Transcript
Alicia Collymore: I'm Alicia. I'm an engineering manager at incident.io. We build incident management software, that means waking you up when something goes wrong and giving you the tools that you need to solve that problem quickly. I've spent about 15 years in tech, 5 of those have been in leadership roles, in management roles. As a manager, hiring is very important to me. The things I care about most is having a happy team that are delivering value. That means working quickly and efficiently, and ensuring that there are growth opportunities for everybody, and that people are enjoying work, even when things are a little bit challenging.
Cultural Alignment
A big part of making that work is hiring the right people into your teams, and that's what I'm going to be talking about, hiring for cultural alignment. When hiring in tech, generally, we want to make sure that people have enough technical depth, can write code well, and have enough relevant experience. We also care about that person fitting in, not just socially, but culturally. This means they have shared beliefs, values, and practices.
Over the last few years in tech, culture has become a big topic of conversation. This track is about culture. It's something that we care about. Let's dive a little bit deeper into the what's and why's of culture. There are many things that make up culture. Some are very tangible, and some are more elusive, a little bit more vibes-based. Values are about having a shared understanding of what is valued in a company. For example, some businesses value design and user experience. Others care more about performance and reliability. Beliefs could be seen as collective understandings held by the company, work, or people. This can be a belief in mission, or even leadership approaches.
A person who believes in transparency is going to fare a lot better at a company that believes in the same thing. Attitudes are more personal and individual, but when shared across a significant group of people, they can become a crucial component to culture. This might manifest as a get shit done type of attitude, or maybe a level of curiosity that the team has and shares. Behaviors are typical ways that we all interact as humans, communicate, conduct ourselves generally. Are you a social company? Are you remote first? How do you operate generally? What are your shared behaviors? Lastly, practices. This can be formal or informal processes, policies, traditions that you have that reinforce your culture. This could be operating in scrum versus Kanban, or maybe regular team lunches and drink after work. All of these things and more make up the culture of the company. Why is it important that we have cultural alignment? Making sure you have cultural alignment has a lot of benefits, both to the business and to individuals. People who have the same values and working styles collaborate more effectively as a team.
Being aligned on expectations you have on things like quality, speed, processes generally leads to fewer conflicts within teams. Engineers who align with the team culture generally report a higher job satisfaction. This leads to better retention, happy people, and increased productivity. Teams with compatible working styles work better together. They make decisions faster. They challenge each other more freely. Businesses using culture as a key hiring strategy report a 23% faster growth in profit. Lastly, scaling. As engineering teams grow, we often lose that thing that makes us productive early on. Having a clear culture makes it easier to maintain those ways of working as you grow. Ultimately, culture isn't about being pleasant to work with, it's about fundamental alignment on how and why work gets done. For engineering teams specifically, cultural misalignment often manifests as disagreements about things like technical approaches, quality, standards, or general processes, rather than things like personal conflict.
When we think about culture in hiring, we typically have a separate interview for this. It's slapped on the end of an interview process. This interview is normally a series of questions or discussion points where the goal is to understand if this person is a good fit, a good culture add. It's normally based off company values, which are a set of principles that guide an organization's actions and decision makings, essentially the culture of that company.
Most commonly, managers, leadership, founders are the ones that carry out these interviews. The people whose role it is to make sure that teams are working effectively and delivering value to the business, which makes sense for this interview. However, we also have a bunch of other stages in our processes where we can get a sense of cultural alignment early on. We can get that from folks who are the heart and soul of culture, our engineers. Today, that's what we'll be focusing on, assessing culture within technical interviews. I hope that by the end of this talk, you'll be able to identify relevant cultural attributes, understand how to spot and assess those within technical interviews, and what that might look like in practice. We'll also have a small recap at the end.
Identifying Attributes
Let's talk about identifying attributes. Before we can assess culture, we need to understand it, and that means looking at where culture is defined for a business. Typically, this is within company values. We also want to understand what end of the spectrum is important in relation to those values, and how to think about culture fit and culture add. Let's talk about company values. Fundamental beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and practices that define a culture within a business. They're normally created pretty early on in a business. They're typically defined by leadership and those working within the business at the time.
