The recruitment process

It took 10 weeks from the announcement on LinkedIn that I was moving back into a permanent role to get my first full-time gig since 2020. So I learned a lot about the current state of the industry and a lot about the current state of recruitment.

I’m not going to talk stats on how many I applied for, or how many 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or even 4th stage interviews I got. I will talk about some of the good and bad processes I went through, where I went wrong in a couple of cases and even a reason why I rejected an offer.

So first let’s go with the rejection of an offer. This was down to SC clearance and some aspects of this specific SC clearance where it would affect my personal life. It was mentioned during the interview process and asked if I lived with anyone who was not a UK citizen. I’m getting my life back on track from a rough 2023, I understand the need for security in this case, but I’m not going to change a dating profile to say “UK citizens only” to secure a job. This was not a bad recruitment process however will not mention names. Two stages and the total time to offer was about two weeks after the initial conversation with the recruiter. I am still in touch with and hopefully will remain in touch with the recruiter and development manager.

The Good

The good/best recruitment processes are next and the key points on these 3 were speed, and not just the personality of the recruiter but also the companies themselves. The feedback from these was also very good. I will name names in this section as they must know it wasn’t a bad process, again the role I rejected was not a bad process it was just a personal thing I couldn’t do.

Christopher Brown, Michael Banner, and David Lloyd from Rippl. This was a strange one as there was no recruiter involved Chris (Managing Director) contacted me directly through LinkedIn and after an initial phone call of about an hour, I was invited to an interview with all three participants, this was again just over an hour. Unfortunately, this is where I went a little wrong and admittedly could have done better. I was asked to complete a quick tech test which I took a bit too literal on the word quick. As I was at my parents for the Christmas Period by this point I was away from any dev setup, so a quick install of VS code and a quick “complete this task” I sent it off. I didn’t show what I could do and that was my downfall. Total time 11 days (18 including Christmas break)

Simon Monaghan & Dootrix - After initial contact with Simon the 1st interview came quickly however, unfortunately again came the Christmas break. The 2nd Interview came on the 3rd of Jan and a final talk came on the 8th. The feedback from both Simon and Dootrix on this was fantastic. Although this was an unfortunate no, I took the feedback forward. I didn’t show that I was ready to go back to (harsh to say) more ridged processes that come from the type of work Dootrix does compared to what I’ve been used to the last 3 years. However, I didn’t and couldn’t show some of the processes that I was used to working with at Twitch when it came to architecture and development due to NDAs, etc. I nearly forgot to mention timescales, the total time was 4 weeks (5 including Christmas)

Mandy Kettle & Unnamed - After a first initial talk with Mandy the interview was booked for 3 days later with the Development Manager, this 30-minute interview was intense and very quick, I got to learn a lot about the company and they got to learn a lot about me. The 2nd interview was booked and took place with glowing feedback. Scheduled for another 30 minutes we did over-run a little but it was more on the technical side of what I know. Again another great interview and again intense but I ended up answering questions before they asked which was fine. I found out about the 3rd interview before getting the feedback on the 2nd which was only 2 days after the 2nd. The 3rd stage was the hardest as it was a panel interview, which is always hard trying to judge what everyone is thinking, you aren’t going to please every person on the panel with every answer, however, that’s where you have to compromise and in theory, the future employer does as well. Unfortunately it went a little wrong in stage 4 and final stage. A meeting with the CEO, the problems that came from this were a couple of things. In the feedback I was told that the CEO in simple terms didn't like or understand why I do weekends working security, even though I told them in the interview it was to keep social at weekends without booze and with random people due to remote roles. The final bit was interesting, it was a great chat with the CEO, and I was told loads about the work and the role. So when asked "any further questions", I said "everything has been covered except I do have a question on how we get paid and how that works with the company being American". What they "heard" from this was "when do we get paid", which was neither the question I asked nor the answer they gave in the interview. Total time 3 weeks.

TelXL - Now this was an interesting one, the internal recruiter contacted me after seeing my CV a quick phone call and the 1st stage came talking to the Development Manager, great chat, got on well and the hour went by pretty quickly. 2nd stage was a tech test, again not something I'm a major fan of but this was an interesting task so to be honest a fun one. I also didn't make the mistake if under-engineering a project, given a week to do it, I spent a couple of hours and was done. They seemed to like it which got me through to the 3rd stage a good 3 hours at the office, general questions, then moving on to a whiteboarding session with a couple of devs and tech test discussion and finally CEO and TechOps lead meeting. I was anxious about the result of this stage as I had a feeling that I didn't answer some questions as eloquently as I had wanted. That anxiety went away after I was invited for a shorter call with them in a stage 3.5. I say 3.5 as it was more a small continuation of stage 3 with a couple more questions around the role. Total time 4 weeks.

