Exploring a career change is a big moment in any individual’s life. At Source Allies, we understand that searching for a place to grow your career is an exciting and sometimes daunting decision, so we strive to make your interactions with us as enjoyable and stress-free as possible. At the conclusion of our interviews, we’ll often hear candidates say “That was a lot of fun!” or “That was much less stressful than I was anticipating!”. In this blog post we’ll go over what you can expect and all the ways you can showcase your skills while getting to know our amazing team.

Teammate-led and Feedback-driven

We hope you’ll notice two trends throughout your interviewing process: direct feedback and plenty of interaction with your potential future coworkers.

Direct Feedback

At Source Allies, we have a flat organizational structure. Since none of us have managers to report to, we rely heavily on feedback from our peers to elevate ourselves. We view feedback as a gift as it helps us understand where we can continue to improve, how we can best help other teammates, and how we can grow and refine what it means be the preferred place of employment for technologists seeking mastery. After every step of our interviewing process we want to make sure you’re exposed to the same feedback that we live and breathe day-to-day. You can expect direct feedback from teammates after nearly every interaction, and we hope the feedback you receive helps you continue down your career path, regardless of where you decide to work next.

Interaction With Real Teammates

Your interviewing process at Source Allies will be filled with interactions with real teammates who work on building the same software products you might expect to work on if you’re invited to join our team. Unlike other companies that may utilize hiring managers, HR departments, or senior technical leaders, we believe the best way to feel comfortable about where you choose to work next is to be exposed to several teammates you could actually be working alongside in the future.

Three Simple Steps

Our interviewing process consists of three simple steps.

📱 Phone Call - Talk about your passions

🧑‍🏫 Technical Assessment - Showcase your skills

💻 Pairing Session - Work alongside us

Phone Call

After getting in touch with you, our recruiting team will schedule a phone call to get to know you better. We’re looking to understand your passions, your experiences, and your goals. We’ll give you a rundown of what it’s like to work at Source Allies, the wide range of projects we work on, and the types of incredible teammates you’ll get to work with.

Technical Assessment

After the phone call with one of our awesome recruiters, you’ll be asked to complete a technical assessment. Currently, we utilize HackerRank to assess your skills. After you complete the HackerRank test, our recruiting team will ask for multiple volunteers from our team to review your submission. Our teammates will look over your submission and provide feedback based on what they’re seeing. We’ll be looking to see if the code in your submission aligns with your level of experience, is easy to understand, and solves the problems being asked.

After our teammates have reviewed your submission, a member of our recruiting team will get back with you to go over the feedback from our teammates. We don’t want anyone to get lost or forgotten once you start your interviewing journey with us, so you can expect feedback on your submission whether we’d like to keep moving forward currently or wait until a later time. Regardless of the outcome, we hope the feedback from our teammates helps you grow and continue your path toward mastery.

Pairing Session

After your technical assessment has been reviewed, you’ll be moved on to the last phase of our interviewing process, a pairing session. This is a 2-3 hour collaborative coding exercise where you’ll meet with a few of our teammates and work through a small project together. The purpose of this pairing session is for our teammates to get to know what it’s like to work alongside you on a day-to-day basis. We’re trying to find exceptional teammates like you to work with us on building innovative digital products for our partners.

Since you’ve already passed the technical assessment we’re not as worried about whether you can reverse a linked list on a whiteboard or determine if two binary trees are identical. We solve complex problems for our partners, but don’t believe being able to solve problems like that are critical to success in our industry. Instead, we prefer customizing the project to align with your interests. Are you enthusiastic about provisioning infrastructure on major cloud platforms? If so, we might collaborate to create and deploy a solution. Have you been learning about a new tech stack or framework lately? Come teach us what you’ve learned, and we’ll solve a fun problem together using whatever you’d like. Since all of our pairing sessions are teammate-led, we do not have one single project we like to work through. Instead, we let our teammates decide what they feel will give them the best view into who you are and what skills you’ll bring to the team.

We believe that since our pairing sessions are teammate-led you’ll get a better feel for what it’s like to work together with us at Source Allies. You’ll be able to ask candid questions of our teammates about what it’s like working here without having to worry about making a perfect first impression to a future manager. We also hope that interacting with teammates who you’ll actually be working with makes the decision to change jobs more exciting and remove some of the uncertainty that comes with that big life change.

After your pairing session is completed, the teammates you worked with will submit individual overviews of how they felt the session went. We don’t have many rules at Source Allies, but one of them is that we encourage the interviewers to avoid speak with each-other about how the pairing session went until these teammates have submitted their review. We don’t want one individual’s view of how things went to interfere with the views of another. We hope this provides our recruiting team with the most complete picture of you and how much we enjoyed working alongside you.

Much like what happened after you submitted your HackerRank, our recruiting team will be in touch with you to review feedback from our teammates about how the pairing session went. Regardless of outcome, we want everyone who has spent time with us to come away with some insightful feedback they can use to improve themselves. Similarly, we’re always looking to improve our interviewing experience, so we also encourage you to share feedback with your interviewers or directly with our recruiting team.

Let’s Chat

We hope this insight into our hiring process helps calm some nerves you may have around pursuing your next great opportunity. At Source Allies, we’re teammate-led and feedback-driven, and we hope all interactions you have with us reflect that. Whether it’s grabbing coffee with one of our recruiting team members or sharing some jokes with our teammates while working through a fun project, we hope you enjoy your time getting to know what all Source Allies has to offer.

If you’re interested in making a move or just want to chat, feel free to check out our careers page or get in touch.