HOW WE HIRE

Apply

Let us know you’re interested

Find your match

Match your skills and interests to jobs you’re excited about and the problems you want to solve.

Standing out

Focus on your CV/resume, this is the first piece of information we’ll see about you, so highlight your achievements. Here’s how to frame them:

• Align your skills and experience with the job description.
• Be specific about projects you’ve worked on or managed. What was the outcome? How did you measure success?
• If you’ve had a leadership role, tell us about it. How big was the team? What was the scope of your work?
• If you’re a recent university graduate or have limited work experience, include school-related projects or coursework that demonstrate relevant skills and knowledge.
• Keep it short: If there’s additional information (like a portfolio) we need during the hiring process, your recruiter will work with you to collect it.

Interview

How it works

Phone/Skype interviews
During phone or Skype interviews, you’ll speak with a potential peer or manager.

For software development roles, your phone/Skype discussion will last between 30 and 60 minutes. When answering coding questions, you’ll talk through your thought process while writing code in a office 365 doc that you’ll share with your interviewer. We recommend using a hands-free headset or speakerphone so you can type freely.

Your phone interview will cover data structures and algorithms. Be prepared to write around 20-30 lines of code in your strongest language. Approach all scripting as a coding exercise — this should be clean, rich, robust code:

• You will be asked an open ended question. Ask clarifying questions, devise requirements.
• You will be asked to explain it in an algorithm.
• Convert it to workable code. (Hint: Don’t worry about getting it perfect because time is limited. Write what comes but then refine it later. Also make sure you consider corner cases and edge cases, production ready.)
• Optimize the code, follow it with test cases and find any bugs.

For all other roles, your phone/skype discussion will last between 30 and 45 minutes. Be prepared for behavioural, hypothetical, or case-based questions that cover your role-related knowledge.

Onsite interviews
You’ll usually meet with two to four people—some potential teammates and some cross-functional—for about 30 minutes each.

All candidates will have the chance to highlight strengths in four different areas:

• We ask open-ended questions to learn how you approach and solve problems. There’s no one right answer—your ability to explain your thought process and how you use data and experience to inform decisions is what’s most important.
• Leadership: Be prepared to discuss how you have used your communication and decision-making skills to enable others. This might be by stepping up to a leadership role at work or with an organisation, or by helping a team succeed even when you weren’t officially the leader.
• Role-related knowledge: We’re interested in how your individual strengths combine with your experience to drive impact. We don’t just look for how you can contribute today, but how you can grow into different roles—including ones that haven’t even been invented yet!
• Our culture: Share how you work individually and on a team, how you help others, how you navigate ambiguity, and how you push yourself to grow outside of your comfort zone.

For software engineering candidates, we want to understand your coding skills and technical areas of expertise, including tools or programming languages and general knowledge on topics like data structures and algorithms.

There’s generally some back and forth in these discussions, just like there is on the job, because we like to push each other’s thinking and learn about different approaches. So be prepared to talk through your solutions in depth. Push your own boundaries and find the best answer—that’s probably how you work anyway.

Remember to interview us too – Throughout the interview process, feel free to ask your interviewers for clarification to make sure you fully understand their questions. And feel free to put us under pressure too. Ask questions—about the work, about the team, about the culture—that will help you decide whether the job will be right for you.

How to prepare

Interviews for all roles
Here’s our advice to help you be ready for your interview.

• Predict the future: You can anticipate 90% of the interview questions you’re going to get. “Why do you want this job?” “What’s a tough problem you’ve solved?” If you can’t think of any, Google “most common interview questions.” Write down the top 20 questions you think you’ll get.
• Plan: For every question on your list, write down your answer. That will help them stick in your brain, which is important because you want your answers to be automatic.
• Have a backup plan: Actually, for every question, write down THREE answers. Why three? You need to have a different, equally good answer for every question because the first interviewer might not like your story. You want the next interviewer to hear a different story and become your advocate.
• Explain: We want to understand how you think, so explain your thought process and decision making throughout the interview. Remember we’re not only evaluating your technical ability, but also how you approach problems and try to solve them. Explicitly state and check assumptions with your interviewer to ensure they are reasonable.
• Clarify: Many of the questions will be deliberately open-ended to provide insight into what categories and information you value within the technological puzzle. We’re looking to see how you engage with the problem and your primary method for solving it. Be sure to talk through your thought process and feel free to ask specific questions if you need clarification.
• Improve: Think about ways to improve the solution you present. It’s worthwhile to think out loud about your initial thoughts to a question. In many cases, your first answer may need some refining and further explanation.

Decide

About the process

Mitrefinch has a unique hiring process which is usually quick within a few days. We strive to keep you updated, but don’t hesitate to reach out to your recruiter if you have any questions.
And then you get your offer.

In most organisations, you join and still have to prove yourself. At Mitrefinch, we trust in each other and new team members from day one. Welcome aboard.