How we hire the best people in a competitive environment.

We work in Minsk where about 5000+ IT companies are based. Therefore, it makes sense that companies severely compete for each skilled developer.

At DashBouquet we are handling the competition and we can say that our company may serve as an example even for the biggest players in the market in terms of hiring politics.

The secret lies in our hiring technology, on which we have been actively working for the whole year. There is still some room for improvement but the main points are here to remain.

We believe that:

1. We want to work with people who do not pretend and always stay themselves
2. We want to work with people who are able to communicate and enjoy it
3. During an interview, we value its process and your answers and not our own “big boss”-selves
4. We care that our candidates get some value from the interview and leave it in a good mood
5. Any interview is a stress and it should be considered

The hiring process consists of few steps and the main step is a “tech interview”. Before the start, we explain to the candidate that this is our attempt to recreate a real working environment within a 60-minute interview.

Based on our principle “to be, not to pretend” we prefer that our candidates show their skills on practice rather than talk about them.

We use collaborative JSFiddle to write code and check its performance. We expect that developers demonstrate their skills of solving simple tasks in real time. If we give them complex tasks, their anxiety will not allow them to show their capabilities and it will be more difficult for us to estimate their skills. We always check the skill of implementation with all candidates. Tasks may include something like adding together few numbers, which does not demand any special skills except basic programming.

For more experienced devs we offer a task to quickly design program interface (like your own redux or Promise library). For the veterans we have a task to design systems and define their key elements.

Besides the actual accuracy of solution we also assess the candidate’s behavior, whether the candidate reacts aggressively on our remarks, asks for help, involves our interviewer into the process, mentions other possible solutions, takes full charge for the actions, reasonably evaluates their skills.

For the developers we offer simple and standard tasks that are aimed to define:

• Knowledge of functional programming basics
• Knowledge of asynchronous operations basics in Javascript
• Ability to divide the task into sections and resolve it one by one

According to our experience, these are the most sensitive topics in which even the slightest problems prevent developers from achieving results within expectancy period.

Usually during the interview process not only the interviewer is able to esteem the candidate, but the candidate is also able to learn something new.

Combined with polite and respectful approach, our interview process usually results in wonderful outcome. Candidates say that it was the best and most fun interview in their lives and recommend our company to the others.

This is how we quite successfully compete with EPAM, Wargaming, Viber in terms of getting the best engineers for you and your future projects.