Recruiting Engineers: Asana’s Secrets to Hiring Talent

Recruiting Engineers: Asana’s Secrets to Hiring Talent (Interview with Greg Sabo, Engineering Manager at Asana)

Recruiting engineers is one of the most challenging aspects of the software industry according to the State of Software Development report. There is a general lack of developers, so finding and hiring the right people is a nightmare.

Today we will look behind the scenes at Asana and reveal how they recruit the best engineers.

Karolina Tóth interviewed Greg Sabo, engineering manager at Asana in episode 10 of the Level-up Engineering podcast. Greg puts a lot of effort into recruiting engineers for Asana, so he’s deeply familiar with the ins and outs of the process.

This post covers:

• Building a strong engineering employer brand
  • Make a great workplace
  • Invest into employer branding
• Asana's developer recruitment process
  • Online application
  • Talking to a recruiter
  • Coding challenge
  • In-depth technical evaluation
  • The final stage
• Making the final decision about recruiting engineers
  • Huddle meeting
  • Look for patterns
  • The facilitator makes the decision
• Key elements to a recruitment process
  • Great facilitators
  • Prioritize candidate experience
• Software engineer recruitment channels
  • Universities
  • Conferences and meetups
  • Email outreach
• Engineer intern program
  • Take on as many interns as you can handle
  • Communicate progress
  • It's not always a match
• Skills and traits expected from new recruits
  • Technical skills
  • Communication
  • Autonomy
  • Overall picture
• Evolving your engineer recruiting process
  • Constantly invest into recruitment
  • Let everyone contribute
  • Improve every aspect
• About Greg Sabo

How does Asana build an employer brand to recruit engineers?

Make a great workplace

The first principle that goes into building our employer brand at Asana is building an incredible workplace. This also helps with our mission to nourish collaboration. We want our workplace to feel like the future, and be a collaborative, welcoming space. We aim to create the perfect balance of helping people grow and push themselves and proper reflection.

The biggest thing that helps us to recruit engineers is word of mouth. We strive to make it so that developers working at Asana can't stop talking about the company, and only have great things to say.

It’s also reflected in Glassdoor reviews and surveys that we do. We have several best workplace awards. It’s a big part of our employer brand since the beginning. Employees often look this up before they join a company. You need to make an authentically great place to work, as people see through fake reviews.

This is the most important pillar of our employer brand, and the last thing that we would ever drop.

The teams can deploy an update any time, and as time passes, the bots play more frequently. So, an early lead certainly won’t decide the final outcome, and you can always find your way back to the top.

Invest into employer branding

On top of this we need to tell the story of what it's like to work here. Our employees tell the story naturally to their friends and anonymous review sites. But there's more to it, that may not be part of the discussion.

So we have an awesome employer brand team that works on our outreach. We do blog posts, participate in conferences, and work with events. This is how we get the word out about what it's like to work at Asana.

What are the steps of your process to recruiting engineers?

Online application

We encourage people to apply through our website. They might have a contact at Asana, but we encourage people to submit online in that stage as well. Early on we look at your experience and see if it’s close to the type of engineers we're looking for at the time.

Talk to a recruiter

Then a recruiter will reach out, and get to know you, learn what you're looking for in your career.

Coding challenge

If there is a match, we proceed with what we call the coding challenge. This is basically a take-home assignment. It's meant to evaluate your coding style, and to see if you can implement a solution to a problem in a constrained amount of time.

We've recently lessened the time requirement, and designed the problem to be solved in about an hour, because not everyone can spend all day. It’s evaluated by one of our engineers, and if it looks good, we move forward.

What skills and traits are you looking for when recruiting engineers for Asana?

Technical skills

We have several stages of evaluation. I'm most familiar with the interview stage. We start with what we call technical design abilities.

We’re gauging the ability to build simple and scalable architectures. We also consider code quality, and look at naming conventions, refactoring, and whether they can produce navigable code.

Communication

We also carefully look at collaboration and communication skills.

Being able to explain your mental model for others is an important skill for a junior, so your mentor can correct it. This is crucial for a senior to be able to do mentoring. For collaboration, we look at how candidates pick up signals and adjust their approach as the interviewer guides the discussion in a certain technical direction.

Autonomy

We look at autonomy as well, which covers the ability to navigate a tricky problem. This involves a process of idea generation and cutting ideas down to a set of decisions. People have different strengths in this area. Ideally a candidate can both generate ideas, and be decisive about which ones to pursue.

Overall picture

We look out for red flags, like a candidate making the interviewer feel uncomfortable. We can’t have a rubric for everything, but we still notice things in the interview process and discuss it during the huddle. It’s the benefit of our process: we don’t just use a scoring system, but make a human decision.

This allows us to pick up on both positive and negative things that can’t be measured.

How do you keep your engineer recruitment process up-to-date?

Keep investing into recruitment

Companies need to find ways to continuously invest into the interview process. This may involve developing new interview questions, or empowering engineers to propose even big changes to the process.

Let people contribute to the recruitment process

An interesting effect is people going through the interview process, and once they join the company, they view it as a rite of passage, and they feel nervous about reflecting on it. Often it’s difficult for people to suggest changes to the process. Nobody wants to be the person who tries to lower the bar.

Everyone working at Asana is more than capable of changing the engineer recruitment process in positive ways, especially in collaboration with others. Leaders have a key role in encouraging people to keep asking questions and refine the process. This way you keep your process feel modern and competitive, and make a good impression on your candidates.

Evolve every aspect

We have areas of responsibility that people take on at Asana. We have several people focusing on our interview process, and some engineers that focus on this. A part of this is operational efficiency, accuracy and candidate experience.

They make sure we talk about any potential bias in our questions. We have a different owner for each of the questions who are responsible for training people, developing training materials and so on. Encouraging people involves making it safe to suggest ideas about our process, so it’ll keep moving forward.

Would you add anything else about recruiting engineers?

Working with all candidates has been an absolute pleasure at Asana. We have the honor of talking to many talented people in the industry. I've learned a lot working with these people and this process.

Asana has been an amazing place for me to work. I’m fully aligned with the company values, everything feels important to me. We are currently hiring engineers. I hope we can connect with many more developers in the future.

About Greg Sabo

I started my career in Cambridge, Massachusetts at IBM where I worked for a few months on internal tools. Later I worked for Echo Nest, which was acquired by Spotify soon after I left. I spent 2 years at HubSpot on the content teams, and that was my first time at a company that was growing at scale. I learned a lot about hiring and scaling team culture there.

Then I moved to San Francisco and spent 2 years as an engineer at Stripe. Then I came over to Asana and started working as an engineer about 3 years ago. I worked on monetization, and also led the internationalization engineering team.

For the past 2 years, I've been an engineering manager at Asana. I support developers across 4 different teams. We call this the adoption pillar of teams. My primary responsibility is to support my reports and give them clear goals for their growth and the team’s growth as well.