What we ask when interviewing

Here at HutSix we operate with a remote-first mindset. This is both due to the locations our clients are based, and the staff we hire. We’ve got team members spread across the country, with offices in Adelaide and Alice Springs. We’ve taken this new work-from-home paradigm seriously, allowing our team members to choose where they work and how often it might look like that. It might seem like a controversial opinion to some people in the industry, but we aren’t fussed about where our staff or clients are.

Why hire remote?

We’re pretty comfortable with hiring people remotely because we know talent isn’t restricted by location. We’ve long held this belief, and the COVID-19 pandemic has helped it become more mainstream. Not everyone wants to live in Sydney or Melbourne, and why should we miss out on talent because we don’t have an office in every single city in Australia!? It’s much, much easier to find good talent if you’re not discriminating based on location. We’ve written a whole blog about our experience being an NT based company and experiencing this, which you can read here.

What’s the vetting process?

We have got some great processes in place to help reduce unconscious bias, ensure we’re finding the right people for the right role, and that the people we interview (and potentially hire) align with our values.

W hen you are hiring people to work remotely, you don’t get to see them in person and read their ‘vibe’. It can be harder to gauge your gut feeling when you’re interviewing someone via Google Meet, so we found out a great way to help this. Before they even get to the interview stage, we send all candidates a link to our Test Gorilla test, which collates all the important information about hiring a candidate like their resume, referees and a personality profile. If they’re an engineer, we’ll also include a coding test for them to complete.

Based on all of this information, we check people’s skills against the team we’ve got, and how the candidate(s) could help either complement these skills enhance the skillset of our team.

If we like what we see, we ask them to interview, to see if they’re the ‘one’ for us.

How to tell if they’re the one

Once we get to the interview stage, we get to have an honest conversation about the applicant based on what they’ve provided. We go through all the standard stuff, but have found two questions that can be asked to help people stand out.

Please describe yourself in one sentence without using any labels

Where do you see your favourite piece of tech evolving in the future?

The big identity question

Erika and Kirsty heard about this great question at _SOUTHSTART Revival Festival in Adelaide 2022, which was shared by Nicole Hatherly during her branding presentation. Nicole had us all think about this question and come up with an answer in a few sentences and share it with someone random in the audience. This question was all about formulating your own personal brand, and to figure out what were the most important things to us as individuals that we prioritise and share.

Kirsty and I (along with a lot of people in the audience) were quite caught off guard by this question, as quite often we introduce ourselves based on our relationship to others. We might refer to ourselves as a parent, child, aunt, uncle, CEO, university graduate, Australian or our gender. These labels are really only labels, and form part of our identity but they don’t encapsulate who you are as a person.

The day after this session at _SOUTHSTART, Kirsty and I spent four hours interviewing eight potential junior engineers at the coding school we sponsor, 42. We decided to put this question to the test, and ask the applicants this question first up. It was a great question to ask in an interview process, as we got the following outcomes:

• Some people had never thought of themselves without a label before
• Some thought the question had a double meaning
• Some thought that we were joking!

It was an excellent social experiment, which allowed us to be able to hear what potential applicants valued, how they saw themselves in the world and what they considered the most important things in their own life. We also got to hear more authentic answers about who someone is, instead of the generic responses to questions like ‘so, tell us about yourself’.

We used this question to help match applicants to our existing team, and to see where the gaps were and where we could see culture add, not just culture fit. This worked very well for our recruitment process, so we’ve used it for every interview since.

Our tech question is another great question to ask to potential candidates during the interview process. We usually ask this one towards the start of the interview, so we can get an idea of the areas of the tech sector that the applicant is interested in the most. We’ve had a wide range of answers, including:

These answers all came unexpectedly, and we wouldn’t have been able to pick it based on the applicant’s resume and other supporting information. These answers helped to form a fuller picture of the applicant as a person, and what interests they can bring to the table. It helps us break the ice and learn about what motivates the person and what’s under the hood. It is also less awkward than saying, ‘so, tell us about yourself?’.

The answers have surprised us each time, and delved into insights about someone that may not have typically come up in the interview organically. Once the applicant has answered this question, we get the opportunity to go off on tangents that we might not have had. We often get to hear about snippets of people’s personal lives, their upbringings, their dreams for their family and their hopes for the future. It seems like we expect a lot based on one question being answered, but you’d be surprised where this one takes you!

Where do we hope this interview style will take us?

Why do we want to interview people a bit differently? Well, we’re hoping to never have to write a Seek ad again. Yup, you heard it.

It’s a bit of a bold claim, but we’re hoping that we don’t need to actively recruit ever again in the next year or so. We’re hoping to become positioned within the market that we become the go to destination to work for engineers, analysts, product owners and support staff alike. We believe we can do this by only choosing work that aligns with our vision and values, and the ability for us to ship excellent work each time will attract excellent talent to come knocking at our door.

We believe that shipping good work and only choosing work that aligns with our values will make us an employer of choice, which will attract great talent to our organisation.

Watch this space as we work on becoming an employer of choice within the regional Australian market.

Originally published at https://www.hutsix.com.au on September 21, 2022.