Read the Docs Blog - Posts tagged hiring

Read the Docs is hiring for multiple positions

2021-01-06T00:00:00Z

Read the Docs received a grant to support scientific software at the beginning of this year. As part of this, we are hiring for two new positions related to the grant work:

A frontend developer with design skills
A developer advocate with documentation skills (This position has been filled, and is no longer active)

Please look at each of the job postings for much more detail on what to expect with the job.

We are excited to be able to expand our small team and increase the support we’re giving to the scientific open source community. Throughout 2021 we are going to be vastly improving our documentation and building major new features around embedding documentation content, based on the work from this grant.

How hiring will be structured

The way we are currently planning to structure this work is to have 50% of the time spent working on grant work, and the other 50% working on Read the Docs itself. The codebase and community we’re building require a good amount of onboarding time, so we are excited to be able to use the grant funds to also improve the overall experience of Read the Docs users.

You can apply to the jobs with the links above to the full job descriptions, where you will be asked to fill out a form with a few questions.

About Read the Docs

Read the Docs is a large open source project providing documentation building and hosting. You can think of it a continuous integration for docs. We do around 500 million pageviews each year. We are a small team, but this role will have a large impact of millions of users. Almost all of our codebase is open source and we feel strongly about supporting the community while sustaining the project in an ethical manner.

Tips for Getting a Developer Interview

2019-02-13T00:00:00Z

Over the last month, the Read the Docs team conducted 30-40 customer development interviews with hiring managers and recruiters at companies ranging from 5-person companies to the biggest names in tech. We wanted to learn more about hiring processes at various companies with the ultimate goal of building a product to help companies find developers.

Last time, we covered some tips for hiring managers based on what companies told us they were doing. This time, we put together tips for candidates looking for their next job based on insights we heard from hiring managers.

Rather than covering how to crack developer interviews or how to gain the necessary technical skills, these tips will focus on getting your foot in the door. Specifically:

Making your application stand out
Improving your application response rate
Getting to the interview process

When applying, go deep not wide

“I don’t want candidates who drive by job sites and pepper every job they find”

As a candidate, there is a temptation to play the numbers game and apply to as many jobs as possible. Many jobs sites make it easy to apply to many jobs quickly and this gives you that feeling that your job search is progressing.

Based on what hiring managers told us, playing the numbers game isn’t the best approach. While it is a bit of a job-seekers market, especially for more senior talent, companies are looking people who want to work for their company and who believe in their mission. Hiring managers told us they want applicants who “think about the company, then check for opportunities”.

That’s almost 300 applications in 2 weeks on just one of the job sites where this is posted.

Spend a little more time on your application

While it takes longer to apply to a job post that requires a cover letter or requires answers to a few questions, those are great ways to have your application stand out relative to other applicants. You don’t want your resume to get lost in a stack of hundreds.

As we mentioned last time, quite a few hiring managers we talked to started requiring a cover letter or even just a couple questions that are unique to the company in order to make their job filtering candidates easier and get candidates who want to work there not those who just want a job.

All the companies we talked to said when they post a job they got tons of applicants, but that high quality, qualified applicants were still in short supply. When 200 people apply to a job but only 20 are willing to do a cover letter, a hiring manager can spend a lot more time per candidate with the smaller pool. One hiring manager told us explicitly “fewer resumes is better because there’s less noise”.

While I know I said getting a developer job isn’t a numbers game, this doesn’t strictly mean you can use these techniques to apply to 2-3 jobs and you’ll get hired. Sometimes by the time you apply, somebody is already in the final stages of getting hired. The position may not really be open anymore. Don’t get discouraged in your job search. Finding the right match can take time.

Here’s some of the questions from the DuckDuckGo application process. This is your place to stand out! DuckDuckGo was not one of the companies we interviewed.

Make yourself a referral: use your network

Hiring managers universally told us their top recruiting channel is referrals from existing employees. As a candidate, use this knowledge to your advantage and make yourself into a referral hire.