Normally, a value session. I don't know if anybody's ever sat through one of those. Perhaps a survey that was sent out to you about what you care about. Company values are almost always shared publicly. You can find them on career pages, about us sections of websites. When you onboard into a company, there is normally an onboarding session, a doc that is shared with you outlining those values. They should be no surprise to anybody. Understanding the attributes of these values is key to being able to assess effectively when interviewing. At incident.io, we share our values loud and proud, and I'm going to be using some of these as examples as we go throughout this talk.
When looking at your company's values, if it's not clear already, try to think of the behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs someone needs to have in order to embody that value. For us, find a way is about being able to navigate uncertainty, having an anything-is-possible attitude. Win together is about operating as a team, celebrating, supporting, and growing together. Raise the pace is about smart and efficient problem-solving to aid efficiency. These are the attributes of these values that we're going to be looking out for. When thinking about values and the attributes that make them up, it's really easy to think in a binary way. You must want to collaborate at all times, or you must want to go fast, but people just don't operate like that. Most people operate on spectrums, and so our values should too. When looking at values and attributes that make them up, we should also be thinking about what that spectrum of behavior is, and, in turn, how much of that do we want and need within our teams and businesses? Let's take raise the pace as an example. Looking at the value and attributes here, we could easily interpret this as maybe fast versus slow, where slow takes maybe six months to deliver a feature, and fast is three days to deliver the same feature.
Ambitious, I know, but people say they can do this. We could think about what good looks like for us on this spectrum. Maybe it's about here. Maybe it's one to two weeks to build out that same feature. When we start to look at the people that we want to hire, we can think about where on the spectrum they might fit, how far or how close they are. Someone who says they can build this feature in three days could probably easily work in an environment where we're building the same thing in one to two weeks, but somebody who thinks and plans in longer time frames, they might struggle to fit in to the culture that you have. Let's take the same value and interpret it in a different way. Let's say we're looking at speed versus quality when we talk about raising pace. Let's say speed means yeeting a feature out with minimal thought and effort, and quality is a thoroughly tested solution with a very sensible rollout plan. Maybe we want to live somewhere in the middle, where we can get a valuable feature delivered quickly, but we're making sensible tradeoffs on speed and quality depending on the feature that we're building.
Someone who normally just yeets something out very quickly might not be used to the thoughtful consideration and processes that it takes to make those tradeoffs. When we talk about values and attributes, it's easy for them to feel personal, and for you to assign your own meaning to them. It's important to make sure there's alignment on exactly what it is meant, and where on the spectrum those focuses should be. When you're talking about pace, are you talking about fast versus slow, or are you talking about speed versus quality? Where on that spectrum do you live, and what do you care about?
We have a good understanding of values and spectrums, what they look like, where they live. We can start to think about the shape of a culture in an org. What type of people make up and define that culture? This is a popular topic, one we've all likely heard a lot about, culture fit and culture add. I think both are important. With culture fit, you can build a hive mind of efficiency, and this is great for getting things done if you can all think and operate in the same way. You are limiting your efforts.
Teams need diversity, different types of thinkings to break bad habits, to let go of restricted thinking, and to bring in new approaches. I think balance is more important. Unless you're cloning your team, it's highly unlikely the culture fit that we all talk about is what we were seeing before. It's probably looking a lot more like this, a balance of values and attributes we care about across teams. People have their strengths and their weaknesses, and it allows for more varied opportunities within your teams, mentorship, allyship. What we're missing are attributes we might need to unlock better ways of working or different views and approaches to problems.
Diverse teams are capable of making better decisions twice as fast as teams that are not. What does that look like? When we're hiring, while we do want to be adding new ways of working to culture, we don't really want to be changing things too much. These additional attributes should be complementary to the current culture. Too much contrast will cause conflict. It's also useful to think about those attributes you might be lacking as a team, and start to intentionally look for those in the people that you're interviewing. To me, this is what culture add looks like.
