If you’re applying (or thinking of applying) for an engineering 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 engineering manager or director via email or phone, go through a technical interview with an engineering director, and finally go through an HR and culture fit interview with our CEO.

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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 Technical Interview.

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Screening

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.

First CV Glance

Your CV will be looked at by an actual engineer. The purpose of this step is to immediately filter out applications that are highly unlikely to be suitable. The goal here is going to be to make your CV stand out. Here are the things that will be looked at:

• Your vocational experience. You do not need to have a set amount of years of experience to land a position at Batvoice, but having those is one way to get past this step.
• Your personal projects / open source experience / portfolio. For example, if you link a public code forge account (such as Github), it will be looked at. If there is anything of note there, even if they’re abandoned projects (though vaporware doesn’t count: there needs to have actually been some work done), or even minor contributions to projects of note, you will have gotten past this step.
• Your personal journey. Did you go to school in multiple different countries? Perhaps you’ve worked on several different continents? Standing out as a person is a good way to get through this stage.
• Your interests. People that are going to be good engineers often care about more than the specific things they work with. Mentioning technologies you genuinely enjoy using, think are cool, or would like to work with — but that most people wouldn’t be familiar with — is a great way to immediately stand out, and move on to the next stage.

Note that missing from this (and future) list(s) is education and certifications. We don’t care about who signed your papers, we care about what you can do, and how well you can do it. We would rather hire someone with an unrelated psychology degree that built an algebraic effects programming language runtime (real example) than hire someone with all the perfect certifications for what we do, but no way to check the quality of their work.

These criteria are used to quickly filter out people that have little interest in the field, and as such, even having a single thing that stands out can often be sufficient. At this stage, the goal is to pass the filter, signalling that you are worth interviewing, not necessarily convincing us that you’re the best candidate (that’s what the interview is for).

CV & Cover Letter Review

Once there’s some level of confidence that you may be a candidate worth interviewing, your application will be handed over to one of our Engineering Managers or Directors (at the time of writing, this will typically be @Chloé Vulquin, our COO/Director of Operations, who is also an open source contributor).

Before proceeding with the CV, your cover letter will be read. It will be used to establish a context for your CV, as well as for your aspirations in the short and long term. It’s important to be honest about what you’re looking for, not only sell yourself in it. Employment is a two way street, and it is as much our responsibility to further your career as it is for you to further our agenda.

With your goals in mind, your CV will be carefully examined. We’ll be looking at it with the context of your cover letter, and trying to ensure that everything appears consistent, and reconciling it with our needs, as expressed in the job listing. In particular, we’ll be looking at (in order of weight given):

• Your personal projects / open source experience / portfolio. We’ll be seeing the design decisions and the quality of your code (as well as your commit messages, how well it meshes with the upstream project if there is one, and similar) that you choose to show us. In this case, we’re evaluating your general ability as an engineer, rather than specific action items (are you good at problem solving, or are you good with Postgres databases?).
• Your vocational experience. It’s very difficult to evaluate the quality of your work in this context, so it instead focuses on action items. For example, if you’ve worked with Vue before, chances are you can get working on a Vue codebase immediately here as well. This will also be used to formulate some questions for the actual exchanges you may have with us.
• Your cover letter. Perhaps you’ve written a dissertation on database systems, but so far you haven’t been able to use those skills vocationally. Perhaps you contribute to open source projects under a pseudonym that you don’t want associated with yourself. Remember that this is context for your overall application.