The Sourcegraph Interview Process

This page includes all information a Talent Team member, Hiring Manager, or Teammate needs to know about the interview stage.

The interview lifecycle

Making a referral

Current employees can refer a candidate in Greenhouse by following these instructions. There is no need for your referral to apply through our careers page once you have referred them in Greenhouse. If the referred candidate is a duplicate, the Recruiter will merge the records together and keep the referral candidate page as the primary candidate page.

Preparing for an interview

Training: all interviewers must review interview training before participating in any interviews.

System set up: all interviewers must have the below systems set up before interviewing.

Role familiarization: prior to the interview, open up the interview kit in Greenhouse (the link can be found in your interview calendar invite). In the interview kit, you’ll be able to view the candidate’s resume, the job description, and the structured interview questions you will ask during the interview.

Selling Sourcegraph:

  • Click here to view our Marketing page that describes what Sourcegraph does in different message lengths.

The interview stage

The recruiter screen

The first step of an interview process for a candidate is the Recruiter Screen. All Recruiters must have completed all stages of Recruiter Onboarding before interviewing candidates.

The Recruiter conducts an initial recruiter screen with eligible candidates. Sample Recruiter screen questions can be found here.

  • To advance a candidate to the Recruiter screen stage, the Recruiter uses the Calendly template in Greenhouse to schedule. To reject a candidate, Recruiter sends rejection email template.

  • To use the Calendly template in Greenhouse to schedule, first enable Calendly integration in Greenhouse. Then continue to these steps to schedule an interview with Calendly.

  • To decline a candidate, follow these steps. All candidates are either advanced or declined within 5 business days of their application date to provide a positive candidate experience.

If the candidate does not show up for the interview, the Recruiter will call, email, and text the candidate and offer to reschedule.

The Recruiter submits qualified candidates to the Hiring Manager. If Hiring Manager expresses interest in the profile, the Recruiter asks the Recruiting Coordinator to schedule the Hiring Manager screen by posting in the #talent-scheduling-and-offers Slack channel.

  • Click here to learn more about scheduling interviews at Sourcegraph.

The hiring manager screen stage

If the Hiring Manager chooses to advance a candidate following the Hiring Manager screen, the Recruiting Coordinator schedules additional interviews in the interview process (below). All interviewers must review the interview training and Guide to Using Brighthire before conducting interviews.

  • How we schedule interviews
  • Interview process and sample interview questions for each department here
  • If the candidate does not show up for the interview in the first 5 minutes, the Hiring Manager will send a message in the private Slack channel for the position and tag the Recruiter and Recruiting Coordinator. If the candidate does not show up for over 5 minutes, the Hiring Manager will end the interview.

The “onsite” stage

The “onsite” stage is defined as all interviews that take place after the hiring manager screen.

The Recruitment Operations specialist will schedule all remaining interviews in the interview process. It is important that all teammates accept the calendar invite to confirm that you plan to attend to the interview.

  • If you unable to make an interview, please Slack #Hiring immediately so that we can work on finding a replacement interviewer, or reschedule. Please do you best to provide a minimum of 24-hours notice if you are unable to attend.

Following your interview, please provide interview feedback immediately, no later than 24-hours after your interview, to ensure we are able to move quickly and provide a positive candidate experience.

The decision making stage

The hiring team reviews the feedback in Greenhouse and makes final hiring decision. This can be done in a synchronous fashion via a debrief Zoom meeting, or asynchronously via Slack. If there is mixed feedback, the Hiring Manager is the ultimate decision maker.

Once a hiring decision in made, the Hiring Manager is responsible for communicating the hiring decisions to the rest of the interview team to stay informed and calibrate for future hiring decisions.

  • Post a note in the role’s private Slack channel.
  • Your note should provide context for why we’ve decided to hire someone, or why we’ve decided not to hire someone.
  • Once it’s been posted in Slack, paste your note into Greenhouse so it lives on the candidate page forever.
  • Should we proceed to an offer, the Recruiter will then paste that note in the offer details.

If we are moving forward with an offer, the Recruiter will submit the offer details for approval and will schedule and offer summary call.

  • Learn more about the offer stage here

If we are declining the candidate, the Recruiter will call the candidate.

  • Click here for policy on declining candidates and providing feedback.

Estimated time-to-hire

It is our goal to fill our openings as quickly as possible while maintaining a high quality bar and a strong candidate experience. Our time-to-fill goal is an average of 45 days. This means that the timespan from intake meeting to candidate offer acceptance (when a candidate signs their offer letter) should be, on average, 45 days or less.

  • (45 days time-to-fill) + (2–4 weeks notice period) + (1-2 weeks vacation in between jobs) = 3 months from the time we kick off the job to when our new teammate starts.
  • All roles should be kicked off 2–3 months prior to our target start date to ensure we’re taking a proactive, rather than reactive, recruitment approach.
  • Once a candidate begins the interview process with us, we should aim to complete the interview process in 2-weeks or less.

