There are many talented engineers in this world, and at Smaato try to find the best of the best. We look for talented individuals who are eager to advance our products, become a part of an international team, and have a positive influence on our company culture. Software and systems engineers are the heart of every SaaS organization. As long as the heart beats, the product lives!
So what does it take to hire great talent? Here’s how we do it at Smaato:
1. Getting Started
Defining Requirements and Drafting the Job Description
For every position at Smaato, we complete a briefing form that provides a full picture of the role we are looking to fill. We want to get a clear picture of the must-haves vs. the nice-to-haves. We craft a job description to make the needs clear and to give candidates insight into exactly what we need, and what we’d love to have.
Preparing Tech Questions for Technical Recruiters
Engineers are excited to speak about tech trends — and we love to talk about trends during the initial screening.
We conduct briefings with the hiring team in order to prepare the appropriate technical questions for the recruiter’s first screening step. These questions help us to get a better understanding of the candidate and their potential technical fit within a team.
Posting a Job
It is essential to spread the word about a new job opening across all relevant outlets. How do we do this? We assesstech-relevant channels that today’s top developers like to explore. At Smaato, these include traditional job boards like LinkedIn, and Xing, as well as our own careers page.
Training for New Interviewers
Conducting interviews is very exciting, but at the same time it can be a challenging and time consuming process. To achieve a highly professional and effective interview output, we invest time and effort into providing interview-skills training for new team members. This helps ensure our hiring managers represent Smaato in the best possible fashion, while ensuring that the interviewer has the confidence and tools needed to conduct a productive interview. While technical skills and professional experience are very important for most jobs, these managers also benefit from knowing how to uncover those skills and behaviors that may not be as obvious on paper.
Collaborating with the Marketing Team
Visibility and positive brand recognition is a crucial aspect for every organization, and Smaato is no exception. The recruitment team works closely with our marketing team to efficiently and effectively spread the word about our engineering openings to help attract potential applicants.
2. The Selection Process
Applicants and Actively-Sourced Candidates — Keeping the Balance!
We are proud to receive a lot of CVs every day, but we do not slack in our efforts to seek other great candidates ourselves. Inbound leads as well as outreach help us keep the balance. At Smaato, we also prioritize diversity and inclusion. It is an integral part of sourcing for the cream of the crop. We are proud to count more than 40 nationalities working under the same roof and towards the same company goals: empowering publishers and marketers, and making Smaato a great place to work!
First Screening Step
Our initial screenings include both technical and behavioral questions to help assess potential fit. Based on the job description we create structured feedback criteria in our Applicant Tracking System (ATS), SmartRecruiters. This includes the already mentioned “must-haves” and “nice-to-haves” as well as the tech, cultural, and motivational fit to Smaato. This helps us hone in on the right candidates sooner.
Technical Challenges
We have two different types of tasks for our tech candidates. Either before or during the interview, we give candidates a real-life problem to solve — something they can expect on a day-to-day basis here at Smaato. The task usually takes 30 to 45 minutes, providing useful insight into the candidate’s technical and problem-solving skills, while giving them a taste of what it is like to work at Smaato.
Peer-to-Peer Recruiting and Sharing Feedback
We share prompt feedback in SmartRecruiters to enable faster decision-making. We are agile, so if we notice that a step needs to be added or reduced, we will adapt the hiring process to meet our business needs accordingly, and so we don’t keep candidates waiting.
Pitching the Role to Candidates
We have a lot of things to be proud of: the latest technologies used on our projects, our great international teams, flat hierarchies, and a healthy work-life balance. It delights us to share our own stories with candidates and to explain how we help with relocation and integration into a new country.
Being Transparent and Always Giving Feedback in Time
We all want feedback. With our transparent workflow in SmartRecruiters, we offer our candidates the possibility to check their application status regularly. In the very first interview, we explain the overall hiring process and the time frame of feedback loops to candidates.
Another important thing: whether it is a CV in an inbox, an interview that took place one week ago, or a 30-minute phone call, we regularly inform our candidates about their application status and whether they will be considered further. We respect the time an applicant has taken for us, and don’t want to keep anyone in purgatory. This is a chance for them to evaluate us, too, and we strive to offer the best interview experience.
3. Tracking and Achieving Success
Analyzing the Data and Sources
Continuously tracking the source of candidates and assessing the approaches that have worked for successful hires in the past helps our recruitment team. We have a continually updating internal overview of how to achieve the best results. By collecting and analyzing this information, we also evaluate whether to implement new tools or job boards in the process.
Staying Up-to-Date with Tech
What’s the latest version of Angular? What’s the latest in OTT/CTV and video streaming? We believe it is important to speak the same language as engineers, so we do our homework by reading technical articles and exploring what’s new in tech. During the initial call with a candidate, we do our best to show that we are hiring for tech teams. From our personal experience, we have noticed that engineers are excited to speak about tech topics with us recruiters and, furthermore, they are always looking forward to having exciting conversations!
Interested? We’re Hiring!
This thorough recruitment process ensures that we at Smaato only hire the best candidates — truly motivated individuals who will enjoy working here and supporting the development of our products. If you think that you would be the right fit, check out our open positions.
DId you know? The Smaato Platform processed more than three trillion ad requests monthly, using some of the best engineering practices and technologies in the business. We offer engineers a chance to work on a low latency, highly concurrent, resilient, and scalable SaaS platform processing millions of requests every second. Be it Cloud, BigData, Machine Learning, or Microservices. Smaato’s platform offers a unique opportunity to work on next-gen technologies, from Cloud tech to Big Data, machine learning, and microservices.
If you’re interested in learning a little bit more via an informational interview, we’d be happy to set up some time for an exploratory call. Get in touch with us here and we can answer any questions you may have about the hiring process and what sets Smaato apart.
We’re looking forward to talking tech with you!
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