How Slack hires engineers

This week, Tech in Asia Jobs shares insights into how successful companies operate, hire, and more.

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A term for lazing around is now also the name of the world’s fastest-growing workplace messaging app.

Slack is barely five years old, but already boasts of 9 million weekly active users and over 50,000 paid teams, including 43 percent of the Fortune 500 companies. The company is valued at US$5 billion.

Slack’s engineering team takes up over a third of the 1,000-strong headcount. Co-founder and CTO Cal Henderson tells Tech in Asia how the company hires and retains talent in Silicon Valley, one of the most engineer-hungry places in the world.

Hiring process for engineers

Slack is overhauling its hiring process for engineers, but it generally looks like this:

1. Resume screening
2. A phone call with a hiring manager or technical recruiter
3. A take-home technical exercise that will be graded
4. A series of onsite interviews
5. An offer within the day or the next day

The length of the whole process varies, depending on the candidate’s availability and the time they take to complete the take-home exercise. In the shortest case, the gap between applying and getting an offer could last a week.

Assessing candidates

Take-home tests

Slack’s founding team has been against whiteboard coding exercises from the beginning.

“There’s been a lot of research showing that they are super exclusionary,” says Henderson, “It gets rid of a whole bunch of people who would be great at the job but bad at doing algorithms on a whiteboard, which is completely unrelated to how anybody actually works.”

At the same time, however, a candidate’s technical ability also has to be assessed. Slack’s solution to this is their take-home technical exercise, which candidates can do at their own time and pace.

Firing fast

Hiring challenges

Retaining engineers

Advice for potential candidates