If you are a Cloud Native engineer, you’ve got cutting-edge skills that are in high demand. You might be getting as many as nine messages a day from recruiters. It could be flattering if it weren’t so annoying. To most of those companies and their recruiters, you’re a name on a list, a LinkedIn profile they want to match to their ever-growing number of vacant jobs.
At Container Solutions, we’re growing fast, and we’ve got plenty of jobs to fill. But we don’t like the impersonal way other companies recruit. We don’t think that kind of process fills engineering jobs with the people we, or our clients, would want to work with.
So we’ve created a recruitment process that expresses our values. We move fast. We treat human beings with care. We give you feedback, even if you don’t wind up working for us so that you can grow and learn as a professional and as a person.
We start with a personal approach. We might notice your LinkedIn profile, and what you’re looking for. If we think you might be a candidate to work at CS, we send you a little information. We try not to be intrusive or pushy. The next step is up to you.
First Steps
If you apply for a job at Container Solutions, our process starts with a get-acquainted chat. We’ll talk over video streaming, or you might visit us in our Amsterdam office if you live in the local area.
In this first step, we will talk about your background, your personal development, your previous experiences, and what you want next for your career. We will tell you about Container Solutions. What we do (we help companies move to the cloud); the role you might play; the events we host to help expand the Cloud Native community. We can even, in the Dutch custom, talk about the weather!
After this talk, our engineers evaluate your skills with an API test. For this trial project, you get to work with the newest tech, such as Kubernetes, Docker, Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery pipelines, among others. More about that later.
Finding the Best Fit
We are not only interested, though, in certifications and tech skills. At our company, we pride ourselves on being a place where people can collaborate easily, and where learning is always evolving. We want everyone at CS to feel safe in sharing their ideas.
To find out if our company is a place where you can be happy and do your best work, we include a personality assessment and a feedback interview in our recruitment process.
The personality questionnaire will ask you about you prefer or tend to behave; the responses you give are compared to a working population norm group. The NEO Personality Inventory questionnaire is a valid and reliable measure of personality. It considers how you see yourself in terms of what psychologists call ‘The Big Five’ traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and emotional reactivity.
This type of measurement helps predict future job performance and try to understand you in more detail. It also gives our psychologists a structured framework to explore your work experience in greater depth and how you see your strengths and challenges.
There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ personality profiles, but the results give us some additional information about our job candidates, about how they prefer or tend to behave in a work setting, to help us determine ‘best fit’. We have explored which personality traits work well for the role of engineers within Container Solutions, so we review how closely your profile fits with this ideal.
But this part of the process isn’t just about our needs as a company. It’s about giving you information that can help you reach your personal goals.
After you have completed the questionnaire, you will also have the opportunity to discuss your profile with one of the occupational psychologists here at CS. They are specially trained to understand how to interpret these profiles, and this conversation can give you further opportunity to clarify to them how you see yourself.
You will also receive a detailed written feedback report, which is confidential to you. Even engineers who do not wind up working for our company have told us that they gained a lot from the session. They can use the feedback to help with their professional development. If you are successful and do start working with CS, then you may find this feedback useful to support your ongoing development within our company. If possible, you always have further opportunity to discuss your development goals with the psychologist you spoke with at these initial stages and receive additional support if needed.
Because of the positive feedback we have received from our candidates, we continue to include personality measurement in our selection process. Investing in development is very much part of our culture here at Container Solutions. Investing in resources such as personality assessment, from the start of our employees’ association with us, demonstrates how important this is to us. Furthermore, we know that the questionnaire we use is a psychometrically sound measure, which helps minimise unfair bias in our selection process.
Getting Feedback
You will then get more feedback during the next part of our process, the technical team meeting, in which you will chat with two of our engineers. You can ask questions, discuss the previous API test; or talk about Cloud Native technologies; the projects we are working on; the tech events we both host and attend; other ways we engage and give back to the community.
It sounds like a lot, right? But we move quickly, mindful that our candidates have other options and aren’t likely to be well served by a long process. We usually make our hiring decisions within two to three weeks, from start to finish.
Our tech team is always helping us to speed up; they know how annoying it can be, as candidates, to wait for an answer from a prospective employer. They’re always willing to help with the team interviews. And they take the time to give detailed technical feedback, which we share with you, even if you decided not to join us. (An example of one candidate’s thoughts about the entire hiring process, shared with us: ‘Thanks for the feedback, I hope I get to speak with your colleagues in the future, I would love to pick their brains’.)
As a learning organisation, we try to make this process a positive and beneficial learning experience for candidates. If you are intrigued by what we do and how we do it, we hope you will apply for a job at one of our offices in Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Montreal, Warsaw, or Prague. We’d love to meet you!
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