A lot of this sounds great, but it's almost impossible to think in this way if your company doesn't have defined values. I really hope that all of your companies do, but if you don't, how do you operate with this model? First thing you can do is advocate for values, and you should. This could be talking to leadership or founders, the people team, whoever might be in charge of that area. Explain why you care, why it's important, the benefits it can bring the business. Figure out if there are other people in the company that feel the same as you.
Rally together, write a proposal, get it to the right person. If it's proven challenging or time-consuming to do that, I know if you're working in a big company, there's red tape, there's process, these things take time. Maybe you can operate at a team level, asking your manager maybe to set some team values. Can you align on those and what the attributes look like? If all else fails, try to think about the values and attributes of those in your team and around you. Are they tangible? Are they aligned with the goal and the mission of the business? Talk to others and see if they feel the same way. Share with your team and use that as a base point.
Assessing in Interviews
We know what we're looking for, hopefully. Let's talk a little bit about how we can spot these in an actual interview setting. We'll go back to our interviews. These are common interviews that pop up. Maybe there's a process that has all of them, maybe a process has one of them, but let's talk about how we can find our values in each of them. For a coding challenge, let's imagine this is a live coding environment. This interview is typically led by a senior engineer on the team. In these kinds of interviews, it's really normal to ask a candidate to think out loud and ask any questions that they might have. When we think about our value here, when together, we can start to think about, are they using the team to help unblock them? There's a fine line here, of course, between giving the answer to somebody and guiding them in the right direction.
That's for your interviewers to have a good sense of what good looks like there. Are they asking sensible questions about the problem? It's very reasonable for them to do that. It shows that there's a willingness to work alongside others to solve problems. Interviews are scary and nerve-inducing. Even the best engineers make mistakes. It's not uncommon for people to need a bit of course correcting on these interviews. A good signal for our win-together value is their ability to take that redirection when it's given to them. Do they stop and listen and collaborate with the interviewers to progress, or do they double down on their approach? What values or attributes can you look for in your coding challenges that align with your company values? Let's talk about a technical knowledge interview. These interviews are often question-based, maybe digging deeper into a technical project, maybe a discussion around a take-home task, potentially. This is a great opportunity to ask a lot of why's and how's, almost a perfect place to look for values.
Using raise the pace as an example here, you can explore what fast might look like for this person. How long did the project take? What might they have done to deliver it more quickly? Was there anything that they would change in the project that they've done before? Are they willing to sacrifice quality for speed, and to what extent? These are all questions you can use to dig deeper and deeper to get the signal on values that you need. If you can, tailor your questions to help draw more of that out, without losing the technical signal that is the main point of the interview. However, if you can, reshape your questions to draw out some of that value and culture, you should. Have a little think about what that could look like for you in your technical interviews.
We also have system design. Very common interview. I'm sure we've all gone through them. It's normally a whiteboard session where a candidate builds out some kind of system. Taking our value of make it magic here, what extra detail did they put in that others might have missed? What were they thinking about when they were building this? Who were they thinking about? Were they thinking about the end user? Were they thinking about the developer experience? Question them. Dig into the whys of why have they put this thing here? What would you add? What would you take away? What impact does that have? Maybe you can find a little magic that they've built into this system.
Again, I urge you to take a look at your values and think about your own system design interview and what you might want to draw out. I think it's important to say that interviews are a two-way street. You're not the only one that's being interviewed in this interview. Share context early. Interview guides, values, blog posts, put out as much information as you can so they know what's expected. The person you're interviewing is assessing you too. They're trying to understand if your company is the right place for them. Chances are they're also picking up on signals from you about the culture from the questions that you ask them. Always give candidates opportunity to ask questions at the end of interviews. It's a great way to see what they care about, what they get excited about, and what they're interested in.
