#techhire

[gcindiadental-care]

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Stop applying. Start launching.

[peoplepersonperson-blog]

Introducing Healthify’s New Core Values!

Below is a repost of a piece I wrote on building our core values for our Healthify blog! 

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At Healthify, we're building a world where no one's health is hindered by their need. That is our mission, and it's one of the pillars of who we are as an organization. The other pillar that supports our mission is our core values. When our People Operations team at Healthify came into existence in 2017, the company had only 2 core values:

Leave your ego at the door

Own your outcome

These two values were a well-intentioned start but they weren't written down, defined, or formally codified. When we asked Healthifytes "Do you know what our core values are?" more often than not the answer was "no". We realized that we needed to rework our core values into ones that are actionable and truly represents who we are and what we aspire to be.

So in January and February of 2018, we went to work! Now, nearly 6 weeks later and excited about where we landed, we want to share our new core values in hopes of giving you a sense of who Healthify is, what drives us, and where we're going.

Defining Core Values

When we started on our journey into reworking our core values, our first hurdle was designing an approach that would help us identify what our values really are. In order to fully understand what drives us as a company, we needed every Healthifyte to be part of that process. With that in mind, we divided our approach into the following steps:

All Company Workshops

Creating Version 1

Small Groups

The Final Version

Putting Values into Action

I. All Company Workshops

Over the course of a week, our People Operations team conducted 2 core values workshops. The goal of our workshops was to learn about the values that mattered most to our employees and to narrow down which ones are central to who we are as a company. In other words, we all have a world of values that guide us, but our "core values" are the ones that are so relevant to who we are as a company, that they will hold true no matter what.

Each workshop lasted about 90 minutes and required every Healthifyte to identify events in their professional lives that were significant to them - whether they were moments of great success or failure. They wrote the positive events above a line on a page and any negative events below the line. Events closest to the top of the page were the biggest successes, and the ones closest to the bottom were the biggest failures.

Next, we asked each Healthifyte to identify what values were present or absent for each of these instances. For the positive experiences - what values were present that made that event particularly satisfying? For the negative experiences - what values were missing from these negative events?

Lastly, we gave each Healthifyte 3 sticky notes and asked them to choose 3 values out of all the ones they'd written down that either showed up most often, had the most impact, closely represented who Healthify currently is, or identified an area we needed to improve.

II. Creating Version 1

Once both workshops were complete, we consolidated the sticky notes from both sessions and began identifying the largest clusters of notes. From the collections, we learned that the top 5 values that Healthifytes care about are:

Having a culture of learning and growth

Treating each other with empathy

Setting a high bar for our work

Working in a supportive and collaborative environment

Having a culture of feedback and respect

III. Small Groups

Our next step was to take this initial version and run it by a select group of Healthifytes for additional input. We wanted these groups to be diverse - old employees and new, employees from different teams, different positions, remote and HQ - so we could make sure everyone at our company was represented in this step.

The feedback from these groups was mixed. While everyone mostly agreed that the initial 5 core values were written in inclusive, actionable language, there was still some concern they were too general and many felt like the values didn't reflect Healthify's uniqueness. Using that feedback, we created a second version of core values which we shared with our team of managers for additional input. Over the course of the next 2 weeks, we collected feedback and updated our values once more for our final version.

IV. The Final Version

After a month of planning, workshops, and revisions, we finally identified four core values that represent who we are and what we want to aspire to be. Our new core values are:

We Lead with Empathy

We Lean Into Vulnerability

We Rise Above the Status Quo

We Love the Hustle

And this is how we define them:

We Lead with Empathy: At Healthify, we believe that kindness and empathy lead to respectful and effective communication. For that reason, we assume good intentions of one another and seek mutual understanding of our teammates, users, and customers.

We Lean into Vulnerability: Healthifytes are not afraid to ask for help or to give and/or receive feedback. We believe vulnerability improves trust in teams, so we take ownership of our failures, and don't shy away from tough conversations.

We Rise Above the Status Quo: All Healthifytes believe the status quo is not good enough. It causes pain for the people we serve. Healthifytes take a stand, and try and do things no one else is in the community is doing. On an individual level, we strive to always grow and improve ourselves.

We love the Hustle: Healthify is forever a startup. We live in the entrepreneurial mentality, stay scrappy, and maintain our "no job too small" mindset. We support autonomy for our employees and strive to help them. We are a team first and foremost, and we hustle together so that no one is overwhelmed, and everyone can be proud of what we're doing.

We love our new core values because they represent all of the original 5 principles that mattered to us most and they're comprehensive yet specific enough that they still uniquely reflect who we are and who we want to aspire to be. These 4 core values serve as guidelines for how we treat one another, how we treat our external stakeholders and what we want to strive for as we keep maturing as a company.

