I was pleasantly surprised by the interview process as a candidate. Everyone was very welcoming and the interviews felt more like a chat, instead of a formal interview. That’s also one of the main reasons why I decided to join and why I felt comfortable about joining. But let’s go through my points from the post and see how GitLab does.
- A generic job description
Job descriptions aren’t generic, I can assure that (at least for the UX roles). We recently had a new recruiter join who specializes in UX recruitment and he updated all our job descriptions so they accurately describe what is expected from the candidate.
2. Lack of respect towards the candidates
I felt respected when I interviewed for GitLab. Now I know why. Since I joined, I learned that we want all our candidates to have a great experience going through the interviews. I believe we measure that on a scale from 1–5 and we aim for an average of 4 even for the candidates that don’t make it. I started helping out with the interviewing shortly after I joined and I had been interviewing candidates before but our approach at GitLab is very different. I went through training even though I had experience with interviewing and I had to shadow other designers conducting interviews before I could start interviewing myself.
3. Treating candidates like numbers
This is one of the toughest things to get right. We get lots of applications, I believe it’s around 40 per day. We tend to hire 1–2% of people that go through the interviews. We only get around 45 minutes with a candidate but I personally don’t mind extending the interview to up to an hour. We also invite the candidates to send follow-up questions after the interview. Generally, I’d say we take time for each candidate and I’ve seen other designers on the team do the same. We prepare for the interview by going through a candidates’ portfolio and resume and come up with tailored questions. With such a high amount of applications, that’s the best we can do and it’s much more than what most companies do.
4. Looking to get free work through “design tasks”
We don’t have design tasks in our interviews anymore. We had them but found out that there’s very little value in them so we cancelled them completely.
5. Not involving other people from the company
A lot of people from the company are involved in the interviews. The first interview is with a recruiter, then a senior UX designer (peer interview), then it’s either staff UX designer or the UX manager, the UX director and in the end the VP of Engineering. I think the major difference from most companies is that we involve designers in the early stages (peer interview). This way, we evaluate candidates based on skill and if they’re a good fir for the team.
6. Lure designers in based on false promises
There are no false promises. There’s a calculator on our website with which the candidates can calculate what kind of salary they can expect based on their experience, where they live and their seniority.
I hope this answers your question ☺️
