The Interview Process: What to Expect When You Apply to YLD

The Interview Process: What to Expect with YLD

Interviews. Some people hate them, some people thrive in them. One thing we know though is they are part of working life. Most of us — if not all of us — have been through a couple of hiring processes. It’s a mandatory step to get that dream job we have been hunting for a while. However, we also know that recruitment is often a grey area which generates a lot of doubts and uncertainty.

Keeping that in mind, we thought it might be useful to do a breakdown of our full hiring process and share what to expect at each step of the way. Thus, we could give you a pleasant experience when you apply to our team.

We try to keep it short, fast and straight-forward. At YLD we advocate the three-day rule which means our Talent Team will reach out to you in 72 hours maximum and we try to complete the process within two weeks. Needless to say, we keep everyone in the loop throughout this journey. Our candidate’s hiring experience and time is something we take very seriously.

Finally, our hiring process is entirely remote which means our contact points will be mainly through video calls (Zoom).

Time to dive into our process now!

Step 1: Getting Started: Sending Us your Application

To start you can search our ‘join us’ page which is always up to date. There you will find all of our current job openings. The next step is really easy, you just need to click at the “apply for this job” button and submit your application. Right after that, you will receive an application confirmation email.

If, for any reason, you don’t find an open position that suits you, but you would like to know if anything comes up, just drop us a line (talent@yld.io) and we’ll be sure to update you.

Step 2: First “Hello World”

Offering a pleasant and “human” experience during our recruitment process is something we pride ourselves on. That’s why we will always get back to you promptly after receiving your application — even if we decide not to progress with you this time. Meaning: you are going to get a response from us no matter what. We don’t like to leave people guessing about why we may not have moved forward with them.

Step 3: Screening Call

In the screening call stage, we will have our first one-to-one chat. Normally, this will take anywhere between 30 to 60 minutes, depending on the role.

Actually, there is something important to mention here. Although we have a bunch of structured questions to ask you, we always try to conduct this chat in a friendly and informal way. This means that some conversations may last a bit longer than others but that’s completely fine.

During this call, we will provide you with all the information about YLD, our services and our team. We will also take time to talk in more detail about each step of the recruitment process to clarify any doubts you may have about it.

Our main purpose during the first screening call is for us to assess all need-to-know information and to gain a better understanding of who you are, such as:

• Your experience/knowledge
• Your soft skills & personal traits
• If you are aligned with our YLD culture and if you feel YLD is a good fit for you

Follow-up. Follow-up. Follow-up. After the screening call, we will follow-up with you within 1–2 days. Even if we haven’t reached a decision yet, we will let you know we are working on it.

Step 4: Take-Home Challenge

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If you are successful through the screening call, we will send you what we call a take-home challenge, our first technical assessment.

Here we’d like you to complete a short programming exercise in JavaScript. By short we mean it shouldn’t take longer than an hour to complete.

The goal of this third step is to see your ability to solve an algorithmic problem. Here we want to understand how it is you tackle the problem at hand, your testing approach, what kind of good practices you apply and to catch a glimpse of your technical skills.

It’s important to mention that you just need to follow our requirements and present a functional solution. Don’t worry — there’s no cryptic puzzle to solve!

When we get your exercise back, our team will take anywhere between 1–3 days to do the review.

Step 5: Pair Programming Session

Our last technical step it’s a remote pairing exercise. This entire session will take around an hour and a half (no longer!).

For the first 45 minutes, you are going to have a virtual “sit-down” with two YLD engineers and just do some “pair” programming. Here we want to get a feel about how you work and simulate what a typical work day would look like.

The main purpose of this step is to see how you approach an unknown problem in real-time using the best practices of software development. As well as that we will be assessing your technical skills, critical thinking and problem-solving abilities.

During the pairing, you’ll share your screen with us, and will be asked to talk out loud as you’re writing the solution as much as possible, so we understand how you are thinking.

The remaining 45 minutes will be used to ask some questions about the take-home assignment and have a Q&A session for both sides.

Don’t worry about being nervous. We know that during this kind of situation sometimes we have some mental blocks and we get stuck. Our engineers will be there to help and nudge you if needed.

Step 6: Offer / No offer

If you’ve made it to this stage that means that you’re getting close to an offer.

What a journey, huh? This is the last step. Basically, once you have finished all the stages, our team will come together to make the final decision. This is always a challenging moment for us but, again, we try to be as fast as possible in getting back to you to provide feedback, no matter what decision was taken.

Even though we can’t hire every candidate who applies to YLD, for us it’s essential to create a good relationship with all the people we talk to and keep in touch for future opportunities if this one doesn’t progress. So we hope, even if this time it’s not for you, you don’t mind if every now and then we check in on you and say hello.

At YLD we are constantly looking for new teammates to join us both in Portugal and London. We are hiring right now and would love to hear from you. Have a look at our current open positions and get in touch!