If you’re applying (or thinking of applying) for a business role at Batvoice, it helps to know what the process is like. Similarly, having a set process helps us internally to keep variance between candidates down to a minimum, to ensure equal opportunity employment.
Excepting all of the internal activity, you can expect to submit your application, have some short exchanges with a manager or director via email or phone, and have to do two interviews in total.
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We process applications in batches, where there will often be a week heavy with screening, and another one heavy with interviews, and so on. If you’ve applied near the start or end of a batch, you’ll typically be told that’s the case after screening, during the scheduling of the first interview.
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In this step, you submit your application. This application should include a CV and a Cover Letter. Multiple things will happen internally before you ever proceed to the next step.
Your CV will be looked at by a manager. The purpose of this step is to immediately filter out applications that are highly unlikely to be suitable. We want our business employees to be interested in the technical aspects of what we do, since you will need to be able to answer (or at least know how to get the answer to) technical questions. As such, we’ll be looking for any indicators that you’ll be able to perform your position, and that you’ll proactively reach out and learn what you need to perform your position well on the technical side.
Note, however, that we do not consider education and certifications as a good measurement of ability. We don’t care about who signed your papers, we care about what you can do, and how well you can do it. We care about your motivation and your ability and willingness to learn. We would rather hire someone with an unrelated psychology degree that helped an agriculture innovator go to market than hire someone with all the perfect certifications for what we do.
Since this step is used to quickly filter out people with no real interest on the field as a whole, even having a single thing that stands out can often be sufficient. Your ultimately goal for this stage (and thus on your CV) is to show that you’re worth talking to or interviewing, not to convince us that you’re the best candidate (that’s what the interviews are for).
After the initial filtering step, your cover letter will be looked at. In the cover letter, we will be looking for confirmation as to what stood out, and for confirmation that you’re interested. If you’ve read this page, you can talk about what you think of the interview process, as one example, since that demonstrates that you were interested enough in the position to click on the link leading here and read this far in!
Besides that, we will be looking for a context for your CV. What your aspirations are in the short and long term, how did you get to this point in your career, and what part of what we do is interesting to you.
At this stage, it’s important to be honest about these things. If your cover letter is being read, you are very likely to get the interview already. If we only see an attempt to sell yourself, then that might make us reconsider continuing the process, and if we find discrepancies between your cover letter and later interviews, it won’t be seen well. We want to work with people, not positions, and the cover letter is your very first opportunity to introduce yourself to us.
There is, additionally, one eliminatory thing you could do, and that is use AI to write your application or cover letter. This type of AI usage goes against our AI Usage Policy, and if you can’t write your cover letter to introduce yourself without AI, we cannot trust you to be able to follow the policy once you’re a part of Batvoice.
Once you’re past the Screening step (which is expected to take up to a week), the manager handling your application will either email you (to the email you provided, one way or the other, which is mandatory) or will call you (about 15m, only if you included your phone number, which is optional). This will be an opportunity to ask for clarifications with regards to your CV and Cover Letter, and potentially schedule the first interview.
Once you’re past the Screening step (which is expected to take around a week), the Engineering Manager handling your application will either email you (to the email you provided, one way or the other, which is mandatory) or will call you (about 15m, only if you included your phone number, which is optional). This will be an opportunity to ask for clarifications with regards to your CV and Cover Letter, and potentially schedule a technical interview.
The first interview is done with a member of our Engineering department, and seeks to establish the following things: