The Ultimate Guide to Landing Your First Software Engineering Job at a Tech Startup: Basic Hiring Process

What are the common steps of startup’s hiring processes and what to expect during each one of them.

Photo by Mark Fletcher-Brown on Unsplash

Each company has its hiring process, but many startups share some common steps.

Usually, startups have the following steps:

• HR interview

• Initial Technical Interview

• Take-Home Assignment

• Assignment Review

While companies might decide to remove or change some of these steps, others might add other steps. Sometimes, they might have different names too. Your hiring process with startups might vary a lot, but generally, those steps are the most common.

Each of those steps will add new information to your Jobs database article.

HR Interview

The HR interview has the goal of clarifying if you are a good fit for the role.

It is an interview where the interviewer should explain the role to you and ensure there are no major blockers to hire you. Do you live in a country where the company does not hire? Do your expectations match the offer? 

This interview is incredibly useful for you.

Even if this is not a technical interview, be prepared for that. Use it to clarify all the doubts you have about the company. Is it a fully-remote company? Is there a physical office? Where is the company located? 

Understand the expectations for the role.

Is it a management role? What does the company want from this role? Will you interact with people from different time zones? What type of contract will you have?

Anything you can imagine, any doubt you have, ask it.

Initial Technical Interview

The first technical interview is usually a conversation where a member of the engineering team tries to understand if you could be a good fit for the role.

This type of interview is very different depending on the company or the personal preference of the interviewer. Some people like to structure it as a conversation, others like to ask technical questions or ask you to do some coding exercises. In every scenario, try to get as much information as you can.

You are speaking to a possible member of your team.

How do they work? Do they use Scrum? What is the Git flow they use? Are they facing any particular problem? How do they interact to address technical issues? How are they organized?

I consider this interview like the high school open day.

In Italy, once you finish middle school, you usually visit different high schools to decide which one you want to go to. Schools, usually ask their senior students to participate in the open day to answer questions from the middle school students. This is much better than asking professors, you get a taste of the real life in the school because you can ask people in the same situation. You don’t care how teachers live in the school, you’re not going to be a teacher there, so you want to know how students live there.

Think about this interview the same way, understand how they live the company as engineers.

Take-Home Assignment

After you speak with a member of the team, some companies will leave you a take-home assignment.

This is a good way for them to understand how you work. In my job search experiences, I completed different assignments. Some of them were similar to coding challenges. Others might ask you to structure a small project. In some cases, you might solve a real-world problem the company is facing. There are also scenarios where you might need to write a document to explain how you would approach a technical issue.

When you start, you will have questions, ask them in a single email.

Working on a take-home assignment you will need to ask questions. It is very unlikely that everything is clear. That is a good sign, in our job, we must ask questions.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

Asking questions is as important as answering them. This is true in every step of the process, especially during the assignment review step. By asking questions you show:

• You reason about your work and you are not a soldier executing orders blindly.

• You raise doubts when something is not clear.

• You want to understand what you do and why it is essential.

Remember, you are talking to your future teammates.

They want someone they can trust. In our daily job, it is very common to miss details during a design review or a backlog refinement. This might result in delays and missing requirements. In your team, you want people to think critically about what they see and with attention to detail.

Ask your questions in a single email.

What I like to do when working on an assignment, is start by analyzing the requirements and gather all the questions that might arise. After that I look at my questions and read again the requirements, this helps me clarify some doubts and, some of those questions might find their answers. The remaining ones, I ask them to the interviewer in a single email.

Take notes while you solve the problem.

I wrote a lot of notes in my BuJo while solving assignments. These notes will be crucial for the next step. After you write your notes, organize them and put them into your Jobs Database.

The take-home assignment is a conversation starter for the following interview.

Assignment Review

Once you complete your assignment, it is reviewed and then discussed.

The discussion usually takes place in a dedicated session. It can involve a single member of the engineering team or more. Interviewers, usually, use your assignment as a conversation starter.

This step aims to discuss the choices you made in your assignment.

This is where your notes are crucial. While doing the assignment, it is essential to take notes about everything. I annotate every decision I make, every compromise I make for time constraints, and every doubt about the assignment. This information is vital during the review session.

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