Did you see an acquaintance on social media post about job openings at their company?
Does a friend or a friend of friend work at the company?
Do you have a first connection (or a very good 2nd connection) on LinkedIn who works there?

In all of these cases, you should contact that person before applying. Even if the person you know isn’t on the hiring team, your contact might be able to put you in touch with the right person.

“Most [senior] people go through their network”

For a mid-level to senior candidate with 7+ years of experience, this is even more important based on our interviews. At that stage of your career, hiring managers we talked to expect a high quality candidate to do due diligence on the company and team to make sure it’s a mutual fit.

Regardless of the exact route you take here, getting in touch with the right people to learn more about the team, the tech stack, and the company makes it clear that you’re very interested. You’re far more likely to get a response, move on to the interview process, and ultimately get hired.

Establishing contact with companies

Turning yourself into a referral is easier for a senior candidate. But what if this is your first or second job or don’t know anybody at the company?

After referral candidates, the next best hiring channel in our interviews was local meetups and engaging the local community. Both startups and established companies – especially when they are actively hiring – use meetups to find talent. If you’re able to meet the hiring manager in person or establish some sort of connection, in my experience, this raises your chances significantly.

In our interviews, another channel that mid-size and larger companies we talked to used to recruit was to rely on their presense at conferences. For many companies, recruiting was the primary motivator to sponsor a conference and have a booth. As a candidate, talking to the engineers at the booth and showing interest can ensure that your application doesn’t get lost among all the applicants they get.

At a smaller company, it’s frequently possible to figure out exactly who the hiring manager is from some combination of the website, hiring posts, and LinkedIn. This is a great way to make a valuable connection and make sure the role is a good fit. Contacting the hiring manager cold requires a bit of finesse so make sure to be respectful.

Places like the monthly HackerNews Who’s Hiring thread are fantastic because they allow direct interaction with the hiring manager and many companies list a person’s direct email to inquire about a position, learn more directly from the source, and show you’re interested.

Here’s some of the phrases we heard from hiring managers in interviews.

Conclusion

By spending a bit more time on your application, establishing contact with the company, and asking good questions about the work and team, you are showing your intent and interest in the company.

You want to make sure the hiring manager or recruiter understands that you’re a serious candidate and you want to work there on their team. Using these methods will improve your response rate and help you get the interview. By doing a one-click apply on a job site, this is completely lost.

Thanks

Again, I’d like to thank all the hiring managers who took the time to talk to us.

Lessons From and For Hiring Managers

2019-01-30T00:00:00Z

Over the last four weeks, the Read the Docs team did dozens of customer development interviews with engineering hiring managers. We wanted to learn more about hiring processes at various companies with the ultimate goal of building a product to help companies find developers. We talked to people looking for talent at five person companies all the way up to the biggest names in tech. In this post, I am going to cover some of the common things we heard from hiring managers and share some ways for hiring managers to improve their company’s process. In our next post in this series, I will have some actionable tips for job seekers based on the same interviews.

Since this is a long post, I figured I’d share some of the key takeaways:

Have a strategy for getting more referrals whether that is actively asking employees or having an overly generous referral bonus. Referrals are probably your top source of candidates so figuring out how to get more will save you time and money in the end. Then do the same for your other best recruiting channels.
Reach passive candidates. There are a lot more passive candidates than active ones so have a plan to reach them. Great developers (especially senior ones) probably aren’t actively looking for a new job and it’s a job-seekers market. Even if somebody isn’t considering a new job at all, the next time they do, you want them to think of your company.
Recruiting for diversity is a focus for hiring managers. Put together a concrete plan for getting more diverse candidates and meeting your diversity goals. Engaging with local developer communities and nonprofits and encouraging referrals worked well for companies we talked to.
Get more signal in your application process by adding a step such as a cover letter, quiz, or simply add a couple questions folks have to answer. Making candidates spend even one extra minute on their application can save you hours filtering resumes.

