In most Western countries, there is a shortage of good programmers. A lot of businesses are vying for the same small business opportunities in cities like San Francisco, New York, London, and Berlin.
But to find modern programmers, you can’t use old methods like posting a job ad, networking, or paying too much for a local recruiter. There are months of open jobs while salaries keep going up because programmers move from one hot company to the next.
According to this Elance survey, 54% of business owners expect their workforce to be working remotely by 2017. “Business as usual” means adding someone to the team with whom you have already worked together, but imagine hiring someone you have never met. This post is meant to make it easier for you to find, hire, and train your next engineer or your whole remote development team.
Getting hired at a fast-growing company like 15Five takes more than just submitting a compelling resume You need to thoroughly prepare for the interview process to stand out among other qualified applicants
In this article, we’ll explore the top 20 most common interview questions asked at 15Five, along with tips on how to craft winning answers. Whether you have an upcoming screening call, an in-person interview, or a final round presentation, these insights will help you put your best foot forward
Overview of 15Five’s Interview Process
The 15Five hiring process typically involves multiple stages, including:
- Initial phone screen with a recruiter
- 1-2 technical interviews focused on your skills
- Culture interviews with future teammates
- Manager interviews to assess leadership capabilities
- Panel presentations to showcase your abilities
The process can take 4-6 weeks from initial application to final offer, Here’s what to expect at each stage
Recruiter Screen: In the 30 minute screening call, the recruiter will evaluate your resume, background, and motivation for the role. Be ready to discuss your experience and interest in 15Five.
Technical Interviews: These 1-hour sessions will test your hands-on skills through coding challenges, technical questions, and discussions about past projects. Brush up on languages like Python and JavaScript.
Culture Interviews: During 1-2 hour conversations, interviewers will assess your cultural fit through behavioral and situational questions. Highlight your collaborative spirit and innovative mindset.
Manager Interviews: Hiring managers will dig deeper into your leadership capabilities and experience driving results. Showcase your strategic thinking and team development skills.
Panel Presentations: In some final rounds, you may be asked to give a presentation and Q&A to multiple interviewers. Tailor your content to the role’s responsibilities.
Throughout each stage, 15Five assesses both hard skills and soft skills, looking for candidates who align with their values of transparency, trust, and innovation.
Now let’s look at the top questions you’re likely to encounter.
15Five’s Top Interview Questions
Here are 20 of the most frequently asked questions during 15Five interviews with tips for nailing your answers:
1. Why do you want to work for 15Five?
This is your chance to demonstrate genuine interest in the company and role. Research 15Five’s products, values, and mission ahead of time. Explain why you’re drawn to their focus on continuous performance development, transparent communication, and data-driven insights. Highlight any friends, colleagues, or mentors who use 15Five and have great things to say. Share how your own values and goals align with the company’s culture.
2. What appeals to you about this role?
Focus on 2-3 key responsibilities of the job that get you excited, like collaborating cross-functionally, conducting data analysis, building client relationships, etc. Discuss how the role aligns with your skills, interests, and career aspirations. Convey your eagerness to take on new challenges and grow professionally in the position.
3. Why do you want to leave your current/last job?
Be diplomatic here. Avoid bashing your past employer. Explain that you’ve greatly appreciated the opportunities you’ve had to develop new skills and experiences. However, you’re now looking for a new challenge where you can utilize those strengths, one that more closely aligns with your long-term goals. Keep it positive and focused on your growth.
4. What do you know about our products and services?
Do thorough research on 15Five’s software offerings like their performance management, employee engagement, leadership development, and analytics tools. Share your understanding of how these products help their clients in areas like OKR tracking, continuous feedback, and insights into team performance. Ask clarifying questions to get more details on features or capabilities you’re less familiar with.
5. How would you effectively engage potential customers during the sales process?
Showcase your consultative sales approach focused on understanding buyers’ pain points and crafting tailored solutions. Discuss strategies like asking probing questions, actively listening, presenting personalized demos focused on their needs, and following up regularly to provide ongoing value. Highlight any particularly creative or successful tactics you’ve used to generate leads and close deals.