VI. Putting Values Into Action!

Since the beginning of this process, our main goal for our core values was to turn them into a purposeful tool that our employees can use and one month since their rollout, we've already started weaving our values into our everyday life!

We've added them into our onboarding for all new Healthifytes and we've set up our #Shoutout channel in Slack so whenever we give someone a shoutout, we must identify which value they're living into. We've also used these values as a framework to begin building our first performance review process and incorporated them into our interview process. Lastly, we've painted them on our office wall so we'll always remember what Healthify is all about. Creating our core values together was a meaningful experience for us as a team. Sharing our goals for our company and ourselves allowed us to be vulnerable, learn from each other, and really understand our collective vision for our future as a company.

If you think our core values are also important to you and reflect what you aspire to be, you, check out our open job postings and keep in touch with me and Healthify on Twitter. We love to meet people of all backgrounds and experiences, so don’t hesitate to reach out!

[doselecthq]

8 Reasons To Dump Your Current Tech. Assessments Vendors, Now.

Did you notice we mentioned them as “vendors” and not partners?

2017 has just begun and we have been having numerous discussions with progressive HR and Technical teams about the perils of working with vendors in the current assessment landscape. If technology pundits and experts are anything to go by, non-linear growth would be the proverbial pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for the service landscape, considering that shrinking margins and throwing “people at the problem” comprise the current linear growth models.

What does that imply for hiring teams?

You can’t be relying on your current technical assessment vendors, for the rapid pace of an organized shift in the skills bank required to achieve the new growth wave, will see you aligning yourself with partners. Partners who understand that Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and Mobility would be driving much of your Automation agenda. Partners who would be crunching data from external sources and helping you with intelligence about a particular candidate’s record on GitHub and Stack Overflow. Partners who are quick to adapt themselves to the changing technology landscape and able to help you with assessments on new age frameworks.

Vendors help you with shortlisting basis assessment scores on legacy technologies. Partners help you derive insights out of the scores. For a vendor, an assessment is the end. For partners, assessments are means to an end.

Which begs the question — What are the ends?

a) A guaranteed increase in quality of technical hires.

b) Insights into a candidate’s prowess around core language concepts.

c) Insights around code quality. Ask any tech. head if she can allow a candidate whose code violates conventions for a language and she will shout “Hell, No”. A partner helps you evaluate candidates on code quality.

DoSelect’s ethos before even writing the first line of its code was to shape itself as a true partner for hiring teams.

Why?

Because the founding team had worked with all popular technical assessment vendors. They were found wanting in almost all aspects which are of mighty importance to technical teams when they induct new members in their teams. Granted that the aggressive sales and marketing machinery of these vendors have served them well enabling them to fire a decent client roster for themselves, but it was imperative for us to build a tool that truly help hiring teams with better insights around the candidates they are mulling to hire.

In almost every discussion we have with hiring teams, one question invariably pops up — “How are you different from HackerRank/ HackerEarth/ Mettl/ Aspiring Minds/ CoCubes/ Codility/ Testdome/ Expert Rating/ (Insert your current vendor here)?”

The answers are many. Let us delve into them one by one.

a) Code Quality Analyzer — DoSelect’s reports point out the exact deficiencies in a candidate’s code. Whenever the code violates set conventions of a particular language, our engine detects and flags it. The underlying dangers of not analyzing code quality is that faulty code might execute test cases well but not following convention leads to “technical debt” which is abhorred by tech. teams. They are not able to scale the code for new enhancements if conventions are not followed.

The image underneath is a grab of our report which highlights the code quality score.

b) Language Based Assessments — DoSelect’s suite of assessments enable you to assess candidates on core concepts in a particular language. Vendors mostly assess these by the aid of algorithms and Data Structures whilst the role might or might not be big on algorithms. Simply put, a candidate you are considering to hire for a Java role should be assessed for concepts like Inheritance, Polymorphism, Method Overloading, Strings, Classes, Methods etc. and not mere algorithmic knowledge.

Below is an excerpt from the report that details know-how in core language concepts.

c) “Crunch” — DoSelect’s “Crunch” pulls data from external sources like GitHub and Stack Overflow to follow the technologies where there have been contributions from a particular candidate. Wouldn’t it be uber helpful if you are aware that a particular candidate who is being considered for a Python role has also been contributing to Android and PHP channels in these forums?

