/blog/create-a-job-kit

For more information about how Hatchways can help you build a more real-world technical interview process, visit: www.hatchways.io

In this podcast episode, Emily Sampson, the University Recruiting & Early Career Program Lead at Amplitude, shares her insights on starting a university recruiting program. Amplitude has expanded its intern and new grad hiring across various departments, creating a pipeline of fresh talent. Emily explains the benefits of early career programs, such as DEIB impact, cost savings, long-term talent pipeline, and improved work-life balance for full-time employees.

To start a successful program, companies need leadership buy-in, a budget, and dedicated resourcing. Emily offers tips on calculating intern headcounts, managing conversion rates, and selecting partnerships with schools based on the program's goals. Connecting with students can be done through career fairs, student organizations, and intimate gatherings with employee resource groups. Emily shares her favorite tools as well as links and resources in our blog: https://www.hatchways.io/blog/amplitude-on-getting-started-with-university-recruiting

For more information about how Hatchways can help you build a more real-world technical interview process, visit www.hatchways.io

In this episode of "Dear Hiring Manager," we sat down with Cliff Jadoo, a Technical Recruiter at Webflow, to discuss recruiting diverse talent and how to create an inclusive and positive interviewing experience. Cliff shares valuable insights on inbound and outbound recruiting strategies, as well as tips for creating an interview experience that caters to diverse talent.

Some highlights from our conversation include targeting diverse job boards, partnering with diverse organizations, creating a gender-neutral job description, and publishing diversity reports. For outbound recruiting, Cliff emphasizes the importance of not relying solely on referrals and intentionally sourcing diverse talent using various tools and tactics.

In creating an interview experience for diverse talent, Cliff recommends using a rubric, being transparent, investing in interviewer training, and having a diverse set of interviewers. He also shares tips on using take-home assessments and reminding candidates about Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) in place.

To help you get started, we've shared a job description template, tips on joining Slack or Google ERG groups, and some common mistakes to avoid. For these resources and additional links, visit our blog: https://www.hatchways.io/blog/on-recruiting-diversity-with-cliff-jadoo-at-webflow

For more information about how Hatchways can help you build a more real-world technical interview process, visit www.hatchways.io

Carmen is a Librarian turned Software developer. In this episode, she shares how she self-taught her self programming before/after work and on weekends, how she assessed if it was the right career for her, and when it was the right time to quit her job and dedicate full-time hours to job searching. We talk about how employers who want to attract non-traditional talent should change their job descriptions and how they should ignore resumes. Lastly, for career shifters, she recommends some resources on how to get job-ready... including receiving feedback on your skills from Hatchways!

To learn more about Hatchways visit: www.hatchways.io  

Tony is a hispanic test engineer. After a year at Carnegie Mellon, Tony dropped out as he couldn’t afford to keep paying for classes. Instead, he worked as a waiter, took part-time community college courses and ended up graduating at 29. Interestingly, even though he didn't graduate from Carnegie Mellon, he still got his foot in the door by having it on his resume.

To learn more about Hatchways visit: www.hatchways.io  

Carille is a software engineer at ATB on the innovation team. She hires for their team and as a minority herself (immigrant, female, POC etc.) she knows what it means to create an inclusive hiring process. Listen to our conversation about how she runs interviewing at ATB and how to build a process that encourages diversity.

To learn more about Hatchways visit: www.hatchways.io

If you would like to be a part of the podcast, let us know here: https://forms.gle/VEowV2sryff84GtcA

Luke is the CTO of Daybreak Health, a startup with a mission to build mental fitness in young people and provide universal access to healthcare in the US.

This week we get a look at the other side of the interviewer’s desk as Luke gives some insight as to why the hiring process is as broken as it is, how it can be fixed, and what all is at stake when a company wants to make a change. 

Research talked about in our episode:

Learn more about Daybreak Health: www.daybreakhealth.com

Apply to jobs at Daybreak here.

This is a summary episode of key takeaways from Episodes 7 through 11 with my interviews with: Alex, who gave up a steady job, took a self-paced bootcamp, and moved to San Francisco, Selali, a self-taught software engineer who struggled with the North American education system and was working as a freelancer in high school, Darren, a senior Finance Manager and working dad who quit his job to become a junior software developer, Minh, a Vietamnese international student currently interning at Google, and Christine, who majored in life sciences, and still managed to get hired as a software engineer out of college.

To learn more about Hatchways visit: www.hatchways.io

If you would like to be a part of the podcast, let us know here: https://forms.gle/VEowV2sryff84GtcA

Growing up, Christine was pressured away from computer science as it did not come as easily to her as it did to her male peers, and her parents lacked an understanding of what careers were available in the field. It was only through having friends in computer science that she got a better idea of what being a software engineer was like and started to reassess what she wanted out of a career.  Today, she is a software engineer at Paypal. We discuss the importance of having a community, how to land internships while you're in school and how to deal with pressure. 

To learn more about Hatchways visit: www.hatchways.io  

Minh landed her first internship at Google after she switched her major from political science through teaching herself data structures and algorithms and volunteering at a startup on campus. She is an international student and shares her personal experiences with self-isolation, being in an non-inclusive environment with her male classmates, working in different Google offices with different diversity standards, and how the Coronavirus and the current US political climate impacts her choices as an immigrant.