6. How do you prioritize when juggling multiple projects and deadlines?
Prove you can balance priorities intelligently when resources are limited. Share your workflow management process, like creating detailed task lists, optimizing based on importance and urgency, communicating timelines with stakeholders, and being able to say no to non-critical work. Provide examples of instances where your prioritization ensured key projects were completed successfully and on time.
7. Tell me about a time you faced a challenging technical issue. How did you resolve it?
Choose an example that highlights your creative problem-solving and persistence. Explain the complex technical issue and your systematic process for diagnosing the root cause. Discuss any innovative solutions you came up with, as well as ways you collaborated with others to resolve the problem. Share the final outcome and key learnings that improved your technical skills.
8. How do you stay current on the latest trends in your field?
Demonstrate your commitment to continuous learning by outlining the podcasts, blogs, online courses, industry events, and other resources you leverage to stay updated. Share specific examples of new technical skills, frameworks, or best practices you’ve incorporated into your work based on these learnings. Convey your enthusiasm for constantly expanding your knowledge and expertise.
9. Tell me about a time you received constructive feedback from a manager. How did you respond?
Pick an example that highlights mature and professional responses to criticism. Explain the context and what specifically you were provided feedback on. Discuss how you actively listened, asked clarifying questions, expressed appreciation for the insights, and remained poised. Share the positive actions you took afterward to improve in that area. Keep the focus on your growth mindset.
10. Have you handled a difficult situation with a coworker before? What was your approach?
Choose an example that demonstrates conflict management and teamwork skills. Set up the challenging situation and individuals involved. Explain how you remained calm, encouraged open and respectful communication, identified mutual goals, and collaborated on solutions. Share the tactics you used to repair the relationship and establish harmony on the team again. Emphasize the positive resolution.
11. Why should we hire you over other candidates?
Focus on 2-3 standout strengths that make you the right fit, like unique technical expertise, proven leadership accomplishments, ability to quickly learn new skills, or creative problem-solving ability. Provide specific examples that back up these claims. You can mention being referred by an employee as a testament to your capabilities. Express genuine enthusiasm to bring your skills and passion to the role.
12. Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Present an ambitious yet realistic vision for your professional growth at the company. Express your passion for expanding your skills and experience in areas like people management, project leadership, specialized technical capabilities, product development, etc. Share how you hope to progress from individual contributor to team lead to manager or other aspirational roles. Convey your excitement about the opportunity to develop professionally at 15Five.
13. How do you motivate your team and foster collaboration?
For managerial roles, share approaches for boosting team spirit, recognizing achievements, and facilitating cooperation. Discuss tactics like one-on-ones, team-building activities, collaborative goal-setting, and public kudos for great work. Provide examples of times you united disjointed teams or improved morale. Outline your coaching and mentoring style focused on developing people.
14. How do you go about debugging code or troubleshooting technical errors?
Demonstrate a systematic, step-by-step approach rather than just trial-and-error. Explain techniques like reproduction, isolation, dividing and conquering, application logging, rubber duck debugging, etc. Share examples of specific complex bugs you’ve resolved using these methods. Highlight your persistence and creativity in exploring solutions. Emphasize how you leverage docs, collaborate with others, and document fixes.
15. What metrics would you track to measure the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns?
Prove you understand key performance indicators for marketing. Explain the metrics you would monitor, like click-through-rates, conversion rates, cost per lead, ROI per channel, social engagement, etc. Discuss how you would leverage data to identify the most effective campaigns, channels, creatives, offers. Highlight your ability to extract actionable insights and continuously optimize efforts based on performance.
16. How would you go about improving our product’s user experience and interface design?
Flaunt your user-centric design approach focused on simplicity, intuitiveness, visual appeal, and utility. Discuss your process, like gathering feedback from users and internal teams, journey mapping, wireframing iterations, prototyping, user testing, and documenting patterns. Share examples of how you’ve driven adoption and engagement through improved UX. Convey your passion for the methodical design process.