Please reference the hiring plan to see your upcoming open roles. This document is updated in real time and adjusts as the needs of our business change. If you see that you have an upcoming role in the next 2–3 months, please follow the below steps to kick off a search.

Sourcing best practices

  • To source passive candidates, the Recruiter and Hiring Manager follows best sourcing practices in LinkedIn Recruiter.

Click here to read about sourcing best practices and how a sourcer partners with a Recruiter and Hiring Manager. Click here for a guide on creating a Recruiting Outreach Campaign.

Outreach best practices

  • Our goal is to drive meaningful outreach and engagement with prospective candidates. When designing an engagement strategy, the goal is to create a sequence of messages and/or content at touch points delivered to a targeted candidate at predefined intervals.

Here’s a guide on creating a Recruiting Outreach Campaign.

Our Scheduling Philosophy

We are flexible when it comes to scheduling interviews because we are all-remote and we don’t need to schedule all interviews back-to-back (unlike typical onsite interviews at other companies). Some candidates like spreading interviews out (e.g., across multiple days and/or having breaks between interviews on the same day) and others prefer to batch them as much as possible to get it over with. Ask the candidate what their ideal interview schedule looks like and then try to accommodate those preferences as much as possible (given interviewer availability).

Even if candidates prefer to batch all their interviews together, it might not be possible due to the timezones of available interviewers.

We will schedule interviews in stages. If it is clear from the feedback that we won’t be moving forward, we will reject and not move forward with additional stages.

To schedule an interview with a candidate, please work with your recruiter or Slack @hiring. You can see a list of Recruiters.

Providing interview feedback

Written interview feedback

Please put your written feedback into Greenhouse as soon as possible following the interview (immediately is ideal) while it is still fresh in your mind. You can also leverage your BrightHire recording to revisit key points during the interview when providing feedback. All feedback must be submitted in Greenhouse before discussing with anyone. This is required and ensures that bias does not impact your hiring recommendation.

How to use BrightHire for feedback

Brighthire’s interview assistant allows you to take time stamped notes while you are interviewing. The notes are formatted into bullets and the question topics are formatted into headers. In interview assistant, you can flag key moments, leave reactions, and use “at mentions” to tag someone. Every note is clickable so as you click it, you can jump right in to replay the moment the note was taken. The bottom of the notes section provides an area to add a general comment that gets tied to the entire interview instead of one specific time point. This is a great place in Brighthire to tag a teammate and pull them in to let them know about next steps.

At the top of the notes page, you have the link available to jump right into the Greenhouse scorecard or to share the link with someone else. When you go back to Greenhouse to leave feedback, you will see the BrightHire tab at the right side of the screen (enabled with the Chrome extension). Clicking on the tab allows you to watch the entire interview, look over time stamped notes, replay key moments with video and recording, jump into areas where you asked questions, and review flagged moments. With this extension, you can copy and paste all notes formatted with the question topics directly into the Greenhouse scorecard to make it easy to provide written feedback in Greenhouse.

Overall hiring recommendation

In addition to providing written feedback, you are asked to choose an overall recommendation. You are given 5 feedback options in Greenhouse: 1. Strong Yes 2. Yes 3. Neutral 4. No 5. Strong No. It is important that we are calibrated as a team and that we assess candidates using the same scale.

  • Feedback is required immediately (no later than 24 hours after the interview) to ensure we’re able to move candidates through our process quickly.

Please leverage the below definitions when rating candidates:

Strong Yes You are confident that this person would make our team better and you would be excited to have the chance to work with them.

Yes You observed only positive signs that this person would be a good fit for our team, but you don’t feel strongly about hiring them.

Neutral You are neutral or are unsure if this person would be a good fit for our team. More digging and interviewing is recommended. To indicate that you’re neutral, please do not select any score and press submit.

No You have doubts about whether this person would make our team better.

Strong No You are very confident that we should not hire this person because they would not be successful on our team.

All “Yes” feedback with no “Strong Yes” feedback is usually not sufficient. We want to hire people who we are excited to work with.

Assessing focus attributes

When assessing focus attributes, we have 5 options: 1. Star 2. Thumbs up 3. Neutral 4. Thumbs down 5. Stop

Star You are very confident that this person has this attribute.

Thumbs up You are confident and have no concerns that this candidate has this attribute.

Neutral You are neutral or are unsure if they have, or don’t have, this attribute. More digging and interviewing is recommended.

Thumbs down You do not believe this candidate has this attribute.

Stop You are very certain that this candidate does not embody this attribute.

Declining candidates

Who receives a written rejection:

  • Any candidate who applies to Sourcegraph but doesn’t make it to the Recruiter Screen stage.
  • Any candidate who has a Recruiter Screen, but isn’t progressed to the Hiring Manager Screen stage.

Follow these steps on how to send candidates a written rejection using a standardized rejection template in Greenhouse.

Who receives a phone call rejection:

  • Any candidate who makes it past the Hiring Manager Screen stage.

If you make it to or past the Hiring Manager stage and are not selected for the role, the Recruiter will call you to provide you high-level feedback about why the team is not moving forward.

Best practices for giving feedback