Redesigning a tech hiring process
Building fair, structured interview processes for data teams, from the role definition to the interview loop to coaching the interviewers.
Context
At every company I’ve worked for, I ended up shaping how we hire. Most recently, that meant hiring across all data teams and every level of seniority at the same time.
Challenge
Interviews depended too much on who you happened to meet. Without a shared definition of “good”, it was hard to compare candidates fairly, and hard for candidates to know what we were looking for.
Approach
- Defined the data engineer role and its required skills for a whole company, and wrote hiring guidelines to match.
- Co-created a competency-based interview loop, with shared questions and clear scoring.
- Interviewed candidates myself and coached other interviewers along the way.
Outcome
Across my career I’ve interviewed 50+ candidates for senior roles in data analytics, data engineering, data science and machine learning, and for the managers who lead them. Each process left behind something reusable: a role definition, a loop, or a guide.
What I learned
A hiring process is a product. It needs an owner, regular feedback, and a lot of empathy for the people going through it on both sides of the table.