The reality is that hiring documents are always going to be living things, because you emphasize different things as you learn more, as the organization changes, and as the business is in different phases. It's important to me to know that there will be a 2023 revision, there will be a 2024, and so on. It means that we're constantly improving as we learn things and grow the business.

In 2021, we had done portfolio review as a hybrid; some people brought code that was highly relevant, others brought code that wasn’t applicable or they didn’t write themselves, and others weren’t able to bring code at all because it was proprietary. It meant that we had 3 very different potential paths for the interview process, which made it impossible to standardize. So we decided to just call it and say we’re not going to require code and just trust the behavioral interview process.

A lot of times when a hiring philosophy is outlined, it’s basically, “here are all the things we're looking for in a candidate.” And I think that's only part of the equation. We can think a candidate's great, but ultimately a candidate needs to think Reforge is great in order for the process to work, and it has to feel two-sided. And so what we tried to create was, one, the interview process you would want to go through as a current employee, and two, the process you'd put your coworker through. And then three was really avoiding this idea of tripping the person up, or having gotchas or reasons not to hire. One of our big philosophies was by the time someone comes through a screen, by the time they're really through the first round, we have a good amount of conviction, that we think this person's great. And so what we wanna do is look for reasons to hire them, not reasons to not hire them.

This is a metaphor we use all the time at Reforge, coined by our former CTO Matt Greenberg. He goes into it in depth in Reforge’s 

 program, but here’s the TLDR: a rock is a straightforward problem to solve—it’s heavy, and you know how many people you need to move it. But say your friend suddenly asks you to babysit their pet monkey. Where do you begin? What does a monkey even eat? We face a lot of monkey problems in our work, and we need folks on the team who can approach them with a level head and scope them into actionable steps.

Depending on the phase of the business, there’s always a time when only hiring senior engineers makes sense. It took us awhile to get to the place where we had the systems, processes and consistency in place to onboard and retain junior engineers and have it be a great experience for everyone. But once we were ready, it felt like an awesome opportunity to build a pipeline of future in-house talent within Reforge. Junior engineers are really the future of your business, and there are a lot of great effects that come with hiring them. It provides mentorship opportunities for more senior engineers, and it introduces diversity to the team in a different way.

Instead of doing a code review, what we want to do is ask you a lot of details about the technical problems you've solved, and the architecture and scale challenges you faced. It's much more difficult to fake that answer as we dig into the nuance. That signal is actually much better than the signal we got from a code review or simulation. We haven’t hired anyone who we later found out could not write code. Every single person who has gone through this process has been a great engineer who said, “Wow, that was an amazing interview process, and I didn't have to write any code.” And conversely, we've actually been able to eliminate quite a few candidates who weren't qualified because they didn't have the depth on the other end of the spectrum.

Tanya Spivak

Morgan Khodayari

Joyce Jang

Matt Greenberg

Jacob Madden

Trevor White

This hiring philosophy is rooted in the belief that you want to hire a talented engineer AND one who believes your company would be great to join. To create this situation the interview process has to be aligned with how the team would work with their own coworkers. 

Engineering Recruiting and Hiring Philosophy at Reforge

⏰ If you’ve happened to review the 2021 version of SWE recruiting, you’ll notice that the biggest updates in our 

 version reflect our updated interview process, standardized question banks, scoring rubrics and, above all, 

a focus on defining consistent interviewing

. Hiring Philosophy has remained unchanged, and we have made some small tweaks to the section representing our ideal candidate as engineering continues to scale.

In order to hire a great engineer, two things need to happen. 1) We have to decide an engineer is great, and 2) The engineer decides that they want to work with us. It's important to remember at all times that both of these need to be true for us to hire. People often forget the second thing. Ultimately we want to give people an experience like we would our coworkers. You should endeavor to make people feel comfortable and have an opportunity to have success—just like you would a coworker—and then let them work hard for you.

You have to know something important about interviewing: it's significantly less predictive than we want it to be. Things that are particularly flawed in interviews:

Facts that most people would use Google to answer anyway especially about the nuance of a programming language. ("I look up File I/O every time I implement it and I have 20 years of experience")

Github and public coding are filled with false negatives. These sources should be relied only for any positive signal they might provide.

