Refactoring Backend Engineering Hiring at Slack

For anyone who’s ever been involved in the hiring process, it’s no easy feat — particularly in a growing company. To get hiring practices right, it takes iteration based on feedback — both on the internal processes within your company as well as on the external process a candidate experiences. Continuously improving hiring is important for a host of reasons, and chief among them is the high cost of hiring the wrong person, or missing out on the right one.

At Slack, we put a lot of care in hiring, and Engineering hiring is certainly no exception. When it comes to hiring backend engineers, we’ve always given a take-home exercise, preferring that candidates complete their programming practicum in an environment cozier to them: on their own machine, and in their own time, within reason. Once candidates have passed our phone screen and this take-home exercise, we invite them onsite for two technical interviews and two non-technical interviews.

The take-home exercise and the technical design onsite interview look for a number of meaningful attributes in candidates. We look for candidates who display a high degree of craftsmanship, who are security-minded, and who are concerned with system performance and reliability. For a long time, both assessments were giving us a good signal on these attributes and others.

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