Behind the scenes - hiring a Frontend Developer in 2023 - Part One

Behind the scenes hiring - Inception

The idea for writing this article came from Hung Lee. 

Whenever he switched to behind the scenes with his LinkedIn newsletter “This Week in Recruiting” (TWIR) it was the one newsletter that I could not stop reading. No holds barred, write about what you are doing without editing to perfection, open up dialogue and debate and people in your space will genuinely be interested in what you are doing…

So that’s what we’re going to do for the journey we went through hiring our Frontend Developer, the first role post-wide spread adoption of Generative AI/Chat GPT. We were worried about the impact this would have on the volume of applications, quality post application stage and being able to work out who was using it optimise and the candidates over-relying on it.

Context is everything

To give you a quick bit of context, we are an HR tech startup with people based in Belfast, London and Cordoba in the inclusive interview software and interview intelligence space. A team of 6 people who care deeply about fair hiring, remotely distributed across the UK, Ireland and Spain. This was our 7th hire to come in and join the team.

With this article I’ll give a behind the scenes of hiring in August and September 2023 for a tech role, the high’s and lows, what we got right, what we could do a lot better and as many learnings as we physically squeeze in at the end.

Before we jump in though, TA and recruitment folks you amaze me. We were hiring for one role and it was hard, I have no idea how you balance insane numbers of roles across multiple geographies, I salute you 🫡. 

The total end stats…

We are going to build up to this throughout the article but I was blown away by these figures… 

To give you some idea of how insane the above stats are, look at the last time we were looking for a developer role back in 2021 (screenshot below)… Absolutely mad. Now I’d love to say it’s the employer brand that we’ve built since then but I think at the same time it maybe says something about the junior to mid tech hiring market. Busy market with a lot of candidates looking. 

Begin at the beginning - what’s the most critical role we need…

The best time for founders to hire is mid-raising, every startup founder will tell you this 😅. But we were near the end of closing a round and asked ourselves the question, what is the most critical role we need to hire first. P0, priority number one. And it didn’t take us long to work this out. 

We have been lucky enough over the last couple of years to have two incredible full-stack software engineers in Amy Glass and Javier Martinez, and when I say full-stack I genuinely mean full-stack. But when working at an early stage startup you find your product roadmap can become a little bit… well endless.

So we knew we would need at least one frontend developer to free up more of Javier and Amy’s time and someone who could really come in and own the frontend. Spotting the gap in the product team and what we needed here was relatively easy. Step two was deciding on our HR/TA tech stack. 

One tech stack to rule them all

There is no one HR or TA tech stack that is going to solve every company’s or recruiters problems within the budget that they have… although Stan might say that with their number of partners interconnected in the ATS space you can (well worth watching his Fully Autonomous Recruiter). So we had a very small budget and wanted to get as much bang for our buck as possible.

• ATS - Rezoomo, super easy to use

• Attraction - Otta.com, Rezoomo for multi-job posting and LinkedIn 

• Sifting - Google Docs (more on this later)

• Tech Test - In-house, PDF with instructions to submit via GitLab/Hub

• Interviews - Equitas (of course)

Gaps in our stack due to either budget, time or the size of our company:

• Attraction - could have advertised broad and wide with amazing groups like Hustle Crew, Coding Black Females, DiverseTalent.ai among many others but wanted to see how Otta would perform on it’s own first

• Sifting - the range of tools on offer here makes life very difficult to choose but looking at our last role I was not expecting huge volumes… How wrong I was. MeVitae , Neurosight and ThriveMap are strong contenders for the next role.

• One-way video interviews - hate them, not an engaging candidate experience and used incorrectly can heavily promote Beauty Bias

• Tech Test - Loads of cool providers out there but costs can be eye-watering, simply linking in to our tech interview was the easiest and most cost effective way

• Interviews - I think if I suggest any other tools here our investors might kill me, loads of amazing providers coming into the interview intelligence space to track though but Equitas focuses on being inclusive by default.

No one HR or TA tech stack that will cover everything and if yours does I’d hazard a guess that you are spending too much. Pick the tools that work for you and get all people involved in hiring process to work with them as a team.

Process is everything - the Goldilocks rule

This is one of the hardest challenges, when it comes to hiring. I wrestle with it when giving people advice as it is so tough to get right. Again, there is no one end to end process that is perfect. The tricky part is balancing speed and depth of assessment across X stages. Too few and a candidate thinks they got the job too easily and your accuracy will potentially plummet, especially if your whole process is a quick coffee chat. Too many and candidates will drop out because of the amount of effort you are asking them to put in, no job role is worth 6+ stages of assessment and interview. 

Here’s a screenshot of the process we used and highlighted in our job advert so that candidates could opt out if it was too long or too short for them right at the outset: 

Again not perfect but works for our size of company without being complete overkill. 

