Build team - behavioural interview plan 2024
Interview setup
There will be 2-3 Distribution team members in a behavioural interview. The pool of interviews I have suggested for this stage of interview is anyone from the two Distribution teams. Once the interviewers are scheduled for a call, There will be a private slack channel for the interview team, so that you can plan who will be the MC (handles intros/ending and keeping the meeting moving), and discuss things privately during the interview.
Scoring
Please submit the scorecard within 24 hours (excluding holiday) after the interview.
For the engineering department it is important to note that your final interview scoring (Strong No/No/Yes/Strong Yes) should reflect how you assessed the candidate performed during the interview, and not be your opinion on whether we should hire them or not. See the engineering scoring definitions here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/hiring/conducting-a-gitlab-interview/#engineering-division
For the final summary score assume that a candidate is a NO until they demonstrate that they have met the criteria for one of the other scores.
For the attribute scoring, please take the time to fill in as many of these as you can, but only ones that you feel like witnessed during the interview. If we do not have enough of these captured by the end of all the interviews, it is very hard to make justification for hire. Also note that any thumbs-down on Must Haves and Values are weighted very heavy during justification, so only use thumbsdown on attributes when it is causing your concern for the hire. If you aren't concerned about the hire based on the attribute, but don't think they demonstrated that they are strong in that area, use the Mixed. How that works for a 'must-have' is that even if you were mixed, as long as others felt it was demonstrated, we can consider the hire. But if you mark a must-have as thumbs-down, its unlikely that we will hire the candidate unless the majority of other interviews were strong yes, and in that case we will likely reach out to you to double check your feelings there.
I will be reading your interview Pros/Cons and Key takeaways to gather context, so that is where you can add context and provide your recommendations that you wish to share with the hiring team.
Interview questions
Previous Distribution interviews have pulled from three questions pools:
- 2020 question pool that has been reused - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Wf7bgVM61z57D4_yJoWBykmoBZd41BI_X3LMFRDuYtg/edit?usp=sharing
- Additional general GitLab questions pool: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1UevvEQt92sQmg9_pfzB6Tw7kpuN2u08rsKBNFXPS5ug/edit?usp=sharing
- Additional questions that the quality team includes in their interviews that are applicable here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/people-group/hiring-processes/-/blob/master/Engineering/Quality/Software-Engineer-in-Test/5-BehavioralPeerInterview.md#additional-questions
Feedback we got internally from our last behavioural interviews suggested that there is a bit of balance we were struggling to achieve in terms of allowing everyone to ask questions, but also to keep the flow going and not be jumping around.
My suggestion to start out this round of interviews, is that regardless of whether you are individually prepping specific questions you want to ask, OR are trying to go more with the conversation flow Be ready to ask your questions as a followup to someone elses if they end up partially covering yours. This should help reduce the jumping around. Its still OK to backtrack and ask followups on old topics, I'm just saying that you shouldn't wait 'turns' to ask followups. That also means if you are a question asker, that you should give your other interviewers a chance to ask followups to your question.