How we hired our Junior Software developer

Anyone can apply for a job. That’s a no-brainer. Endless hours scrolling job sites, a never ending compilation of cover letters and sitting by the phone waiting for the “you’ve got the job” call. What feels like minutes turns into eternity when you’re on the job seeking crew.

You’ll probably think about how badly you want to win the lotto too. It will be a constant thought throughout this process, as you attempt to navigate a foot in the door to make your contribution to capitalism.

With the growth of our company increasing, we decided we needed more hands on deck. So much work with limited resources meant that it was time to make the band bigger. Hiring a junior software developer was definitely not something I had done before but I’m never one to shy away from a challenge.

This was one of the first critical tasks I was given when I started several months ago. Daunting, I’ll admit, yes. For a process that was merely a few months ago, now feels like a mirage since I’ve experienced what it takes to hire candidates. Let’s see how we went for my first time doing the hiring process the Sanico way shall we?

Start the Clock

Before this role, I’ve had limited exposure to the Human Resources (HR) world of people. I’ve sat in on interviews or performed company introductions - the bare minimum of HR. In all fairness I can see why I didn’t follow the HR path. Majority of my experience with the HR world is one of constant eye roll. Listening to the standard corporate jargon of, “were here to help” or “you can come to us with anything.”

It’s a flytrap don’t believe it. You’ll get enveloped by thinking that way.

If you’re reading this sentence you may have had interesting experiences with hiring processes, HR teams and even just figuring out what you want to do as a job.

HR is there to protect the company.

It’s what I’ll try to do in this role as well. I’ll attempt to nourish our foundations of transparency and authenticity whilst “protecting” where I can.

We’re going to be the reason people all over the nation and probably the world, will rethink their perception of recruitment.

Because we think and move differently here at Sanico, the team and I have spent hours, days and weeks, scanning the market for the right fit. We were holding our glass slipper in front of us, waiting for our Cinderella to come collect their shoe.

I can now successfully say, the shoe has been collected and Cinderella is currently undergoing training.

But first, I’ll elaborate on how tedious the fitting can get.

Preparing for the fitting

I’m sure if you’re still reading that I’ve peaked your curiosity on how we’ve done the hiring process differently. “Mak, how can you know what you’re doing if you’ve never done it?”

Take a seat my friend. There’s more to life than always thinking you have to know how to do something before jumping into action. We all learned how to crawl, walk and talk at some point right? That’s the similar theory we’ve applied here.

Before my time at Sanico, Sav and Dom had been soldiering this out on their own. Trying to find Cinderellas from all over the country. It takes trust, intuition and a little bit of street smart to pick a candidate that you know will fit. Sometimes you’ll find out they won’t fit too. It’s a bit like scrummaging the table trying to find the missing jigsaw piece. But with a well written job ad, we believe that it will call the right candidates to the front line.

How did we write it? Simple, take a peak for yourself at our job ad:

We are looking for a motivated and willing learner. Someone who approaches unknown challenges head on, not hides from them. Someone that plays with the band, not a solo artist. A team player, not a lone ranger. A coder, not a prompter. We want someone that is enthusiastic to join the industry and bring their problem solving skills to Sanico.

Notice how we fire off straight away about the morals and principles we’re looking for? If you read well enough between the lines, you’ll see that we’re emphasising on looking for a team player. It’s one of our most important values that we cherish here at Sanico. You could try to be a solo artist, sure. But how are you going to make it big without the guitarist, the drummer, the visual and audio crew, or even your manager?

The point I’m making here is that we convey such a tone because we know that only a few singers will harmonise with our melody. Resonation and collaboration is where I’m taking this.

From writing a job ad that has contrasting differences to the corporate standard, we’re at an advantage on the field. Show me a job ad that get’s more personal than a bullet point list of “preferred candidate attributes”, or one that references working in your Oodie. Something we don’t do by the way. Only on Fridays. A job ad for the Oodie company itself doesn’t count. I’ll do you one better and show you ours. For those curious you can read the full job ad we wrote on Seek.

Once Sav and I were content with the magic we wrote in the ad, we were ready to see what awaited us in the jobs forum land. Pack the pumpkin carriage folks, we’re taking our glass slipper to find Cinderella!

Where to put our glass slipper

We released the ad onto numerous job forums not expecting the flood of applications that came rushing through. We took to Seek.com.au, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, and with a few hurdles we managed to get the ad on almost every Australian University job board. Once we did that, our ad started to reach the masses. I mean why wouldn’t it when you see what’s on offer right?

Fully remote, good pay for entry level, 3 days a week, the opportunity to work alongside a senior developer AND a super cool team. Sounds like a strike of lightning type of role.

As my first starting point, I decided to tackle the applications through Seek. For those reading this that aren’t familiar with Seek, it’s one of Australia’s leading job sites.

