A description of the Hiring Process for engineers

how_we_hire.txt

We're looking to hire engineers to join our teams in Maidenhead. The full description of the job can be found at http://smrtr.io/0qr3uA. Further information about working at Alfresco can be found on our careers pages at https://www.alfresco.com/company/careers. Any questions about the role can be sent to me, via twitter at @steve_codes.

To ensure that all candidates get a fair shot, and to give you more of an idea of what we're looking for and how we'll run the assessment, I thought I'd put together this little helper.

Firstly, we aim to respectful to all candidates. We understand the pressures, challenges and time that goes into finding a new job. It's stressful, and we're hoping that we're going to make things a little bit easier for you. We'll work with you to arrange interviews at times that work around  your schedule and respect the discretion which is sometimes necessary when taking part in a recruitment process. Our assessments are designed to challenging, but if you're running into problems that mean you're unable to show us your best self, please let us know.

So, onto the process. Our process comprises of two parts - the technical telephone screen, and the onsite interview. These stages follow on from the initial contact and CV screen. 

The technical telephone screen is used primarily to validate the information that you talk about on your CV. We'll be aiming to talk about specific projects you've worked on, the roles you played, the actions you took and the impacts you had. As with the whole process, the focus is on _you_, rather than _we_. We work in teams at Alfresco, but when it comes to hiring, we want _you_ to highlight _your_ achievements.

We'll also take the opportunity to talk about some of the things we value when building software. Clean code, incremental development, testing, software design, and agile practices. If you're able to demonstrate knowledge in these areas, then you're the kind of person we're looking for. Help us to recognise your skills by providing us with examples. We aim for about 20-40% of people to pass our telephone screen. 

Our on-site interview takes place at our Maidenhead office and we'll ask you to join us for half a day. After a tour of the office, we'll get you set up with the first part of the day, our coding challenge. We'll ask you to write some code to solve a set of problems for us. As most of the software we write uses Java or Javascript, we'll ask you to use one of those languages. We'll give you an hour to work through the problems on your own, using the tools your familar with (if you want to bring your own laptop, you're welcome to do so). You'll then get the chance to talk through your solution with one of our senior engineers. During the coding challenge, we're more interested in your approach to tackling the problem, rather than how far you get through the solution - it's more important to us that the code is well structured, clean and sufficiently tested.

After a short break, you'll move to the panel interviews where you'll get a chance to meet some more members of our team who will further assess your technical and behavioural skills. The panel will be made up from engineers, engineering managers, testers, product managers or scrum masters. Once again, we're looking for your examples to support your answers, focussing on the things _you_ achieved.

And that's it. Following the interviews the members of the hiring team will review notes and we'll give you feedback the next day.