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Eka Terima for epilot

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How to get hired at epilot: step-by-step guide

Hi there,

If you’ve enjoyed some of the blog posts my wonderful colleagues have posted here on dev.to and would like to get to know the authors in person, today is your lucky day: We’re hiring!

My name is Eka and I'm People & Culture Manager at epilot. Our mission is to maximize positive employee experience starting with a smooth recruiting process, over to a great onboarding and finally ensuring an enjoyable work atmosphere with e.g. regular get-togethers, providing opportunities for personal development and generally supporting wherever we can.

If you’re curious about our recruiting process and maybe even would yourself wish to become an “epilot” one day (that's what we call ourselves!), read on and we’ll provide you with this post as a cheat sheet on how to get hired!

Application

Application

  • What is expected of you?

Just send us your CV. A cover letter would be also appreciated to get to know more about you. A link to a public GitHub account or Portfolio with existing projects is always very exciting for us!

  • What happens in the background?

Your application will be carefully reviewed by our colleagues. We like to move fast so don’t be surprised by getting a response even on the same day!

HR call (≈40min)

HRcall

  • What is expected of you?

Congratulations, you’ve passed the first stage, and we’ve invited you for a first get-to-know-chat. In the first call (about 40min) we want to learn more about you and your past experience. Me or my colleague Aiko will reach out to you and schedule a first chat with us.

In this call you will get to know us personally and have a discussion on your career (“Where have you been and where are you in your career?”), expectations (“What are you expecting from your next job?”) and practicalities (“Notice period?”, “Are you planning to relocate or work remotely?” etc.). You will also get a chance to ask us about anything regarding your future role or about epilot in general.

  • What happens in the background?

Prior to your first call, we will take a deeper look at your CV and any other information provided e.g. projects on your Github profile. If we have any questions about your CV or portfolio projects, this is when we get to talk about it. Make sure to come prepared with stories about teams and projects you've worked on and are especially proud of, or learned something important.

Take-home coding task OR existing project

Project

  • What is expected of you?

If you made it this far, you’ve definitely impressed us! Depending on the position and your prior experience, we might provide you a take-home coding task, or alternatively ask you to walk us through an existing project. We don't prefer one over the other. In fact, if you already have a project you are proud to talk about it, we are happy to go through that existing project.

The purpose of this is to both assess your technical experience level and how well you communicate about your code. We certainly don’t expect a perfect solution, but rather a small sample of how you like to work and think about solving problems with code.

In case you choose to do the take home code assignment: The appropriate amount of time and effort spent on the assignment is totally up to you, but you shouldn’t feel pressured to spend more than a half-day’s effort on it. While we appreciate moving fast, we of course understand you are busy, so take your time submitting your completed assignment. You will not be rated on the speed of delivery.

  • What happens in the background?

After you complete the assignment or provide a link to an existing project for review, one of our dev colleagues will carefully review the submitted project and provide feedback. If all looks good, we will invite you to a project walkthrough!

Project walkthrough (≈1h)

Walkthrough

  • What is expected of you? We start of with a short intro, so you'll get to know your potential dev colleagues better. After the introductions, we dive right into your project. We ask you to walk us through the project you provided (either the solution of the take-home coding assignment OR one of your personal projects) and take us through your thought process.

In case you did the code assignment: As we don’t expect you to spend a lot of time on the code assignment and come up with a perfect solution, we will ask you to think of ways to improve the solution, if this were to be deployed as a real world production application. So don't feel pressured to deliver a "pixel perfect" solution.

In case you chose to present a personal project: Keep in mind, that my colleagues are not familiar with your project at all. So make sure to give them a brief overview of the project.

In both cases, you should be prepared to be asked questions about the project. The aim of the project walkthrough is to get a better understanding of how you tackle a specific problem and how you communicate your work (the project as a whole and the code).

We might also discuss more general tech topics related to the position you’re applying for. We like candidates who have opinions on tech and get excited about things! Just see this appointment as a "simulated" exchange between colleagues - and not as an "exam situation".

Since you will meet your potential colleagues the for the first time, you are more than welcome to ask them anything.

  • What happens in the background? After the project walkthrough, our dev colleagues will have a discussion about how you communicated your project (e.g. "Was it easy to follow your explanations?", "Did you present the project/product well?"), were you able to answer my colleagues questions adequately? and in the end: could they imagine working with you?

Final interview (≈1h)

  • What is expected of you?

Well done, you've made it this far! The final interview will either be held on-site or as video call. In this final step you will usually meet the hiring manager for the open position (usually one of the Teamleads), Viljami (our Head of Engineer), Szilard (our CTO) and a team member from HR (me or Aiko). Everyone knows that interview situations can be stressful, therefore we try to keep the interview more as a dialogue and definitely not as one-way interrogation. Always feel free to ask questions in between, and generally come as you are. There is absolutely no need to be nervous at all🙂.

To make you feel comfortable at epilot, in case the final interview will be held in our office in Cologne, we will happily welcome you with a drink of your choice (🥛,☕️,🍵). Unfortunately in case of a final video call we cannot offer you a drink of your choice, but you are free to take your drink of your choice with during the video call🙂.

The final interview is usually divided into the following parts:

Introduction: to make us all comfortable and get to know who the people sitting in front of you, (possibly your new colleagues!) we start off with a short introduction round.

Cultural and personal fit: In the main part of the final call we will talk about how you think, how you work, how you think things should work, what drives your work and that kind of topics. In that regard we will also give you a glimpse of how we think, work, we think things should work and what drives our work.

Question time: Since this interview is also meant for you to get to know us better (the company, the product, the business,the team, the job position etc. ) feel free to ask us about anything on your mind. If you can’t think of anything else, just ask us about our favourite dishes.

Practicalities: If not already done before we will also discuss things like your notice period, relocation plans and compensation.

  • What happens in the background?

Before the final interview all participants will prepare any questions they wish to talk about with you: beginning from unanswered questions regarding any question marks in your CV and also questions regarding the person behind the application. Keep the aforementioned parts of the interview in mind and prepare to give us valuable insights regarding each part.

After the final interview all participants from our side come together and share their feedback with each other. Shortly after the final interview we will get back to you to give you feedback whether we will get you onboard to a common journey or if we will unfortunately go separate ways.

Hired

Hired!

Ready for take-off? We are happy to welcome you to the epilot crew. You can now proudly call yourself an “epilot”.

The next step in your journey with us will be the onboarding process.

We are generally remote first, but if possible we like to have you onsite in Cologne for the onboarding during your first week. If it is not possible we are also fine doing the onboarding remotely.

If you reside outside the EU and you plan to relocate (but again: we are remote first, so we don't require you to relocate at all) we will gladly assist you with your work permit and relocation.

Generally we will provide you with a 90-day plan to help you get started and what to expect in your first days at epilot.

Here’s what you can expect in your first weeks:

  • A (virtual) office tour to get to know your workplace and meet your colleagues
  • A meeting with HR to clarify any remaining HR related question
  • A meeting with your supervisor to discuss your role and responsibilities from day one
  • A talk about the vision, mission and culture at epilot with with one of the founders
  • A product demo meeting
  • Meetings with the heads of departments to get an overview about the product and the business as well as other exciting and fun things awaiting you!

Ready to become part of our awesome journey? Then we're looking forward to talking to you and receiving your application! Check out our open tech positions!

If you have any questions: reach out to me directly at e.terima@epilot.cloud or get in touch with our recruitment team at careers@epilot.cloud

We are looking forward to welcoming you at epilot!
We are hiring!

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