So here I am, watching the numbers grow every hour on Seek. Being the proactive person I am, I decided to void the applications that I knew didn’t hit the mark for us. The downside to this action was not realising that people receive a notification if you’ve rejected their application.

If you’re someone who applied for this role and this happened to you. I apologise for that. I dearly hope you found a role that aligns with your values, and the type of culture you’d like to be a part of. You choose the company you want to work for too.

If you’ve read up to this point, it means your intrigued by the background mechanisms of this process, and how we navigate the hiring process the Sanico way.

Continue to give me the time to tell you why I was able to void many applications very quickly. I’m just getting warmed up.

Like I said before, I was looking for a harmoniser. All these solo artists were showing me in the first 3 sentences of their cover letter, why their pitches weren’t going to blend with ours.

I’m looking for the X factor. A pitch perfect audition if you will.

Here’s a few examples of why I hit the red button…

Putting “I may not be the greatest pick” then following it up with thin air is not a great start.

Tell me what your skillset is! Why are you right candidate? Give me depth! This was the entire cover letter by the way.

When I show you further down who didn’t fall victim to the red button, you will gain a better understanding.

Before I go there, I want to bring attention to a vital aspect of this process. Being able to recognise who used AI to generate their cover letters.

Looking through the glass of AI cover letters

We asked for personalisation in our ad and no generic AI written applications. Contrary to the below comment hurled at us on YouTube, I hope they can read this and take it as a learning curve that we walk the walk, and talk the talk.

See how that’s contradicting when we have put our utmost authenticity into the job ad? Take a look at what we wrote in our job ad below:

We expect personalised cover letters, we will not accept any generic applications written by generative Al. We do not use Al to vet applicants, instead a team member of Sanico will personally read all cover letters submitted. In return we ask for the same courtesy.

That team member mentioned, is both myself and Sav. Endless scrolling to gauge if there’s a robotic undertone to candidates letters. We place a significant emphasis on the cover letter and not the resume for a few reasons. Our main point is we believe it is very hard to fake a well written cover letter. As good as AI is for a handful of tasks, the one thing it can’t do is give the personalisation that can only be done by humans. Sure, it could study your prompts and attempt to apply it’s creative flare. But we know well enough what true personalisation looks like.

Absorb that paragraph of our job ad, and allow me to show you examples of how easy it is to identify AI generation from the first few sentences.

What did you notice about those 3 examples? Was it the fact that they all value the craftsmanship, collaboration and mentorship of our company? I think so.

Those were a few examples of the thousands of opening paragraphs we read through. Now you have a glimpse into how we’re able to pinpoint a stand out application. Let’s see what that looked like.

Here is one of my favourite openers that really caught my eye!

It ticked the boxes for me. Intriguing, humorous and most importantly - personalised.

Here’s another goodie that made me go, “well alright then I see you!”

Okay fine, last one to show you the tone I’m seeking. Ha get it? Seeking on Seek…

If at this point you’re thinking, “well okay miss creative show us yours.” Well sure, here then. This is what caught Sav and Dom’s attention when I applied to work for them several months ago. Now I get to toot my own horn, not too loud though we’re still humble over here folks.

There’s a grammar error in there, my bad, but you get my point. If I got to write that letter again for the application with what I know now, I could only imagine what that would look like. Probably the same to be honest with a multitude of metaphorical references for Dom and Sav to laugh at.

The cover letter was an opportunity for candidates to puff their chest at us, and show us who we could be working alongside. When I wrote mine, I was tempted to AI generate my letter the same way I had for a few generic jobs I had applied for. Thank goodness I dropped my tea on my lap that day. It forced me to close all my browsing tabs and reopen them.

To my surprise the Sanico ad popped up again and I gave it another read. I backspaced my whole cover letter and started from scratch. I wasn’t even mad though. I thought it was a breath of fresh air to have the opportunity to write something personal without saying, “I align myself with the values of the company.” Thanks Dom and Sav for letting me cook in my cover letter.

The clock arms draw near

With so many great applicants to choose from, there could only be 1 ring to rule them all. great candidate that was going to sing in the band. I never foresaw the mountain of applications that would come our way. Now I get it. Hiring a candidate isn’t all accepting and rejecting. The ball had too many suitors, and we’re still looking for the owner of said glass slipper.

It’s an exhausting process and not everyone can come in the pumpkin carriage. It’s not big enough…yet.

When I say it was a mountain, I’m talking Everest. To me it is anyway.

If we’re talking figures, here are some actuals from our Seek statistics for our most recent role of the junior software dev.

• 1709 applications
• 14,130 clicks on our job ad
• 410,000 ad views

To put that in comparison for the business ops (my position) role that we hired for several months ago, I’ve drafted a stunning graph with the stats to compare to the 2 roles (the numbers have been rounded as whole figures.)