Implementation
We've got all these fantastic ideas about what signals to look for and where to look for them, but what does that actually mean in reality? What does that look like in practice? Let's get into some real-world applications. Assessment criteria. Assessment criteria for interviews can be super helpful in guiding you on expectations. These can be attached to specific questions within your interview or maybe stages of the interview. Be specific as you can be here to help interviewers. What skills or ways of thinking are you looking for? What type of attitude are you looking for? What value does that align to within your company's values? Lastly, what does good look like here? Ensure each interview has a clear assessment criteria. You'll find that your interviewers will be much more aligned on what you're looking for as a team, as a business, both technically and culturally.
If this isn't something that you already have, then it's time to advocate for it. Put together a proposal, share it with your talent team, with leadership. Make it clear why this is important and how it can bring you some cultural alignment into your teams. If you can't do it at that level, we'll go back down to the team level. If you're hiring for a specific team, is this something that you can align with together? Can you get your manager to put this together? Can you work together as a team to lay out your criteria? If you can't manage to get those bigger initiatives over the line due to red tape or whatever reason, write it up for yourself. Share it with a few people in the team and the company. Get input, adapt it, and evolve it. Maybe this is something that you can help grow organically.
Interview debriefs. If you're not having interview debriefs, you should be. Debriefs involve everyone that took part in the interview process, getting everyone in a room and discussing their performance throughout the process. Where did they do well? Where are the areas that they might need to improve? Where were their spikes? These give hiring managers the chance to dig deeper on feedback given throughout the interview process. Interviewers have a chance to advocate for that person to say, actually, I think this person would be great here and we should hire them and this is why. Bring up the attributes that shed light on culture. Bring up any reservations that you might have. In practice, debriefs are a company-wide type of thing. We're talking about engineering here, but there are other departments in companies. This is something that you will have to, again, advocate for, write a company-wide proposal, and try to get debriefs put into your interview process.
Aside from org changes, you can share additional thoughts with the hiring manager, especially if your process isn't set up to evaluate those cultural attributes. Sharing the signal you picked up on the interview can be incredibly helpful. You might be able to shed some light on something that someone has missed. Most interviewers are going to be looking at the technical details here and not the cultural details. If you can share some additional information on cultural attributes to your hiring manager, it can be incredibly useful. Lastly, be loud. Be as loud as you can about the culture that you're building and what you care about. Showcase your engineer. Showcase ways of working, company values. You can help candidates do some early evaluation on you. Maybe they watch my podcast and they're like, I don't really want to work like that. That's fine. We've just saved everybody a bunch of time. Fantastic. Maybe they read an engineer showcase and think, "That sounds right up my street. I'd love to work there". Great. Come and let's have a chat. Be as loud as you can and share as early as you can. How to do that? It's quite easy. LinkedIn, blog posts, talk about what you care about. Talk about it often, loudly, on Twitter, wherever it is that you live on the internet, share it.
Recap
What are your company values and what are the attributes that make them what they are? Think in spectrums. What is the spectrum that you care about for each value? Where does that sit with your cultural plans? What wiggle room are you willing to give? Think about culture fit, balance, additions to the team that they might need. Work on getting assessment criteria set up for each interview. Align them to your values. Discuss any cultural signal you get in debriefs. Give room for discussion. Candidates can show you a lot about what they value if you're listening. Set candidates up for success with interview pre-reads. Ensure your interviews are aligned to that. Talk publicly as much as you can stomach about the type of culture you have and what you're trying to build.
Questions and Answers
Participant 1: Do you think that companies actually do have fixed values at all, or are they in actual fact just malleable things that go with the individual people that work there? I'm just thinking back to 2008 when I worked for a company and they had very strong company values. Said, "People are our greatest asset. Cultural diversity is our greatest strength". After the credit crunch, it turned out the bottom line was actually their most important asset. Then in the current day, we've got this woman, I think it's Meta, isn't it? They had a cultural value of DEI. As soon as Donald Trump says otherwise, they don't have the cultural value of DEI. You think if the people who are at the company are maybe the ones that actually have the cultural values, and if they go, what happens to that culture?