This image underneath showcases our report which outlines a candidate’s submissions to GitHub and Stack Overflow.

d) Measurement of API skills — For developers working on home grown products, working with external APIs forms one of the most crucial components of a typical day at work. Current assessment vendors cant’ assess developers on API skills because their core isn’t engineered to talk to other networks (read: internet). DoSelect’s API assessments see candidates working with Open APIs (Twitter, NASA etc) and solve challenges by diving into them.

Following is one of the sample problems in the DoSelect API library.

e) Automated Testing Framework® (ATF)— Current assessment engines are opaque about how they allot scores in a particular test. DoSelect’s Automated Testing Framework® makes this black box redundant by not marking candidates on mere input-output results but also the inner workings behind the functionality of the code. Simply put, whether a Java code has correct implementation of Classes would be one parameter on which ATF would evaluate final scores.

f) Auto-Droid — Android assessments that evaluate a candidate on not mere build but functionality as well. Current engines evaluate candidates on mere build (“build” stands for the concept where the mobile app. is evaluated only on one parameter — whether the code is written correctly or not — it does not enlighten you with the metrics around “correct functionality” of the code)

To evaluate for functionality, the hiring team has to download the application and check for test cases. Imagine your pain if you have to evaluate 150 candidates — you are looking at downloading 150 applications, leading to a draining time per hire and probable chances of you missing out on a great candidate if she is placed as the 75th applicant in the pool of 150.** By the time you evaluate her code, she has been snapped up by your rivals.**

DoSelect’s Auto-Droid evaluates the candidates on both build as well as functionality — the report saves you crucial hours by pointing whether the application does it’s job well or not.

The following image is a grab from our Auto-Droid report. The GIF on the right showcases the functionality of the application, in an automated format.

g) Auto UI — An automated UI assessment framework that informs recruiters whether the candidate’s application fulfills the functional accuracy in the UI front. For instance, if the candidate is creating a temperature converter, the DoSelect report can detail whether the functionality of the converter is working or not.

The report underneath details the UI of the application, spawned from the code, written by the candidate.

h) Machine Learning and Data Science Assessments — Since you are high on an automation drive, you would need to assess candidates on modern Machine Learning paradigms. An MCQ assessment can be faked, guessed and manipulated in more ways than one. Considering that the talent pool in these technologies is limited, you can’t afford to go wrong with your next hire. This team is going to drive your non-linear growth, after all.

What needs to be assessed then?

1. Application problems on real world data sets

One of the questions which are put forth in our assessments are

“You have N images with one of the two tags — “Apparels” or “Electronics”. Build a model to tag any image in the following large data set as one of the two”

2. Sentiment Analysis

“Given a set of reviews of a particular product in a marketplace, determine the overall sentiment with either a “positive” or “negative” tag”

DoSelect’s suite empowers you to assess candidates on use cases like the ones mentioned above. This is the closest your team can get to measure actual, on-job proficiency in ML and AI skills.

These 8 reasons should couple DoSelect as your ideal technical skills measurement partner, in the truest sense of the word.

The current assessment scenario needs an overhaul if vendors have to become partners of HR teams to ensure their success in identifying the right talent, in lines with the strategic imperatives. DoSelect attempts to do just that, and more, by lending crucial insights which impacts your engineering team’s performance, bit by bit, literally.

What are your thoughts? We would love to gather your brains around the seismic shift that is due to hit hiring teams and the arsenal you are trying to build for your business units.

Please drop us a note at hello@doselect or a message at [phone] and we can help you a tad (actually, more than a tad) to devise the right assessments for their skills.

Till next time.

Update 1: Some readers asked for a grab of how the candidate interface looks like in DoSelect. The following GIF is taken from a live test happening as I type this

Update 2: Readers also asked for a sample report for our assessments. One such report for a Java assessment can be accessed by clicking this link - http://dos.lc/java-report-sample

[peoplepersonperson-blog]

How I use FogBugz for Recruiting

Here’s a piece I wrote for Fog Creek dot com on my recruitment process!

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If I told you I ate my own dog food, would you think I was gross? Or would you know what I meant? That at Fog Creek we use our products internally as a kind of quality control and real-world test case.

Well, it’s the latter. I swear! One way we eat our own dog food at Fog Creek is by using FogBugz as an Application Tracking System (ATS) for all our recruiting. We’ve used FogBugz in this fashion for as long as our company’s been in business (some 16 years and counting!), and it works really well. I’ve outlined the process below so you can replicate it within your own company too.

Handling Job Applications

The first step is to have an Admin create a Project that will act as your Inbox. At the Creek, all applications from candidates sent to [email protected] arrive in our Inbox. Every case is initially assigned to “Recruiting” which is a catch-all account we created so as to not overwhelm. I sort the inbox reverse chronologically by Area, so the most recent, “Not Spam” cases are the ones I see first.