Why is Read the Docs tackling hiring? Hasn’t that been done?

While we didn’t initially think about Read the Docs ads for recruiting, based on some unexpected past successes, we decided to position promoted jobs as one of our main verticals within our advertising. Rather than dash forward and create a product, however, we started by just talking to hiring managers to understand the hiring process better so we can best meet their needs with something we create.

One of the questions we asked in our interviews was how long it took to hire their most recent developer? Specifically, we asked hiring managers to consider how much time they and their team spent sourcing candidates, filtering resumes, preparing for and doing phone and onsite interviews, and anything else. Internal recruiters’ time is valuable too, but we figured the hiring manager would probably underestimate how much time the recruiter spent since they didn’t directly observe it. While answers were all over the place, the range with the most overlap was 50-100 hours of engineering time to make a hire. No huge revelation here, but companies make a massive investment in hiring.

From my days being an interviewer at Qualcomm and Amazon as well as a smaller startup, I’d say fifty hours is on the low side for big company but about right for a smaller company. When something costs 50+ engineering hours to do, any improvement is worth a lot of time and money and at Read the Docs we believe we can help significantly here.

Top hiring channels

It was no big surprise to hear that referrals were the top hiring channel. The second best channel was a bit of a surprise with local meetups and local communities being very high in a majority of interviews although this was less true among the largest companies we talked to. Companies also had some success with recruiting at conferences, using various job sites, and proactive outreach.

Hiring managers shared strategies with us that they used to increase the number of referral and community candidates they got. Two different companies we talked to hosted multiple local meetups at their offices and one of those hiring managers said “being plugged into the community” was their main channel for hiring.

Another hiring manager who focused a lot on developers with security experience talked about having “LinkedIn parties” where either a hiring manager or internal recruiter sat with engineers on their team one-on-one to go through their LinkedIn network. Even when he heard a person “is great, but they’ll never change jobs”, that was a good candidate to target. Security is such a high demand field, he said, that very few great people are actively looking for a job.

Reaching people who aren’t looking is critical

One of our biggest takeaways from the interviews was that companies wanted to reach candidates before they started actively looking. Most of the hiring managers we talked to stressed the importance of getting in front of passive candidates. Certainly fewer people are actively looking for developer jobs than those who are just open to a change. A few different reasons were given but I actually think Joel Spolsky had it right when he said top developers “barely ever apply for jobs at all. That’s because they already have jobs.”

This quote isn’t necessarily a slight against people who apply actively to jobs. Virtually everyone I know in tech started their career applying to a job. Rather, the message here is that as a developer becomes a mid-level developer and then becomes a senior developer, they are more likely to rely on their network to somewhat passively job seek rather than going through the front door and simply applying on a company website.

Reaching people who aren’t actively looking is one area where Read the Docs can really help. Companies want to reach them when they are just thinking about a new job or perhaps passively seeking. Developers who come to our site are actively building software, not job-seeking. Many of them are content at their current position. For those that aren’t, this is a perfect place to showcase great companies and help Read the Docs’ visitors to find their next job.

Recruiters can be worth it

In each interview, we asked whether the company used recruiters or recruiting related services (eg. Hired, Triplebyte). Universally, hiring managers brought up how expensive recruiters are, but most of the people we talked to who had actually used recruiters in the past had a positive impression overall. Hiring takes a ton of time, typically from senior folks at the company. At smaller startups, that’s frequently the CEO or CTO. Even though the price is high, recruiters who help speed that process along are worth it.

I think the quote that really summed it up was from a VP of engineering at a startup that just raised a Series B. He’s trying to grow his team by 10 developers this year (about a 50% increase). His experience hiring his first couple developers through a 2-person boutique recruiting firm was great and he would use them for hiring everyone “if hiring 10 people didn’t mean $100k+” in fees alone.

Full disclosure: Triplebyte is an advertiser on Read the Docs. We’re fans.

