We only interview engineers who have been nominated by existing Commit community members.
We assess every nominated engineer against eight essential skills - dedication, accountability, self-starter, growth mindset, humility/empathy, collaboration, communication skills and self-awareness. We believe each of these skills are critical to succeed in a startup.
Engineers who pass that essential skill screening are then interviewed by a Commit engineer who is more senior in their tech stack. This is a technical assessment premised on systems design and inquiry-based questions about actual projects they've worked on, challenges and tradeoffs they encountered, tools and tactics they used, what they would do differently in hindsight, etc.
We believe the best way to gauge an Engineer’s level of understanding about a language or framework is by having them explain it. The bonus is that this approach gets candidates who might be nervous and introverted to open up by talking proudly about code they’ve written, projects they’ve contributed to, issues they’ve resolved.
Engineers who pass our technical assessment have a final culture screen.
We conduct "off-book" reference calls with the individuals who worked closest with the engineer in their past few roles.
Commit engineers spend their first two weeks at Commit working on a hackathon onboarding project (HOP). They identify an engineering challenge that impacts the Commit community, scope a fix, produce a working product, and present the problem and their approach to a panel of Commit interviewers and community members.
Each of our interviewers has co-founded a company and individually conducted hundreds of interviews.
Commit doesn't believe in theoretical questions, algorithmic questions, (virtual) whiteboarding, and/or timed tests. These techniques are good at determining who is excellent at performing during an interview: people who thrive with an audience, study hiring articles and visit the ubiquitous websites that present common interview questions and ideal responses. They show little of an engineer's capability to solve complex real-world technical issues within a team and with resources at their disposal.
We're not the only people who feel this way:
Resumes are available upon request, as is a summarized technical interviewing scorecard, which captures our assessment of an engineer's essential skills, career goals and interests, and technical abilities.