Alicia Collymore: You have to try and rebuild it, and reset. Ultimately, culture isn't a sticky thing. We're humans. It's going to grow and adapt. The more people you bring into a company, the more it's going to grow and adapt. I think as leaders, you need to think about what company it is that you're trying to build. When you're hiring, think about that. We can't control what happens above us, but we can do the best for the roles and decisions that we're making.
I think if you do have the hiring power and you are somebody that is able to make a hiring decision, then that's something that you should think about. What do you need in your team? Like I said earlier, what is it lacking? What can you add? That might mean that your culture evolves and changes over time. It's going to have to as the business grows. How you operate as a startup cannot be how you operate as a 200-, 300-, 400-person company. It's just going to be different and adapt. I think it's important to know that culture changes. It changes here in London. London isn't what it was 10 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago. I think that's just the nature of culture.
Participant 2: If you didn't inherit a team as a manager that you didn't do hiring decisions for, and there's clearly a culture that is aligned with the rest of the company, but someone made a bad hiring decision, or something went wrong along the way, is that something recoverable? What's your view on that?
Alicia Collymore: I think it's down to the manager. A big part of culture is who you hire, but also who you fire. If there is somebody that is not doing well in the company, I'm sure they're not happy either. I think it's time to have an honest conversation with that person about, does this make sense? At Incident, we like to move fast. We like to ship things quickly. That doesn't lend well to somebody who likes lots of detail and big processes. Engineers that work like that and join our company don't do very well. Those engineers do fantastic in other companies. I think it's just about trying to find the right fit for the right person. I think as a manager, especially if you have that power to guide and mentor that person to help make the right decision for them as well as the business as well.
Participant 3: If you're pulling culture forward in the interview process, do you have any advice or guidance on what the ideal final stage interview where you've got those senior stakeholders, what are the things that you think are great to build into that final stage?
Alicia Collymore: We still have a final stage culture interview. I think that is still very important, where you sit down for an hour and you dig into stuff and you talk about stuff. My point is that it doesn't have to be the only time you get signal on culture. Especially when it comes to the engineers carrying out the interviews, they're going to be working with this person. They're going to have a good understanding of what it's like to pair program with them or to have a technical conversation. Does it feel right? Does it make sense? Do you feel like, yes, this person, I can imagine them sitting next to me in a few weeks' time just cracking on with some work. Or does it feel like there's a sense of conflict? What is that? Why is that? Those are the kinds of discussions that you should be having in that debrief meeting. A culture interview is still very important. Don't get rid of it. You can look for more signal along the way.
Participant 4: By nature of an interview, it's artificially more intense. Do you ever find people basically give you the answers you want, and even on a cultural level, almost say the things you're looking for? Then in reality, it's very different on how they work. Do you have any advice on that?
Alicia Collymore: We had this last year, actually, our hiring manager interview, which is more of like a ways of working. It was kind of cultural. It was like, tell me a time where you've worked on a project, and you've done your best work. Talk me through that. We'd ask a bunch of follow-up questions. It's really easy to pick the one time you did the perfect thing in the perfect way, and talk about it really authentically. We changed our interview process completely to be much more scenario-based. You can look at what somebody has done by reading their CV or talking about it at another time, maybe.
To understand a way a person thinks is quite different. We changed one of our interview processes. We don't have a hiring manager interview process. We call it a product delivery interview, where you go through scenarios, and we ask you questions. How would you pick out a feature? What would you do with this? What would you do with that? Sometimes we ask, do you have an example of a time that you have done that to back up what they're saying and their ways of thinking? We try to change our process to look more about ways of thinking rather than like, give me the one time you did the one great thing. Not an easy thing to do.
Participant 5: I'm quite interested in the idea of the assessment criteria. How often do you review it? Especially you mentioned there, culture is malleable, as the people that are in, the people that are out. How often, once a year, once every couple of years that you're thinking about?
Alicia Collymore: We don't actually have a set cadence for this. We're still quite a young company. We're only 4 years old. However, we do review it when interviews are feeling off, when we're feeling like pass rates are low, or maybe pass rates are high, but they're failing at later stages. Then it's time for us to sit down and think, where's the problem? Is it in our criteria? Is it in our assessment? Is it somewhere else? That's the time where we'll normally sit down and look at it. We wait for signal, essentially.