17. Tell me about a time you successfully influenced a team or individual without formal authority.
Illustrate strong powers of **pers
Recruiting & Onboarding Your Dev Team
Dan Norris, co-founder of WP curve wrote this instructive piece for remote recruitment from start to finish. Using Lucid Chart, I will share Dan’s secret sauce:
Step 1 – Trigger
We decide whether or not to hire and then kick off the process.
Step 2 – Recruitment
Here we find potential applicants, pre-screen them, trial them, and make a hiring decision.
Step 3 – Onboarding
As soon as we decide to hire someone, we add them to our systems and start their orientation.
One of the toughest jobs in hiring virtual players is the screening process. As people can’t visit your office without considerable investment, your abilities to interview are limited. You can’t see the candidate’s body language or listen to the subtle changes in the tone of their voice. But there is a sequence you can follow to get as close as possible to determining if the developer candidate will be good for your company:
1. Schedule a call. I recommend live video calls, which are always more effective. These are the best way to test for culture and values fit from afar.
2. Technical Proficiency. Dig a bit deeper with a technical interview and administer a short 2-4 hour technical exam. Then give the candidate a trial project.
For non technical roles, I have found selection to be more complicated if you do the recruitment remotely. Programmers can objectively be tested on their output (code quality, analysis skills, logical skills…etc…).
For a manager (e. g. content marketer, customer success manager), selecting a candidate is less objective. You need to understand the attitude and competencies of the person. And doing such interviews remotely via video conferencing can often convey the wrong of a person.
I finally figured something out. Agile development is a culture, not a process. @jevnin
I am a strong believer in having an office/management structure in place to hire managers. At Ekipa’s India office, we have an HR department, technical and project management, and a lot of programmers. These people make the hiring decisions. They do this with the local cultural setting and the company culture in mind. This makes it much easier to hire for cultural fit.
This method has been indispensible for hiring and selecting great remote colleagues. I recommend reading Who: The A-Method for Hiring, which also discusses how to coach and retain ‘A-players’.
1) Create a score card
Briefly describe the job you’re looking to fill, along with your goals and expected results for the job. You have to really think about the person you need and the performance you want to see when you make this scorecard.
Next, define the competencies you seek for this role. Topgrading has a set of 40 competencies that are well documented. For each competency you give an expected ‘score’ on a scale of 1-6. Here’s a sample score card that I recently used to hire our marketing and sales director.
2. The telephone interview
For sales positions, there’s very useful standard script in Topgrading for Sales. You talk with the candidate for 10-30 minutes to filter out the obvious mismatches. For remote positions, you can also perfectly do this through video conferencing.
3. Competency-based interview questions
There are proven questions linked to each competency, which I always use during interviews (sometimes to the annoyance of the candidate I must admit). The questions trigger responses that are about the candidate’s past experience; they must come up with specific cases or situations, no fictional or hypothetical answers.
15 SHORT ANSWERS to COMMON INTERVIEW QUESTIONS! (How to PREPARE for a JOB INTERVIEW!)
FAQ
What type of questions are asked in a manager interview?
What are the questions asked in Sunoida Solutions interview?
What is a 15-minute family interview?
The 15-minute family interview is a condensed form of the Calgary Family Assessment and Intervention Models (CFAM and CFIM) that aims to contribute to the establishment of a therapeutic relationship between nurses and family and to implement interventions to promote health and suffering relief, even during brief interactions.
Why should you use 15Five?
15Five’s features will give you space to have a voice. Your manager, senior leadership, and even executives now have deeper insight into, for example, your priorities, objectives, recognition, which can all lead to more effective 1-on-1 conversations with your manager.
What is a high five & how does it work?
Using High Fives to give recognition is an example of how you can enhance the existing culture in your organization—like a real life high five, but more amplified. As you may already know, the heart of 15Five is what we call the Check-in. More on the Check-in feature in a minute.