Note: these are screenshots from our *actual* recruiting inbox – the names and cases are blocked out to protect our applicants!

We’ve set it up so every candidate who applies to a position at Fog Creek receives an auto-response from our Recruiting Robot with information about how recruitment works at Fog Creek.

With this response, candidates don’t have to worry if you’ve received their resume or not, and the fact that it’s canned, but still has personality sets it far apart from the generic forms most ATSs send out. We get loads of love for our robot – it sets the tone that this recruitment process actually won’t suck.

Reviewing Cover Letters

Moving on: We’ll use the story of a fictitious candidate who applied for a QA position at Fog Creek to walk you through our application process.

As the de-facto Head of Recruiting, I’m the first to take a look at each resume and cover letter. If you have a larger team, you can assign any member you like to this task. When I click into my applicant’s case, I see that Martha loves Fog Creek and that she wants to join our QA team.

Using the “Correspondent” column on the left, I can also she that Martha’s applied to Fog Creek before.

As the robot promised, we get back to every applicant, moving forward or not. If Martha were lacking, I’d reply to her email with a polite rejection using a snippet. Luckily for her, Martha has passed my initial screen. For my next step, I’ll move her from the Inbox to our Recruiting Queue, another Project in our FogBugz instance.

At this point, I also update the case’s Area – which corresponds to the position to which the candidate is applying – and the Milestone, which correlates to the whichever stage of the interview process the candidate is in. At Fog Creek we have 10 potential milestones, which include things like ‘Sales Pitch’, ‘SysAdmin Take Home Problem’ and ‘In-person with CEO’ – you can set your milestones to match whatever recruitment processes you have in place.

Lastly, I assign Martha’s case to Jude and request a resume screen. I’ve updated the “Due” date on the left side of the case and given Jude 1 full day to complete his screen. This is a great way to get rid of one of tech recruiting’s worst bottlenecks – waiting on developers to screen resumes! Lastly, I’ve subscribed to the case to make sure I see all updates. For example – if the candidate writes back in, I’ll get an email alerting me to the correspondence.

The Recruiting Queue

While Jude is reviewing Martha’s resume, let’s pause, and I’ll tell you a bit more about the Recruiting Queue. And just so you know – you’re about to get a super exclusive look into our *actual* queue – you are so lucky!

I organize my queue as follows: All active cases, sorted by Area (Position), then Milestone (Stage in the Process). Currently, I’m hiring on my SysAdmin & Support teams; you’ll see candidates for those 2 positions, plus Martha’s QA resume, below:

I sort this way so I can see how many candidates I have in the queue for each position, and so I can tell, of those candidates, how many are in each stage of the process. I star the cases that require my attention but I haven’t had time to respond to yet.

Sometimes I want to take stock of how many candidates I have in each stage of the process, so I’ll re-sort by Milestone to see how many “code screens” or “in-person interviews” are taking place this week and next.

I try to evenly distribute the load of recruiting and not put too much work on any one person. When I want to double check to make sure I’m meeting my goal, I’ll switch it up and resort by “Assigned To”

Yikes! I’ve got a lot of work to do. So let’s move on quickly!

From Resume Screening to Interview

Back to Martha: Jude has now completed his screen and (hurray!) Martha is moving on to the next round, which is a code screen. He’s assigned his case back to me, the Recruiter, to move her forward.

Because I subscribed to the case, I got an email with Jude’s assessment. I click into the case, change Milestone to “code screen”. Then use my snippets again to reach out to Martha and schedule an interview. I can email her right from FogBugz, which is handy for keeping all correspondence in one place.

Before I send, I’ll also update the “Due” date. I usually give candidates a day or two to respond.

Once we’ve gotten to the in-person stage, I notify each person interviewing Martha so they can add their interview times to their calendars. I keep the case assigned to myself as I’ll be facilitating the interview while Martha’s in the building.

After each interview, the interviewer edits the case with his/her feedback on the candidate’s performance. In Martha’s case – all hires! (we only hire those we all agree on, here’s why)

Sending out Offers

The next stage is the fun part of recruiting – the offer stage! Hiring people is the best; it’s also full of conversations that include personal and private information that a potential new employee doesn’t necessarily want to share with their potential new co-workers. To preserve Martha’s privacy, I move Martha’s case from the “Recruiting Queue” project to “Hiring” which has limited access. We have 2 Milestones in Hiring – Offer & Onboarding. Right now, Martha is in the Offer Stage, because we made her an offer. If Martha accepts the offer, she’ll move to “onboarding”. After her first month at the company, she’ll move from “Hiring” to our “Archive,” another secure project with access limited to admins, so that no employees can see what their coworkers said when hiring them.

