Interviews

Once you’re all settled and you understand how everything works, you might start feeling an urge to share Manas with others. When that happens, you can start to help with bringing people as great as you to the team by involving yourself in the interview process.

As you can probably imagine, our hiring process is not exactly traditional. We get candidates as usual: getting an email to jobs@manas.com.ar or we find them through online searches. But after that, it’s pretty different. We don’t usually send out postings with “semi-senior programmer wanted with minimum three year experience in Java. UML basics appreciated”.

We’re always looking for the next perfect person to hire. The catch is that we do not exactly know how to find them by a list of skills or experience. That’s where you come in.

The interview process is simple: if a candidate calls to us or is recommended by someone, we start on an initial interview which hopes to rule out serial killers, minors and ABAP programmers (although not necessarily in that order). If that goes well, we perform a simple at-home technical evaluation to gauge what their technical level is.

When that’s done, we arrange interviews with several members of the team who want to take part - here’s where you can join in. Even though we share a core set of ideals and methods, the interviews themselves don’t have a specific format and everyone is free to find their own style. The point is to find out if the interviewee shares Manas’ set of values, is smart and fits in with the kind of work we do.

Remember where we kicked off: you should focus on discovering the candidate’s values. The only way to guarantee that the paths we take will be positive to the majority is by hiring people who share our values. A simple, yet effective, way to find someone’s values is to ask them about their life altering decisions: why did they study what they did? Why did they decide to move? Why do they want to switch jobs?

Once the interview process is over, everyone involved has to decide between “YES HIRE” or “NO HIRE”. We know that sometimes you will not be entirely sure, or you might prefer to defer the decision to somebody else. That counts as a “NO HIRE”. We don’t want to take any chances, if the candidate wasn’t great, then it’s better to keep looking. Ultimately, the team will suffer much more from hiring a wrong candidate than from losing a good one. For the record, if you are hesitant then it’s a NO HIRE.

If you think the candidate should be hired, then you should include in your response the salary you believe is appropriate for the candidate. If you are having a hard time deciding on a number, check the current salary list and try to find something appropriate by adjusting it in relation to the people you would consider his or her peer. The offer we make is the best one we can make, and therefore, final; don’t lower your offer to negotiate later, and don’t push the offer over what you think is right just because you really want them to accept. Salaries are internally visible and the candidate will face an awkward situation if they end up above their peers. And anyway, the review process in six months time will end up adjusting the salaries.

Should everyone agree to hire them, en email with an offer will be sent to the candidate. The offered salary will be the average of everyone’s suggestion. If they take it, ask for a copy of this manual and hand it to them on their first day of work. Congratulations, you’ve now closed the loop!

“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said. ‘One can’t believe impossible things.’
I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
— Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.