Diversity and inclusivity in hiring

We didn’t ask any questions around hiring for diversity but fully six hiring managers volunteered information on their companies’ strategies for getting more diverse candidates. This is why I love this kind of interview where the goal is just to listen to what hiring managers say and dig deeper when you hear something interesting. Some of the larger companies we talked to had explicit diversity goals set at the company level. Even among the hiring managers at smaller companies, they shared some tactics they used to get more diverse candidates to apply.

Of the companies with hard diversity goals, most of them told us that their strategy entailed syndicating their job openings to diversity focused jobs sites or in some cases engaging directly with relevant interest groups. In terms of efficacy, reviews of these various jobs boards was mixed.

On the more positive side, hiring managers cited Girl Develop It, Black Girls Code, and PyLadies as fantastic channels for both increasing candidate diversity and for high quality applicants. Two companies also talked about trying to decrease bias in their job postings using Textio and similar services.

Having multiple people mention diversity completely unprompted really shows that this topic is becoming higher priority for companies and hiring managers. It also shows that it if hiring for diversity is important to your company, you need to have a plan for actually making those goals a reality. It’s worth checking whether the strategy actually works too.

Remember, sourcing is the bigger problem

Every single hiring manager we talked to complained about the time they spent filtering resumes from applicants. Some choice quotes I heard included “95% of applicants weren’t a fit” even after only reviewing the resume and a hiring manager who posted to a very popular remote-only job board told me he got “literally one thousand applications”. While I believe this is a legitimate complaint, I think Aline Lerner, founder of interviewing.io said it best when she said “Engineering hiring isn’t a filtering problem. It’s a sourcing problem.” The reason we heard it a lot is that filtering is a very time-consuming task that hiring managers directly deal with.

The real problem here is that the number of applicants to a job post is a vanity metric. What hiring managers are looking for is qualified applicants, which is harder to gauge without some additional work. One of the problems here is that a lot of jobs sites make it really easy for candidates to apply to lots of jobs. This is understandable from their perspective as more applicants makes their platform seem more valuable. There’s no reason for a job board to put artificial barriers into the application funnel, but hiring managers told us they want candidates who want to work for their company not somebody who is applying to every job out there.

Instead of building product here, I think hiring managers just need a few tweaks to get more of a signal of candidate quality and intent in their applications. A few of the hiring managers we talked to described how they did this. Multiple hiring managers mentioned how they required a cover letter that answered specific questions (“why us” was the most popular). Another hiring manager described how his hiring system just asked a few short questions of candidates – for example, “what is the software project you’re most proud of” – when they applied. When a candidate didn’t do a cover letter or didn’t answer the questions, they weren’t considered. The latter solution seemed like the best of both worlds as it solves the one-click apply problem without being too much of a barrier.

Thanks

I’d like to thank all the hiring managers who took time out of their days (or in some cases evenings) to talk to us. If you’re a hiring manager or an internal company recruiter and you’d like to share your experiences and help Read the Docs, please get in touch.

Check back soon for our next post in this series which covers tips for candidates based on the same interviews!

Update: This blog was updated to mention our new post in the series

Ready to hire your next developer, fast!

Get in front of passive candidates already using your tech by promoting your job openings with Read the Docs.

Tips to Hire Developers with Read the Docs

2018-10-30T00:00:00Z

Read the Docs is probably not the first place you think of if you are recruiting. However, over 7 million unique developers use Read the Docs each month from all over the world. We didn’t set out to build a better job board, but after a number of advertisers used our ethical ads for recruiting, we discovered that Read the Docs was a great place to find developer talent.

Hiring with Read the Docs works

Developers are not always actively job seeking by browsing job boards or company careers pages. However, they are on Read the Docs reading about the libraries and frameworks they use. Even when people aren’t actively looking for a new job, many are open to exploring new opportunities.

