Hiring Hacks: How Stack Overflow Interviews Engineers

How Stack Overflow Interviews Engineers

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Today’s Moderators

Casey Marshallcasey.marshall@greenhouse.io

Rachel Maleadymaleady@stackoverflow.com

What is Hiring Hacks? • The hiring hacks series is presented by Greenhouse

• Greenhouse is an end-to-end recruiting optimization platform, helping companies get better at recruiting

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Hiring Hacks Series• Each webinar in the series focuses on strategies and tools that helps

measurably improve the recruiting process and outcomes

• In this Hiring Hacks, Greenhouse partnered with Stack Overflow to discuss:

• What Stack Overflow’s technical hiring process looks like • How supporting remote work is a competitive recruiting advantage • How Stack Overflow evaluates candidates’ technical and non-technical skills• How to build a recruiting culture among your engineers

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Stack OverflowStack Overflow was co-founded by programmer experts Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood in 2008 and quickly became the trusted destination for developers to ask and answer programming questions. With 40 million monthly visitors, it’s the world’s largest programming community.  

Stack Overflow Careers lets employers reach, attract, and engage talent while helping developers find jobs they love. Our job listings go above and beyond your traditional job board; listings are targeted and distributed on Stack Overflow, letting employers reach both active and hard-to-reach passive candidates. An opt-in, invite-only candidate database lets employers directly engage with hundreds of thousands of candidates around the world. We also offer employer branding opportunities to help companies position their developer work environment and culture in front of their vast audience.

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Hiring Hacks Speaker

Matt Sherman Engineering Manager

Matt Sherman is the Engineering Manager of Stack Overflow’s Careers team. It’s his job to keep engineers happy, well-supported and productive.

Matt was one of Stack Overflow’s earliest engineers himself, and these days likes to dabble in new languages and platforms for fun. He lives in New York City and eats a lot of ramen.

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HistoryPremier Q&A for programmers, founded 2008

Peer-to-peer, community-driven (like Wikipedia)

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Today40MM users around the world

10MM questions answered

250 employees in 3 offices (NYC, London, Denver) and more than 10 countries

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First, a bit of pessimism

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Tech interviewing is hard

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Smart and Gets Things DoneThankfully, our founder (Joel Spolsky) wrote the book

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Mostly remoteInterview via Google Hangouts + shared doc

⅔ of our technical staff work remotely

A selling point

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A conversation, not a quizWe want to know how you think and communicate

No “gotchas”

Nervousness is bad for both of us, work to reduce

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Hire/No HireDecisive & unanimous

Try to mitigate subjectivity

Candidate feels respected even when No Hire

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TEDPG resume review (4 of 5)T - Targeted

E - Experienced

D - Depth

P - Passion

G - Gets Things Done

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Code Screen (30 minutes)Actually a coder?

Intentionally “easy”

As fast as they can type

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Smart (60 minutes)An in-depth algorithm question

How much complexity can they keep in their head at once?

Thinking out loud#HiringHackss.tk/hiringhacks

Gets things done (60 mins)A “whole” application

Full stack: understands how parts relate

Architecture

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Product management (60 mins)Do they understand products, and not just code?

User-focused and business-focused

Working with others

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Executive interviewDid previous interviewers do their job?

It’s our turn to sell

Assume they have other suitors

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Make the offerFast turnaround is important

Onboarding comes next, but that’s another topic...

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Thanks! Questions?Matt Sherman

matt@stackoverflow.com

@clipperhouse

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Thanks! Questions?

#HiringHacks

Matt Sherman matt@stackoverflow.com@clipperhouse

s.tk/hiringhacks