Problems that rely on a single insight to solve ("I know it, this is a dynamic programming problem!")

Algorithmic / LeetCode / trick-questions / puzzles (these also perpetuate a culture in technology of "I had to do it, so I'll pass it along...")

People not researching a company up front and stalking you is not correlated to hiring success and is especially often a false negative. It's on us to get people excited about the mission & vision of the company, and it's important that we take the time to answer everything from why Reforge is exciting, to what our biggest challenges are.

Live coding doesn't approximate working together, always be wary of the signal you get from it.

Employed, passive, senior software engineers often do not have time for take home tests.

"Culture fit" is notoriously bad for building a diverse team.

You focus on the problem you have today, and not on enabling wins towards the problems you have tomorrow.

A good sanity check for an interview process is that you would hire your best peers if you put them through the process.

 interview process for software engineers has a few key qualities:

It helps us find great engineers to add to the team and each additional person we bring on makes the team net better.

It recognizes the limited time you have with a candidate and tries to focus time on most important qualities without repetition.

It errs on the side of reducing friction for qualified, employed candidates to make it through the pipeline.

It focuses on putting the candidate in a position to be their best and feel like they are in a true work environment while challenging them in that scenario.

It feels like a cohesive, honest experience to the person being interviewed such that they can decide if this is a great place for them to work.

It enables the hiring team to know how to best position that person for success in the organization and highlights a route for them to do the best work of their career here.

It enables a diverse and inclusive team that wins more over time by following best practices that minimize unconscious bias.

It focuses on values fit (explained below) and makes sure people will like the climate and environment we work in.

It uses values fit and fundamental competency to help assess potential for long term success instead of immediate success.

We want to try to have a good interview process and avoid outcomes where we waste the time of candidates or interviewers. If we do this well, we are happier and also build an awesome team.

Reforge is a smallish and growing company. Each year it will double or more in size on the engineering side. This year we started with ~20 engineers and plan to end the year around ~50-60. The people we are hiring today will hopefully be the leaders tomorrow. The most important skill we are focused on today is people's potential to tackle hard abstract problems in a high quality way and solve them with a group of other humans.

Our perfect candidate will have experience in a smallish company and a remote situation (so we know that they know what the environment will be like), that they will have worked on an elite team and product (so that they know what great looks like), will have projects they can talk to that are similar to ones we do (web app experiences in content, community, and experiences), have examples of them tackling hard problems as a leader (reducing risks, communicating with teams internally and cross functionally, and bringing good results), will have an eye towards the tradeoffs of pragmatism vs engineering @ scale, will be a thoughtful member of the team with an eye for exceeding expectations (think before they act, go slow to go fast, make things that are awesome), will be level-headed and easy to work with (

know how to convert problems into rocks and not monkeys

, low drama), and will have a growth mindset and desire to do the best work of their career (they'd make for a good Reforge member in addition to joining the team).

 (smallish company, remote, elite team and product), 

 (building a great modern web app, creating a fantastic user experience, building a product that will scale for years to come), and 

 (thoughtful member of the team, great collaborator, often exceeds expectations, easy to work with, and growth mindset).

This profile is an over-fit. No candidate will have every one of these qualities. Therefore they need to have potential in any number of the areas without having that direct experience, but it goes to show how many things can make a hire work or not work for us. In running an interview process, I like to imagine that throughout the process each of the questions will help us assess whether or not someone has the skills and experience to do a thing or the potential to do it. At the end of an interview process we should look at all of the above skills and rate people as to whether they have the skills, have the potential, or don't have the skills or potential. The worst case scenario in an interview is that one or more of the skills we care about we have no signal on. With no signal, we failed as a team to properly interview a person.

As of 2022, we’ve added specialization to the pipeline of Platform Engineering, as we believe the time is right to invest in a small but mighty team that can help scale the next generation of our tools, infrastructure and developer experience. You’ll see that the interview formats and questions are very similar by role, but focus on the nuanced experiences that one would have as a software or platform engineer.