On Read the Docs, we found that developers engage with hiring ads at a higher rate than any other kind of advertising. With hiring ads, developers get ads that are relevant and interesting and companies reach the folks actively using the tech they are recruiting for.

Be specific and find the right developers

If you are looking for Python developers, you can configure your hiring ad to only show on Python related documentation. You can further refine your audience to Read the Docs visitors in specific regions. Whether you are looking for a remote Python data scientist or a blockchain developer in Switzerland, be as specific as possible. This ensures you don’t get unqualified candidates as well as making sure you catch the eyes of the people you are interested in.

Set the right expectations

In any type of advertising, setting appropriate expectations can make the difference between a lackluster and successful campaign. In hiring, it is even more critical. This means making sure that your hiring ad for a front-end JavaScript developer links directly to your JavaScript developer job listing page where people can click “apply”. Don’t link to a listing of all of your open positions unless your hiring ad sets that expectation. Nothing is worse for the developer than clicking on a hiring ad and not knowing what to do next.

Likewise, some things can set the wrong kind of expectation. Most developers have seen enough hiring posts for “rockstars” and “ninjas” to know what to expect. Be honest and upfront and you will attract the right folks.

Stand out

Developers get contacted all the time by recruiters and it can be difficult to show prospective employees why they should check out your company. People look for all sorts of different things when seeking a new job from working with a high-caliber team to working for a company whose goals they agree with. You should highlight your best selling points right on your hiring ad as early as possible. If your company affords a fantastic work/life balance, mention that. A company in a great location, with a beautiful office, and top of the line hardware should definitely feature that. Focusing on your best attributes shows you care about your developers and helps you appeal to people who care about your products and mission.

Are you hiring?

Find qualified candidates already using your tech by promoting your job openings with Read the Docs.

Read the Docs is hiring!

2015-05-04T00:00:00Z

Thanks to our successful fundraiser, we have the ability to pay people to work on Read the Docs.

We have two positions that we are looking for:

Community Developer
Operations Developer

These will be part-time remote contract positions.

Our budget is:

40 total hours each week
Paid at $50/hr

These hours will be split between the two roles, and our time managing and doing administrative tasks. We expect each person to work around 15-20 hours each week. It will initially be for a 3-month period, after which we will evaluate the program, and continue it with renewed funding if it is successful.

We understand that money and time can be an obstacle to working on OSS, so let this be your opportunity to join us! We are hoping to build a team that is diverse in view points and location, and that definitely includes folks like you. Historically under-represented folks in the open source world will be given preference.

Community Developer

You will help us build community and give our users a better experience. Help us make the code base better, and build a thriving open source project along the way.

Your jobs will be:

Triage and fix bugs as they come in via GitHub, IRC, and the Mailing List
Work through the back log of GitHub Issues, fixing and closing them
Doing ongoing maintenance of the code base, including upgrading Django versions, refactoring, and other technical debt clean up
Work onboarding developers into the code base

Tech Used:

Linux (Ubuntu)
Nginx
Django
Python
Celery
Sphinx & Docutils
GitHub

It’s fine if you aren’t familiar with all of these things, but are willing to learn!

Operations Developer

You will help us operate the largest open source documentation website in the world. We currently get over 15,000,000 pageviews a month, and we hope to maintain a reliable and stable hosting platform for years to come.

Your responsibilities will be:

Manage backups of our databases
Manage usage of our web and build machines, keeping them up to date and within capacity
Build new infrastructure and help us scale the existing machines
Write code to make Read the Docs easier to scale and sustain
Be included in an On Call rotation

Tech Used:

Salt
Postgres
Munin
Nagios
Nginx
Elastic Search
Django
Celery

It’s fine if you aren’t familiar with all of these things, but are willing to learn!

We will prefer candidates in non-US based time zones to simplify our on call rotation. Nobody should have to wake up at night to fix issues!

How to Apply

Thanks for everyone who has applied. We are in the process of choosing a candidate, and applications are now closed.