Scaling a company requires quality in many areas—in the product, customer service, sales—the list goes on. But for us, first and foremost has always been the people that make up these teams and the belief that the rest falls into place after that.

We know that the time leading up to, and during, the interview process can be nerve-wracking and filled with unanswered questions. We don’t want it to be like that. This post was created by our builders team to help lay out a clear picture of our interview process, what kinds of things are important to us, and hopefully answer any questions you may have along the way.

The interview process

Our product is the one thing that every team is focused on in one aspect or another, and a commitment to constantly improving it is one of the most important things we do. Since each engineer on our team makes a real and tangible impact on our product on a daily basis, it’s essential to find people who are the right fit, both professionally and culturally. Our recruitment process is built to ensure that the position, company, and applicant are all a perfect fit.

This can be determined by a number of different factors but the most important things to remember is that there is a method to the process, you can always feel free to ask us questions or for feedback, and to always feel comfortable to be yourself throughout the processes.

So, what should you expect?

1. Phone interview: This initial chat will cover your work experience, goals, and a brief overview of the role we’re looking to fill. The goal of this is to make sure we’re both aligned on general expectations and the scope of the role before we ask you to invest your time and energy on an assignment.

2. Zoom interview: The next step is what would normally be an in-person interview (now hosted over Zoom) with one or two of our engineers. We’ll take a few minutes to get to know one another, and then we’ll present you with some technical challenges, this will be conducted either through a simple share screen or using the system Coderpad. After that, we’ll take the time to get to know you better, hear what you’re looking for, and tell you more about us and the position.

For the technical section, we’ll present real-world problems that we could encounter (and probably already have encountered) in our daily work. We believe that asking questions about real-world problems is the most reliable and valid predictor for how you’ll do on the job. Based on our past experience, we don’t believe that theoretical brain teasers are reliable in predicting success within our team, so don’t expect any.

How you can prepare for the technical interview:

In order to best prepare for this part of the hiring process, we recommend brushing up on several core CS concepts:

• Commonly used coding algorithms – You can practice applying some of these concepts on sites like https://leetcode.com/
• Time/space complexities
• System design – Here are some useful assets that can help you practice this basic concept – Blog post and video.

Also, it’s important to note that we’re more interested in your thought process than the actual solution you propose. We’re eager to see if you can:

• Break down a big problem into smaller and simpler steps
• Understand deeply what happens behind the scenes, not just make sure it works
• Weigh the tradeoffs of any decision you make; there’s never one perfect solution
• Know how to analyze the performance and effectiveness of your work
• Adjust your solution and work to accommodate constantly changing circumstances
• Communicate all of the above in a clear, straightforward way
• Code in a user-first mindset, always considering the experience of the user when making decisions

We know that interviewing can be stressful, but our goal is to make things feel as real and down-to-earth as possible. For us, the best interviews have been the ones where it feels like a casual conversation between two engineers.

Second round of Zoom interviews: The next step would be to invite you for another technical interview. The structure of this interview is very similar to the first one, the goal is to introduce you to as many people on our engineering team as possible. You’ll also likely meet one of our engineering managers. This is a good opportunity for you to ask any questions or share any thoughts based on your experience during the first in-person interview.

HR interview: After you’ve passed the professional interviews, the next step is to meet with a member of our HR team and get more personally acquainted. Our goal here is to check the compatibility between the direction of our team and culture with your long-term goals. We want to make sure it’s a good match for both sides. We strive to hire people who are highly motivated and strongly believe in our product, our culture, and the way we do things at monday.com.

Offer: This is the final stage! The HR you have been in touch with will call you in for a face-to-face offer where we will explain and reveal all the elements of the proposal and make sure everything is clear and transparent. We will gladly answer any questions you may have before receiving the formal written offer. After that, welcome to our team.

Who we are and what it’s like to work here

Total ownership over your work:
This is a genuinely fun environment to work in as an engineer, because our responsibilities extend far beyond code. We’re all product people and are committed to creating an amazing user experience and product. Of course, you can’t be a good developer without deep technical expertise, but that’s just one aspect of our work. We propose new features and develop them end to end, taking them from ideation to post-deployment analysis. We do our own QA, communicate directly with our customers to hear their feedback, and truly care about making an impact.

Fast-paced and hardworking:
We develop in production and deploy code multiple times a day. This makes it possible for us to do faster and higher-quality code reviews, and quickly identify any bugs. We all have a lot on our plate but it’s a very exciting, fast-paced environment where we all play an integral role in the conception and execution of the product roadmap.

Transparent and data-driven:
We’re obsessed with making all information accessible to everyone on our team as well as measuring the impact of every change we make. Deploying snippets of code several times a day allows us to A/B test the effectiveness of everything we build, and we track all the results in our internal BI tool BigBrain.

No ego or politics:
We try to keep our organization “flat,” meaning there’s very little bureaucracy, hierarchy, or chain of approval. Have a cool idea? Great! Go make it happen and let us know how it performed. When everything is out in the open, there is no hierarchy of those who know and those who don’t.

Hopefully you found this information helpful. We’re always looking for ways to improve our process, so please let us know what you think!