The Not so Good

Companies that used buzzwords in their job description, I saw plenty of it and I did go for a few that had some of these. I didn’t go for any mentioning 10x or Rockstar… Yes, I saw them both.
The auto-rejection emails always contained the same content.
- On this occasion, you weren’t selected
- We had a lot of applications
- They were more qualified, You are not as qualified
Fake job postings - far too many. Be on the lookout for those that post the same job spec in multiple locations.
Feedback, feedback, feedback - the more feedback the better, but when you have a first stage or even second and get “you weren’t selected to move forward” or “we went with someone else”. You always ask yourself why, why was the other better, what did they have I didn’t? Even just “they had more experience in that role” would have been nice.

So that’s the end of the bulleted list of initial things, but what we do have are further issues I encountered.

This next one is interesting, a job posted as “Senior .NET Software Developer”. After the first initial call with the employer, it looked like a good position, there were some small red flags though around the size of the company. Although it has been around for quite a while now. Then unfortunately due to illness, the 2nd stage didn’t come until almost a month later. Although booked in for a couple of hours the interview ended up being 4 hours. In my case, I didn’t mind the extra time as I was using it as a discovery session to figure out what was needed and what was wanted. Now here’s the kicker, the role was not for a Senior Dev, it was for a Development Manager on a very small team with expansion planned for 2024/2025. This is not a major issue in itself but coupled with the lower salary due to the role advertised it was starting to look like they advertised as such to bring that down. The next and final red flag after the 4 hours of digging was the conflict that would undoubtedly arise from the issue of old tech. With this old tech issue, it was less about me not being able to work on it and being able to do it. The issue comes with the business priority of sales and new features over the technology upgrade and the future inability to hire people who can do it or even want to. The catch-22 of this is the conflict that will occur when as the new development manager you can’t hire, new features need creating and you end up the only person on the team.

Another role another interview, and this boiled down to the tech interview, no tech test but a dive into what I knew. Now the issue was the style of questioning. Asking a question with many, many correct answers, except they were expecting one answer. The reason for this was a lack of specificity. Asked how to update data that was changed in another pointed to DDD. I said Azure ServiceBus (in AWS that’s SQS), but that was not the expected answer. Queue a long conversation on Cloud Native vs using something like gRPC. In my mind, I’m very much a Development vs Maintenance vs Other costs, type of person, and the complications of each way of doing things. Now, I would rather use a service that may cost a little more but requires little to no maintenance, in terms of development easy to use. Yes, it’s more complicated than that especially when you think about scaling, the amount of traffic, etc. That was not the point however, it was to answer the question, which I did. This was a rejection by the way based on “not being technical enough”.

“Thank you for your application, now go and do this AI powered test before you get to speak to a recruiter, then you may get an interview with the company”. Okay, so what’s so bad about this? Well, I would have thought if you’ve seen my CV you may want to talk before doing the test, which will then signify if I’m truly okay to go through. Then comes the test itself, yes, I had a look at it. There was an initial series of questions, asking what role you’ve applied for and the following question is “how many years of experience do you have?” In what? the role, the separate technologies involved in the JD, I could have answered anything except it was a number from 1-? so I put 0 and moved on. Nice validation on an AI driven test. The main part of the test however was the worst… 15 questions with 2.5 minutes to answer each one.. VERBALLY. That’s right it was a verbal test. Now I’m not usually one to bang on about barriers to entry but that one is huge. Instantly messaged the recruiter and withdrew my application.

The ME factor

So this was bad at times but also good. My personality, I’m very straight and open about things which at times does cause conflict and at times means others and myself can talk for days. I do not believe hiding yourself in interviews is a good idea. Your peers, managers, and the team you lead will get to know you over a very long time compared to the length of the interview process. If you hide behind an interview version of yourself then that will not work.

The downside of me is TERMS, I know what things are, I do them every day, can I remember the exact definition of that thing? Not all the time! A few examples over the last month were things like overload vs override, normalisation. I haven’t had to use the terms in so long and with about a million different terms and technologies in the development space you end up with brain fog.

I will also debate my side of any case and end up in deep discussion over what is the best way of doing things. Again, in the end, it's a case of the best tool and best way of doing things on a case-by-case basis. However, if you lead me down one way of doing things I will always ask why. Why am I doing it that way? I believe this has come with years of experience and unfortunately does come out, but again, don’t hide behind an interview mask.

So what happened?

Well, I am now the Principal Software Engineer for TelXL. Thanks again to the TelXL team it was fun and although I was anxious at times at least that didn't show much.

Thanks to everyone over the last 3 months, it’s been a wild ride. The state of recruitment in tech is, to put it mildly, messed up, and the multitude of job boards, ads, internal vs external recruitment, and other factors make it difficult in more ways than one. I’m lucky enough to have a CV that speaks for itself and was “chased” quite a bit for roles. For those who have been and still are looking, firstly I’m sorry it’s been a pain and I understand your frustration. I wish you luck in getting the role you want.

Another note on this is the stupidly wide ranging salaries and packages. Anything from Junior, Senior, Lead, Principal, Managerial within Engineering, Architecture and DevOps all being in the £40k-150k range just shows no one knows where salaries should be. yes I saw a Junior role at £100k and a Managerial role at £40k.