Job Adverts, Science, Art or somewhere in between…

This is what makes the difference in the early days, you as a founder have time to invest in getting the job advert right and make sure that it speaks to people. The big employers will have templates they need to stick rigidly to, tone of voice can be lost and a lot of them will start sounding very very similar.  

There are so many job adverts out there that put me to sleep or that I immediately stop reading when they turn out to be a job spec with every duty detailed to the point where you have no idea if anyone could do the job.

Our job advert isn’t perfect but it’s better than most, request access if you want here and happy to share - Frontend Developer Job Advert. A few key points to take away:

• Don’t just copy and paste your competitors - it’s very easy to tell

• Lead with 3-4 bullets on “Why this role” to grab people’s attention

• As near the top as possible put in why you as a company actually care about DEI - not the generic copy and paste right at the bottom

• A section on what exciting things or projects they will actually be working on…

• We highlight that we “Hire on ability, attitude and aptitude with a big emphasis on potential rather than just past experience” - this opens up for more applications and can have an impact on diversity of applications

• Will their work actually have an impact… If so, where? - people want to know if they are going to do something that matters and if you care about them as an employer not that they'll be printing interview packs 8 hours a day or something

• No more than 6 bullet points for “What you need to Succeed” / “Must Haves” anything else in the “Nice to have bullet points” - forces the team to be crystal clear on must haves

• Benefits, the more the better and don’t mention legally required things like a pension unless you are doing some pretty hefty employer contributions

• Salary range otherwise you are wasting your time and theirs

A side note on the importance of job ads:

"The job ad spoke to me."

and

"I read it and thought - this is me."

Two quotes we had at our recent team offsite. I never realised how important this was until great people told me it's the whole reason they applied. We could talk about Job Adverts all day but let’s save that for another article. No one knows more about this topic than Daniel Fellows at Get-Optimal.com , if you want to see how to optimise your job ads for DEI and SEO reach out to him, he knows far more about this topic than me!

Last bit of attraction planning… And away we go!

We are small, the budget for job ads, also pretty small. We put a £200 lifetime budget on LinkedIn and made sure the Easy Apply option was not switched on. Only switch this on if you think you will really struggle to get any applications, otherwise you are going to be overwhelmed by irrelevant applications. For all non-senior roles make sure there is some level of friction there, with us it was simply redirecting them to our ATS Rezoomo and making them apply through there. Or with Otta, the same idea, pinging them application questions to see if they actually wanted to apply. A little bit of friction whenever you are going to get a bit of volume through will work wonders, the ones who apply won’t be speculative, they’ll actually be genuinely passionate about working there. 

In the early days you’ll have to rely on your own network for reach and sharing. We tapped up every angel, advisor, operator, founder, influencer we knew to let them know that we were hiring and to share far and wide if they could. Otta was a new tool to try but we'd heard good things from others in the space.

First few days on Otta… We’re going to need a bigger boat!

OK so we were hoping for a few dozen applications, we thought maybe 100+ would be a good target to aim for. Day one might have changed this pretty quickly.

Otta promised us a good volume of diverse candidates and they did not fail to disappoint. Flo Brantingham looked after us getting us set up in next to no time and even giving a few profile tips on improving the impact on DEI (simple things like employee profiles and referrals from a wide range of team members).

Learnings, we should have templated our candidate communications earlier on and were kicking off with personalised messages as best we could but when volumes pick up this becomes pretty unsustainable. We gave any candidates who didn't hit the benchmark feedback if they requested it but better regret templates could have solved for this sooner.

The quality of early applications was amazing, some really talented folks with a range of backgrounds in Frontend Development and some who were new to the industry. We felt overwhelmed by the volume pretty quickly and our inboxes were lighting up every time someone new came through.

Will they use ChatGPT or Generative AI... Yes.

The answer of will they or won’t they use ChatGPT was answered in the first few applications…

My mind was blown on one of our morning team calls when I said there are a few similar examples coming through (nearly word for word) then Amy Glass said just prompt with "Answer this question" and put one of our screening questions.

We saw a few variations on the above multiple times.

Martyn Redstone is a prompting expert and would be rolling over in his grave if he saw this level of laziness when it came to prompting. He's alive and well though and runs prompting courses so well worth having him in your network!

What we saw next when it came to using ChatGPT and generative AI in the next stages absolutely blew our minds...

If you found this article interesting and helpful let me know and I’ll get part two out in the coming weeks. We will cover: 

• Outreach - push versus pull

• Impact of ChatGPT - volumes and quality

• Blind sifting on a budget… The startup way

• Tech test on launching rockets - test the hard skills before the interview

• Interview framework design - questions, probes and scoring criteria

• Interview Intelligence - Role-related interviews & Values interviews with Equitas

• Candidate Fraud? Or a simple misunderstanding...

• Finding the one, Danish - 562/1 chance