Participant 6: One of the things you started talking about is when you have a culture and you want to introduce change because you don't want to have an echo chamber of ways of thinking. What are the warning signs that you're at that stage and you need to look for to expand the team and change it a little bit?
Alicia Collymore: I think you should always be looking for it. I don't think there are any clear warning signs. I'll be making something up if I did say something, but I think it's just more about when you are interviewing somebody and you see something that you're not used to, thinking, can that be useful in my team? Who in my team doesn't think like that? Do we want that type of thinking here? I think for every candidate that you interview, it's a question that you should be asking yourself.
Participant 7: I want to zoom in on the debrief session a little bit. Specifically, how do you handle disagreements? To give an example, I remember sitting in a debrief where two people were saying like, yes, this guy was kind of a jerk. He was so clear, so direct, so obvious, I would love to work with him. How do you handle a situation like that?
Alicia Collymore: Ultimately, you need to know who the decision maker is and that everybody else is there to give their input. There is only one decision maker, and that is the hiring manager, normally. I think it's up to the hiring manager to take what they need to dive deeper into those disagreements and ultimately make the best decision they can off the back of it. Something that we do at Incident is like, we want somebody to advocate for that person. If everybody is just like, sure, and no one's really excited about them, whereas if there's somebody that's like, "No, I really want to work with this person. Why aren't we hiring them", and getting annoyed about it? Then that's like, we'll take more consideration and be like, ok, cool. Then if there is that disagreement where someone really feels strongly, "Yes, we should hire them". The other person's like, "That guy's an absolute jerk. Why would we even talk to them?" Then it's absolutely fine to jump on a call with that person and dive deeper. Jump on a call with that candidate and be like, "Team really loved you, but we got some signal on this, this, and this. Let's talk about it a bit more". We're just humans and conversations are ok, and we can continue to talk after an interview process is done.
Participant 8: Do you have any way of calibrating this process? I remember reading something many years ago now. I think it was Google. They cross-referenced how well people did in the interview with how well they performed once they were in your company, and found essentially zero correlation. I just wondered if you did any calibration.
Alicia Collymore: No, we've done no calibration. That's a good idea. Maybe something we can look at. I imagine Google have a lot more data to go off than we do right now. It will probably be a lot more useful for them than us. Food for thought.
Participant 9: In terms of like, because you're hiring individuals and different people will offer different things to the culture, so maybe you're interviewing two people. This guy, yes, he fits the culture, but perhaps we've got too many of this person already. Then this guy, he's a bit awkward, but actually, we need that character. How do you manage that kind of problem in terms of deciding, he or she fits our culture, but perhaps that's not what we're looking for. How do you move along in that path and try and decide how that works?
Alicia Collymore: We could only hire one of these fake people, yes. I think culture is very important, but if somebody can't come in and do the job, then that is something that you need to think about quite seriously. You need to set people up for success. If you're like, this person is going to have the right attitude and get along great with everybody, but they're going to be really slow technically, and they're going to struggle, like, "Do I have the support to give them to make sure they succeed?" If you do, then great, bring them on board. If you don't, then like, is it the right place for them? Maybe it's like, I think you should spend a bit of time in your company, maybe come back to us in a year. These are the areas that we think you could improve on. I think it's about understanding the strengths, weaknesses of a team, what your team needs. It's not like a binary decision.
Participant 10: Do you share the feedback with the person that you're interviewing? At what level do you share if you do share?
Alicia Collymore: We share as much feedback as we can with that candidate about where they failed, what stage, and why, and where they could potentially look to level up in the future. Sometimes they ask to jump on a call, we have a further discussion with them. Just because you're not hiring that person doesn't mean that you can't contribute to their growth outside of your company. It's important to do that, because maybe that person spends a couple years in another company and becomes a sick engineer and wants to come and have another chat with you. What goes around comes around.
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