Interviewing at CareMessage: An Overview
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CareMessage wouldn’t exist without our amazing and talented team members so we work hard to ensure our mission and our values are reflected in our hiring plan. As CareMessage has grown over the years we have spent a lot of time experimenting with and refining our approach to hiring new remote employees. We’ve received feedback from potential candidates and our own employees on how we can improve our process and we’ve worked on redesigning it to reflect that feedback.
My name is Aareet Shermon — I’ve been with CareMessage since 2014 and in my time here I have seen an unwavering dedication to fairness in our approach to hiring and onboarding new team members. In my role as Engineering Manager, I’m responsible for constantly evaluating and improving the interview and onboarding experience for those interested in working with us. Most importantly, our mandate is to be respectful of the time candidates invest in interviewing with us, to minimize bias in our evaluation of candidates and to offer an equitable opportunity to applicants from underrepresented backgrounds.
In this blog post, I’ll provide an overview of our interview stages so that you, as an applicant, can gain a better understanding of what to expect when you begin to interview at CareMessage. I’ll also provide some context to our interview pipeline so you can better understand why we made the choices we did in designing it this way.
Photo by Mikito Tateisi on Unsplash
Interview Steps
We have organized our interviews into a standardized pipeline of steps that we follow regardless of the role, department or level associated with the position you are interviewing for. Our structured approach attempts to mitigate bias and ensure a fair evaluation for all our candidates.
- Resume Review — Our process begins when we first receive your application. Each job has a hiring manager who is responsible for reviewing resumes that are submitted to us. The hiring manager looks through your resume for the required skills that are described in the job description. We don’t have any hidden requirements or “nice-to-have” checklists that we look at when reviewing resumes — at this stage, we are only screening for relevant experience as described in the public job posting. (You can find our open roles here)
- Preliminary Interview — Once you’ve passed the resume review stage, we schedule a preliminary call with the hiring manager to discuss your interest in the position you’ve applied to, learn more about your work experience and your interest in our mission. We also save some time to answer your questions about the company, the role or the next steps. Note that if you have applied to a management position, you may do an additional interview at this stage.
- Technical Stage or Case Study — Depending on the role you apply to, this stage can consist of a take-home programming test, a case study or some similar evaluation of your skills. For example, if you’ve applied to a programming position, we may send you a link to a coding test which you can complete on your own time, and at your leisure. The take-home assignment is followed by a video call to discuss your work and ask any follow-up questions. At this stage, you may be interviewed by a peer for your role and if so, you will have an opportunity to ask them questions about their day-to-day experience in the position you’re applying to.
- Behavioral Interview — Once you’ve done the technical interview, you’ll progress to our final stage of interviews. In this stage, you’ll jump on two to four back-to-back video calls to speak with team members who you’re likely to work with frequently and with members of the leadership team. They will ask you questions to better understand your alignment with our values, how you like to work, your experience dealing with difficult workplace situations and your ambitions for your future. You may be asked the same question twice because we hire by a committee and we like to see each interviewer’s interpretation of your response. This is our final stage of interviews.
- Reference Check — We finalize our interview process with a reference check. We’ll ask you for contact information for two to three references who can speak to your previous work and values.
- Final Decision — Once the reference checks are complete, we are able to make a final decision. In order to ensure equity and fairness in compensation across our diverse team, we have defined a series of non-negotiable compensation bands based on the levels in our career ladder. The career ladder serves as a canonical reference for each level of career development that is possible in your time at CareMessage. Once we make a decision on your level in the career ladder, the hiring manager will provide a written offer letter and will set up a call to discuss the other benefits we offer. You can expect this follow-up within 3–5 days of the Reference Check stage.
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Design Considerations
Next, I’ll describe some core considerations that went into the creation of our hiring plan, so you may understand the context behind our design choices.
- Elimination of Interviewer Bias — We ask a standard set of questions to all candidates at each interview stage to attempt to eliminate bias in our hiring decisions. This may differ from interviews at other organizations who prefer a conversational style of interview. In our experience, conversational style interviews are inconsistent in the answers they elicit from candidates and result in variability in responses. It becomes very difficult to evaluate two candidates for the same position when they have had inconsistent conversations with two different interviewers. To some candidates, our approach may seem a bit robotic but we have found that it is the best way to ensure candidates from underrepresented backgrounds have an equal opportunity to speak to their skills and experience without relying on each individual interviewer’s conversational ability.
- Diversity and Inclusion — Diversity has been a core value at CareMessage since our founding. In order to most effectively serve our customers, we believe that our team needs to be representative of the target population we are trying to help. We try to ensure that candidates of all backgrounds feel comfortable applying to our open positions and feel welcome throughout our interview process. We conduct interview training for all interviewers to ensure they follow the same procedures when conducting interviews. When creating job postings we try to ensure we use inclusive language in our descriptions of the ideal candidates for our roles. We source candidates from job boards focused on applicants from underrepresented backgrounds, in an effort to increase the diversity of our candidate pool. We try to ensure diversity in our team of interviewers to ensure candidates have an opportunity to speak with team members who may share their own background.
- Time to Decision — A major focus of our design (and of our remote work ethic in general) is to ensure constant and speedy communication with candidates so we may arrive at a decision efficiently. We do our best to respond to questions from candidates as soon as we can. We revert with decisions on next steps within 72 hours of an interview whenever possible. We schedule time blocks in interviewer calendars to ensure candidates can schedule an interview as soon as they are available. In this way, we attempt to ensure a smooth, efficient and fair interview process for all applicants.
I hope that this post provides an informative overview and some meaningful context of our interview pipeline. In essence, we are attempting to design a hiring process that reduces interviewer bias, welcomes diversity in our organization and minimizes uncertainty for candidates interviewing with us. There is, of course, always room for improvement in our approach and we will continue to refine and improve it based on our own investigation and the feedback we receive from applicants and employees. If you ever have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask your hiring manager.
Good luck in your search and thank you for considering CareMessage!
P. S. Do you like what you see? Check out our open positions at: https://caremessage.org/careers