Scott Porad

After the last two days of posts about resumes, I thought I would take a moment to outline the hiring process we have at Cheezburger for developers.

1. Candidates submit their resume and answer a brief questionnaire at http://jobs.cheezburger.com.  The questionnaire asks a few simple questions.  For example, for a senior position we ask years of experience with C# because it’s really easy to screen out the resume-spam-blasters who apply for every position with out reading the job requirements.  We also as a few logistical questions, such as “when can you start?”.  In total, the questionnaire has less than 10 questions.
2. We screen resumes looking for candidates that meet our core requirements in terms of skills and experience.
3. Candidates who pass our screening are invited to submit a coding sample based on a simple project spec that we provide.  For a qualified candidate, we expect that the project should only take a few hours.
4. As candidates submit their sample projects, we review their code to get a sense of their overall coding ability and style.
5. Candidates who’s coding sample is satisfactory then enter an interview loop where the will meet face-to-face (or in some cases via Skype, depending on the locale) with four people from our team: one senior developer, one other developer, one product manager and me, the CTO.
6. The two developers are tasked with assessing technical skill.  In other words, does the candidate have the chops to do the job.  The way we think about this is that having the skills gets you “in the door”…
7. …then whether or not you’d be a good fit for our team gets you hired.  The PM and I focus primarily on this assessment, although the developers consider this as well.  When we look at fit, we look for two general things: a) does your work style fit with our work style, for example, preferring Agile over Waterfall, and b) does it seem like you’d be pleasurable to work with 8 hours a day.
8. Finally, if the candidate has made it this far—meaning that all four people who have interviewed indicate we should hire—we check personal references.

There are occasions where we vary from this process—for example, when hiring a short-term contractor.  In general, however, we like it because we get to look at three examples of code (the coding project, plus two developer interviews where the candidate is asked to write code), and four face-to-face meetings to assess personal/culture fit.