Discovering Great Engineering Talent 🔎

There are five primary funnels in which you source: 1) organic 2) entry level 3) referral 4) sourced 5) agency.

 applications come from ads and our website and flow into the first step of our funnel. These are more often than not unqualified but the better your employer brand and reach the more they'll come in volume and include some qualified candidates. We place ads and have our website (

) where people can apply and we get a steady stream of candidates in this funnel. At least once a week someone in engineering leadership goes through the backlog of candidates there and reviews them for qualification and either rejects or moves them forward.

 applications come in huge volume when open. We hired our first cohort of entry level Reforgers in early 2022, and will likely continue to hire at a cadence of once or twice a year. 

If you truly want to hire a large number of engineers and have a healthy balanced team, hiring high potential entry level engineers is critical.

 The engineers you build, often from internship, become some of the best and most valued members of the team the fastest. Reforge does not differentiate between code schools / bootcamps / 4 year CS degrees for entry level candidates - we encourage candidates to apply regardless of background.

 is an excellent source of candidates. As we discussed above, interviews are an inexact science whereas actual real work experience generally translates from company to company, it's a strong form of pre-qualification. Referrals help drive the company forward and it's great when we can get referrals of high quality people from your past. Referrals are often passive candidates which means they aren't currently looking but are taking the conversation because they are your ex-coworker or friend. The biggest issue with referral is that it often drives less diversity into the pipeline.

 candidates are those that we have reached out to either from engineering or recruiting. While we have no signal that they are qualified, they typically tick at least one of the linked visible boxes above (startup experience, remote experience, remote team and product) and preferably more. Sourced candidates are often passive and we have to work to bring them in, they don't have the benefit of having us pre-qualified by having an ex-coworker or friend working here like a referral. The majority of the candidates in our funnel will likely be sourced until we begin hiring more entry level roles or substantially increase our employer brand with engineers to enable organic.

 candidates are those that are referred to us via a 3rd party recruiting firm that typically has a wide network of candidates. These candidates vary greatly in experience and market fit, especially influenced by how long we've been working with the recruiting partner (the newer the partnership, the more likely candidates are to not check the boxes we are looking for). We typically aim to respond to agency candidates within 24 hours, as many times they are actively job hunting and in other interviews at the same time. This also means that we typically will aim to accelerate interviews for these candidates in a situation where there is time pressure to ensure they have an experience interviewing with Reforge.

In order to go through all of our factors in where we are, what we do, and how we do it; we'll work through primarily a 

For more information on behavioral interviewing, @Matt Greenberg wrote a post about it here: 

https://engineering.creditkarma.com/the-best-predictor-of-future-behavior-is-past-behavior

https://engineering.creditkarma.com/engaging-with-a-candidate

. We will ask some other practical experience questions but try to err on the side of general knowledge and approach vs trivia.

Think context; action; result (CAR). You want to get each of these pieces from an answer and if you don't get them you should follow up and ask.

I and not we; most people get benefit from talking about we as a team and not standing out with the I mindset of what they did. In this interview, though, it matters their behaviors as an individual and not the group. When people say "we" try to understand who was involved and what they did as an individual.

Perfect situations are a bad sign; nothing is perfect and you should have a healthy skepticism of perfect. Dig to understand what didn't work out well, that's where the interesting experiences mostly live.

With behavioral interviewing, the candidate has a better chance of slipping by on charm and nonsense without proper interviewing technique. Interviewers need to be careful with open questions that hint at the answer, i.e. tell me about a time you solved ambiguity by being proactive and taking charge. The candidate needs to be the one talking about the how and the interviewer needs to be the one pressing on the who, what, when, and where in their questions.

When a candidate is doing the majority of the talking, time management becomes critical. In our quest to help candidates show us their best work, we can politely redirect them or change topics in order to maximize time on the topics that give you the most signal out of an interview process. An interview that ends without strong signal is the best way to waste the candidate (and your) time in the process.

Please familiarize yourself with what you can and cannot ask legally.

For more details on interview approach and questions to ask, please refer to the job worksheet and interview process documentation for the specific role.

Engineering Recruiting and Hiring Philosophy at Reforge

Engineering Recruiting and Hiring Philosophy at Reforge

Hiring Philosophy 🤩

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