Django Girls is hiring! Lessons learned from our recruitment process.

Lucie Daeye joined Django Girls Support Team in our first paid position last week, which concluded our two-month-long hiring process. Before that, we had very limited experience previous experience with hiring or conducting interviews. Here is what we learned.

Backstory

Back in May, the number of new city requests we were receiving per month suddenly doubled, and we quickly realized that even with a team of 6 people, we wouldn’t be able to keep up with the all those incoming requests.

Around the same time, we had a conversation with Honza Král about scaling Django Girls by hiring someone who could handle the daily operations of the organization, like onboarding new cities or helping organizers all over the world organize their events.

After weighing our options, we decided to raise funds to hire someone to work part time, 20 hours a week, and announced our intent to hire the Django Girls’ first Awesomeness Ambassador.

Details of the hiring process

The hiring process was divided into three rounds.

• Applications: We accepted applications for 3 weeks, and then spent 2 weeks reading and scoring the 67 applications. Each application was scored by 6 people.
• First round of interviews: We invited 10 people to 30-minute interviews on Google Hangouts, each conducted by two people from our team.
• Second round of interviews: Out of these 10 people, we invited 3 applicants to a final interview with two other members of the team.

Application process

To attend a Django Girls workshop, every applicant needs to fill out a simple application form, telling us a little bit about herself, why she wants to attend, and how she intends to give back to the community. We find that these three questions allow us to get to know the person and see if they would really benefit from the workshop and contribute to our growing community once they complete it.

Because those questions work so well for choosing attendees, we used them in our application as well. You can find the application form that each Awesomeness Ambassador candidate filled out here.

We discovered that, although we asked for CVs, the CV generally didn’t give us the information we were looking for. An applicant’s prior experience didn’t play nearly as large a role in our decision-making process as their answers to the application questions did.

We believe that having those questions also helped us to lower the number of received applications, while increasing their quality at the same time.

Applications review

Once the deadline for the applications passed, we informed everyone how the recruiting process was going to look like, describing timelines we assumed for our decision and informing everyone how the potential interview phase may look like. From experience, we all knew how stressful recruiting processes are, so we tried to give everyone a clear idea on the timeline for our decisions about interviews and when they could expect a final decision.

Then, we imported all 67 applications to the Django Girls workshop application system, which allowed us to score applications blindly, without seeing how other members of the team scored them. All six of us read through each application, and we invited the top 10 people to interview.

We also sent a message to all rejected applicants, offering them an opportunity to ask for more detailed feedback, if they want to improve future applications. Here you can find a template we used for these messages. It was important to us to provide decisions to waiting applicants as quickly as possible.

23 people got back to us asking for more detailed feedback. Ola Sendecka and Ania Warzecha spent hours writing a personalized feedback for each of these people. This extra step required a lot of work, but was incredibly important for us; we want to make sure that we treat people the way we would like to be treated. Here is an example of feedback we provided.

Out of 10 people who qualified for a second round, half of them had previous experience volunteering for Django Girls, while the other half didn’t had any.

Interviews round

We made ourselves an extensive list of random questions that can be asked to let us compare candidates. You can find the list of questions we used here.

We tried to keep the interview as casual as possible, and make the questions flow naturally through the conversation. Our aim was to keep the candidate as relaxed as possible, to get the best out of them.

Most of us are not native English speakers, and sometimes it was difficult to make notes and talk to someone at the same time. This part of the process we would like to improve in the future by having someone else from the team who is not an active part of the interview, but instead takes notes.

After the first round of interviews, we invited three people to the next round. We also offered one person a place in the Django Girls Support Team because she was incredibly impressive, but we didn’t feel she was the best candidate for the Ambassador position.

The remaining 6 people received personal emails describing why we decided not to invite them to the next round.

Final decision

The second round of interviews was very similar, but 2 different people from out team conducted interviews with candidates this time, so we have a wider set of opinions and points of view.

After this round, we were convinced that all three of them can do the job really well, and we would be happy to work with them. We chose the most qualified and experienced person, who already had a history of volunteering with Django Girls.

The two candidates we did not select were both excellent candidates, and we learned that making the final decision about who to hire is an agonizing one. We sent them each personal email, wishing them all the best.

Django Girls Awesomeness Ambassador Hired!

On the 8th of September, and after more than two months since the initial opening of the application, Lucie Daeye started work as our Ambassador. If you want to learn more about Lucie, head to our blog to read her story.

We couldn’t be happier to have her on board, and she has been a huge help since her very first day.

Time for a big happy sigh.

:drumroll: Credits :drumroll:

There are amazing people and organizations helped us make it happen. Huge, well-deserved thank you to:

• Elastic for their financial contribution to cover the first 6 months of Awesomness Ambassador salary
• Sentry, Lincoln Loop and Divio, for contributing to our fundraising goal for this role
• Leslie Hawthorn, Honza Král and Dominata Kargbo, for helping us prepare the job offer
• Geoff, Kasia, Baptiste, Ania, Ola and Ola, for conducting the recruitment process
• everyone else who helped us to get the word out and offered advice.

Wait, there is more!

We’re still looking for organizations that can help us make this position and Django Girls growth sustainable. If you’re interested in contributing financially, please get in touch.