Interviews at tech companies can be daunting and opaque for candidates, but they shouldn’t be. In this blog, Jack Rhodes(opens new window), Senior Software Engineer, sheds light on our hiring process to give you the best chance to show us who you are and what you want to bring to Multiverse.
How we hire at Multiverse
Our hiring process starts with a recruiter call. They will support you throughout the interview process. In this call, you will learn more about engineering life at Multiverse and assess whether this would be the right position for you. We will give you some more insight into the Multiverse mission, the role and how our engineering team drives us forward. We’ll also answer any questions you might have.
From there, we have four interview stages:
- The engineer screen where we want to get to know you better
- A take home tech challenge and review where we want to see how you approach problem solving
- A “culture add” interview where you’ll speak to a leader in our ProdTech team about what you’ll bring to the role
- Finally, an interview with our founder, Euan Blair.
Let’s chat a bit more about each stage.
Initial engineer call
In our first stage, you’ll chat to two members of our engineering team. All engineers at Multiverse can choose to be part of our interviewing process and we make sure there will be a hiring manager in each session so that we’re fair and consistent across all candidates.
In this call, we’re looking to do three things:
- Get to know you, what drives you, and why you’re interested in Multiverse
- Chat about your technical experience, and work through a small problem together to see how your thought process works
- Answer your questions about Multiverse and chat about the impact we think you could have here
We structure the conversation around a set script to make interviews uniform across candidates but we might dig deeper into interesting areas of your background.
Tips
- Think about what aspects of our work excites you and how your skills align to that. Have a look through our website multiverse.io, maybe read some of our blog posts to get an idea of what is going on in the business right now.
- We’ll have a few “tell me about a time...” questions where we want to hear about things you’ve done, projects you’ve worked on, and most importantly the results you helped to achieve. It’s incredibly helpful to think about how you structure your answers here; things like the STAR method(opens new window) can help highlight your achievements in a clear and concise way.
Take home challenge
Next, we want to see how you tackle a small programming challenge and have put together a take-home test that you can complete in any language you like. You’ll then have a chance to review it with two of our engineers.
We make sure that you meet different interviewers at every stage. This means we get a rounded picture of who you are and give you a chance to meet a wider sample of the engineers in our team.
The take-home tests allow us to get an idea of:
- How you approach breaking problems down
- What you value when writing clean, concise code
We also hope they remove the stress of live coding tests by allowing you to choose the time and place to tackle the challenge.
The interview itself is split in two.
For the first half, we’ll ask you to walk through your solution and ask any questions we have about it. Here we’re looking for how you respond to feedback on code, how you value pragmatism in finding solutions, and where you draw the line to say that code is “done”.
At Multiverse we value lifelong learning; it’s in our mission. This goes for our employees as well as our apprentices. The second half of the take-home test interview is about how you like to learn, how you seek feedback, and how you help support your team members through sharing knowledge.
Here at Multiverse, we primarily work in Elixir but don’t expect anyone to have prior experience in this before they join. We provide a £1000 training budget and time to learn at your own pace.
Tips
- We encourage you to time-box the challenge to 2-3 hours and don’t mind if it’s not 100% finished.
- We’ll chat about your approach, the challenges you faced, and what you would want to do next given more time. If you don’t get as far as you like in the time, add a note for what you’d tackle next.
- A little documentation goes a long way. If you can, include a readme file that tells us how to run your project.
“Culture add” interview
Hiring the best people is foundational to our success as a business. Whether you’re applying for an engineering role, a sales role, a marketing role, or a coach role, everyone will go through some form of a “cultural add” interview with a senior member of the team you’re applying for. Here, we look to understand what you’ll bring to our team.
This might be with our VP of Engineering, Sachin, our VP of Product, Emma, or our Head of Engineering, Theo. Emma has written a great article about what we look for here(opens new window).
Tips
- We’d strongly encourage you to read the article and think about examples from your past that showcase the qualities Emma mentions.
- Again, think about the context of your example, the action you took, and the results you achieved.
Founder’s interview
In our final interview stage, you’ll meet our founder, Euan, or occasionally one of the other senior leadership team members.
It’s a good time to reflect on the people you’ve met so far, what you talked about, and what you would bring to the company.
From there, it’s decision time for us. If we feel you would be a good addition to the team, one of our internal recruiters will be in touch with the good news.
We really hope that you choose to join our team on its amazing journey. We’re just getting started!
Apply today
We're hiring a number of pivotal roles across our Engineering team and we'd love to receive your application. Find out more and apply here.
