You’ve landed a job interview at Qumulo. So now what?
We rely on an interviewing framework that helps us assess each candidates’ technical and leadership skills. The framework also focuses on enabling each candidate to show off their best qualities and learn a lot about Qumulo, our culture, our product and a lot more. For engineering candidates, here’s what you can expect on an interviewing loop.
First, you will be assigned a special Qumulo ambassador, who provides an overview about our products, our company and whatever else you want to know. We often try to map ambassadors with specific skills or areas of expertise that our candidates have expressed an interest in prior to the interview.
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Second, you can expect to meet with several different team members over the course of the day – each one assigned to ask a technical question as well as probe on a few leadership attributes we look for when hiring.
You’ll note that Olivier is assigned to assess the candidate’s design skills along with how collaborative he or she is. Similarly, Neal will be conducting a laptop coding exercise and assessing the candidate’s problem-solving skills. One slot is dedicated just to leadership attributes. In this example, I am taking on that role. In addition, every technical interview will assess the candidate on as many of the technical traits that we discussed earlier.
As you can see, one of our technical interviews is conducted on a laptop. This helps us assess how comfortable the candidate is in using his or her tools: IDE, debugger, command line and so on. It is important to note that we are not assessing how adept you are in a particular IDE or language. We always recommend that candidates use tools and languages that they are very familiar with, and the tools they use have no bearing on the outcome of the interview.
The Evaluation
We assess each of the attributes – both technical and leadership – using well-defined guidelines and a scorecard. For example, when assessing a candidate’s code cleanliness and quality we will evaluate those based on these guidelines.
It is worth noting that our leadership questions are all behavioral interview questions, which typically take the form of “Tell me about a time you did/demonstrated XYX”. Similar to technical attributes, we do have guidelines helping us assess a candidate’s strength across each of the leadership attributes we care about. Generally speaking, a good response provides context about the situation, describes what the candidate did, why she did it as well as results or lessons she learned.
The Debrief
After the interview loop, we schedule a debrief that includes all the interviewers, the hiring manager, and the recruiter to make a hire/no-hire decision. Our process involves making a decision on the candidate’s technical and leadership aptitude. If we believe the candidate demonstrated sufficient skills across both sets of attributes, we extend an offer!
Interested in learning more, and joining the Qumulo team? Check out our open positions here!