And that’s it! We’ve gone from application to hire entirely within FogBugz. So, if you’re frustrated with the ATS your recruiting team is using, or if you’re a recruiter looking for a new system, I’d definitely recommend FogBugz. It’s simple, clean, easy to use, easy to teach(!) and reliable. If you have questions or want more information on how this works, find me on Twitter or email me – [email protected].

Do you want to hire the best developers? Watch this video guide.

[doselecthq]

Introducing Code Quality Analysis Engine — Of Comparing Apples To Apples

Two code samples. Both pass the specified test cases.

Question: How does your current assessment engine determine the better sample of the two?

Answer: It can’t.

Until now.

That hit you hard. Didn’t it?

Ask any engineering manager about factors that contribute to “technical debt”, and “shitty code” pops out as the first, almost knee-jerk like reaction. Now, shitty code has a lot of ingredients to it and one of them is whether the code adheres to the best-practice conventions as defined by the creators or the community of the language. Following these conventions are important because it ensures sanity when a lot of people are working together on a project and enables them to contribute constructively without a lot of hair-pulling, trauma, sleepless nights and unintended murders. The danger that underlies shitty code is the fact that it is functionally correct but if it piles up, new developers who want to improve a functionality or add an extension, find it a nerve-wracking exercise, because of the non-standardization in it.

Coming back to the question stated above — Are you measuring it, right now?

Because if you aren’t, chances are that you would hire somebody whose code is passing all intended test cases but writes what you have been reading all through — shit code. Popular assessment engines are guilty (and they are guilty of some more, but that is for some other day) of scoring a candidate’s performance on mere code functionality. They don’t differentiate whether Coder A wrote better code than Coder B and that’s where your quality per hire goes for a toss.

This won’t plague you anymore.

Starting today, all code submissions on DoSelect will be graded for their quality in addition to functionality. You would be able to see a quality score for each code solution, and an average quality score on a test report. This gives you more actionable data about the candidate that you can do to make an informed hiring decision – and your engineering teams would love you for this. To the Moon. And back.

For instance, even though both Kevin and Ms. Granger scored 200 in the assessment, Ms. Granger beat the minion to it. How did DoSelect conjure the machination to topple the minion?

How does it work?

Note: The above graphic is just an illustration used to compare two codes. Actual product may vary.

Whenever a solution is submitted in a programming language, the code quality analysis engine will detect violations of conventions of that language. Depending on the number and severity of these violations, it assigns a score between 0 to 5 – where 5 means no violations, hence good code; and 0 means too many violations, hence bad code. This update is now available in all new DoSelect test reports by default. No need to push any buttons or call our helpline! Code quality analysis is currently available for these languages - Python, Go, PHP, Bash, Haskell, and JavaScript. We are working on adding more languages soon.

It’s a brand new day, ladies and gentlemen :)

“DoSelect has been an absolute game changer for us” - Says Kevin Freitas, Global Head - HR, InMobi. We are out of private beta and available for progressive HR and Technical teams to give us a spin. Drop your co-ordinates here – https://goo.gl/Ymg2gO

Update on 25.11.2016

It’s about a week and we’ve upgraded code quality analyzer support for C, C++, Java 7 and Java 8. Shouts of joy please!

This is now enabled for companies as well as developers. Login and see for yourself.

[tiyblog]

It's an honor to be a part of and we're excited to see the impact it will have on Read the @hypepotamus interview with @EricDodds here http://bit.ly/21aEua4

The Iron Yard Co-Founder on Igniting Tech Education in Atlanta - Hypepotamus

Share this:By Eric Dodds, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at The Iron Yard Just the other day, I met with an organization that gives a few hundred dollars each year out of their already-strapped budget to buy art supplies for local elementary school students. Seeing student artwork and hearing about the gratitude of

[newamericablr-blog]

In which LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman is asked to pitch a great idea to Wharton’s Adam Grant and chooses to pitch Opportunity@Work!*

*Opportunity@Work is a program here at New America dedicated to giving people skills to get and do jobs, and to getting employers jobs based on potential and skill, not pedigree. Their flagship project is TechHire. Why are they starting with tech jobs? Because there are 600,000 of ‘em open in America; because they pay more than the average American job does; and because tech has a diversity and inclusion problem, and Opportunity@Work is about nothing if not solutions.

Follow them on Twitter here (co-founder Byron Auguste, mentioned in this video by Hoffman, is here).

[techaccesstv]

#EnglewoodBlue #Graduation #CompTIA #TechHire (at EnglewoodBlue)