1701 applications compared to the 200 for the business ops role. That’s a whopping 750% increase! Have a look at the screenshot from Seek below:

Now of course I can’t forget the momentum of the other platforms. I mentioned previously our use of LinkedIn. This also brought significant attention to the job ad. In conjunction with LinkedIn, we used a software called Jotforms. It’s a fantastic platform that we utilised to create our stunning job ad, manage the masses of the applications and assist with our approval process.

Have a look at how chunky those submissions were as well.

That’s a total of 2338 applications that we sifted through. Does it make your brain hurt from those figures? Mine sure does. If your brain isn’t sore yet, keep in mind that a 2 person team sorted through those 2338 applications. I’m remembering the effort and time it takes to read every single one. It’s mind blowing.

When I say we’re different from the standard corporate fitting , I mean it. I’m not sure if any other company is operating on our wave length. If they are, I take my hat off to them. To navigate the hiring process like this takes fine curation, good resources, and the time to invest in looking for the right fitting candidate.

Now we’ve got the short listed applicants, It’s time to put them under the microscope and ask them to cite their cover letter back to front see who can actually sing live instead of only in the studio. If you didn’t catch that metaphor, I meant we’re ready to see if their letters match their personalities by the way.

I use metaphors religiously in my every day conversations and in my writing. Don’t be shocked now I’m just making sure to keep your imagination alive whilst you follow along. Here we go. Sav…pull the lever!

Here comes midnight

The pressure is on and we hit the ground running with initial interviews. We hosted brief video calls with our short listers to see if their personality was fitting for the band. I thoroughly enjoyed this part of the process as I’m a strong people person and love to see what version of people show up when they’re being interviewed.

We balance the scales of professionalism and casual very well here at Sanico. There are no questions to prepare for. I’m purely getting to know the candidates as human beings. Not the mundane robots we pretend to be when applying for a job.

I’m looking for flare, jazz fingers, a great hit!

I asked questions about what they like to do in their spare time, what ignites their soul, how they like their eggs, you get where I’m going.

We believe in breaking down that stigma of placing people under unrealistic situations that don’t happen in the professional world. Interviews are daunting, we know this. The corporate world has set that precedent of suffocating pressure to be the perfect candidate. It’s not something any applicant will ever have to worry about when applying for a role with us. We pride ourselves on moving with integrity, authenticity and respect for anyone who crosses paths with us.

Once the initial interviews were performed, we decided to send the candidates a paid technical take home assessment to complete. Give our podcast a listen to understand why we allow take homes rather than live assessments.

Now my fortress is business, not the technicalities of the coding world. At this point I’ve handed the reigns over to Dom and Sav. After reviewing the assessment results, it was time to decide who came to the table with what we’re looking for.

It’s a perfect fit!

It’s not an easy choice to decide who becomes part of our team. For anyone thinking, “well don’t you just choose the best performing candidate?”

Short answer. No.

We analysed who brought what to the table and how it was dished up. Back and forth conversations were had. Many hums and huh’s from all 3 of us.

Eventually we got there.

We were ready to hand our Cinderella their glass slipper!

Whilst excited we found our candidate, we then had the sad task of letting the unsuccessful candidates know that they weren’t getting the golden ticket to Sanico.

I personally found this really daunting. I had only ever been at the receiving end of an email or call that I didn’t get the job. I had to rip the band aid off and send out those unsuccessful outcomes. I was most uncomfortable with grappling my own emotions of how it feels to not get the job I wanted.

If any of the candidates are reading this, thank you. For the time you spent to give us an application that may change the way you think about hiring processes.

That’s not to say to rule yourselves out for any future roles. As Justin Bieber once said “Never say never”.

The responses I received from the candidates were nothing short of good sports. They took the outcome with grace and dignity. This painted a picture for me that what we’re doing, and how we do it really makes a difference. It also told me that we were choosing from the best of the bunch.

Curious as to what that grace looked like?

Okay fine I hate to do this again. I really do, it pains me …

So anyway, here are what a few of our candidates had to say about the way we performed our hiring process.

These are little positive reinforcements that I will treasure as my first time wearing the recruitment hat. Although I don’t possess the HR degree or certifications, I do have the gift of the gab. So do Sav, Dom and the rest of our synchronised team.The proof is in the pudding you see!

Moving through any avenue of our existence with authenticity and transparency, will always outweigh any rigid or conforming ideologies.

For anyone reading this that hasn’t had any luck with obtaining a job lately, I implore you to re-evaluate your strategy. What does that look like? Perhaps take one step back from the scrutiny of job hunting, evaluate if the companies you’re applying for suit your character. Do you like what they have to say? How did the interviewer make you feel? Is it somewhere you see yourself being a part of the furniture?

Never forget to remember who you are, what you can do and where you want to go.

Not only are companies choosing you, but most importantly, you’re choosing them.

One door closed means an even better one awaiting you to open it.

What an experience this was. I look forward to all the future recruitment opportunities that will come our way!