Building our Engineering Team (Michael Mizrahi & Andrew Conner)

In this episode Levels Head of Operations Mike Mizrahi sat down with Head of Engineering Andrew Connor to talk about why engineers make up almost half of the 33 person Levels team and how they’ve been thinking about hiring and onboarding new teammates.

Using a “Teach Us Something” exercise to interview engineers

Each Levels engineering candidate is asked to pick a technical topic they’re passionate about, prepare a short lesson and present it.

I tell all of them pretend you are doing something to colleagues, not to professional customers, or something like that. Pick something that you’re passionate about. And so sometimes people write Notion documents or Google Docs, and then often talking through it with a Loom video or something like that. And the wonderful thing is we get an insight for what they think is interesting. We get an insight for how do they communicate a hard technical topic. And it doesn’t even have to be something that we know nothing about. It certainly could be. It’s often how well can you structure something where there’s an interesting hook, and it validates why we want to solve this problem. And so we’ve very much enjoyed them. It also lets us learn what is technically interesting for the candidate that we might be able to focus on later in the interview process.

Being a fully remote company is a chance to rethink “standard” practice

Levels has presented an opportunity to rethink the hiring process to align with what candidates are looking for an push back against the status quo as a remote company.

I think for many candidates, that starts with a good job posting. I’m kind of like a information management nut. And so I probably have something like 75,000 bookmarks or something like that. And for the past, maybe five or six years, I’ve saved good job posts that I thought were just really good. Where it’s they were transparent and they made it really exciting to learn more about the company and that sort of thing. And so that was the very first thing I did was I pull up a lot of these good job posts that I’d seen before, and try to find themes for them. And one of the biggest themes I found was transparency around where is the company? What’s it actually like? Not a checklist of skills you have, but potentially passions you have. And what’s the type of person that we’re interested in? And also why might you be interested in the company? If you look at a lot of job posts, they all look pretty homogenous and very difficult to get candidates really excited about the company. And so I thought the very first thing we need to do as a small company is get candidates incredibly excited about our mission and the opportunity, and that sort of stuff.

Setting clear expectations in the hiring process

By aligning expectations early in the hiring process the Levels team has been able to ensure better matching and ultimately a win-win scenario for candidates and the company.

Oftentimes I think companies approach it with, we have to find the right candidate. And so we’re going to search through this massive stack of resumes and applications, and sift through them to try and find the ones that we’re excited about. We have a unique opportunity with this async and documentation culture that keeps paying dividends, where we can show ourselves to candidates pretty transparently. We can open up all of our docs. We can have them to our Friday forums. We’re sharing a lot of that information anyways. And so by doing that, we let it’s really see what it’s like to work here to the point where when they start on day one, they already feel like they’ve known the company. They’ve known the individuals for as long as they’ve been in the recruiting process. I certainly felt that way. And it’s something we continue to hear from each and every person that starts is, day one actually isn’t that intimidating because they already know how things run. They’ve already read the docs. They’ve maybe not seen the full picture, but a pretty good understanding of how it works and how things run.

Finding the right fit for the company and the candidate

The Levels team recognizes the investment a candidate is making in choosing a new role and has intentionally focused on ensuring it’s possible for candidates to think slowly and make the best decision.

One difference I’ve found of very senior people that have worked at a few different companies and more junior people, is I think senior people recognize how important it is to find a good fit of the company that you’re working at, both in terms of product space, but also how they operate and people you want to work with. And I think in general, the average candidate doesn’t spend enough time genuinely thinking deeply about it. And I think that goes both ways to some extent of companies giving exploding offers to people. Where it’s like you have to choose quickly, and there’s FOMO. When in reality, I want someone to think really slowly and compare all their options, and feel really good about wherever they want to work. Because it’s hundreds and thousands of hours of their future life dedicated to something. And if they’re not fully engaged and it’s not the right fit, then it’s not going to be good for either side.

The advantages of hiring from your customer base

Many of the Levels team were previous community members which has helped ensure alignment with the mission and problem being solved.

I think a majority of our team has come through as members of Levels first before candidates or prospective hires. There’s also something interesting that I think I’ve noticed. We are lucky in both the content that we produce, and maybe not lucky, we put a lot of work into it, but the Levels education around the metabolic health crisis I was talking about earlier. Our blog and our kind of articles that we’ve written take care of a lot of that education and build the excitement, sell the mission up front. Such that the interview process itself doesn’t need to spend as much time on that.

Finding the right way to assess and measure candidates at Levels

Andrew was previously at Google where engineering interviews are famously algorithms and data structures heavy, whiteboard style interviews, finding the right assessment methods at Levels is a work in progress.

I think a lot of that reflects back to both the work they do and the history of Google, which is very academic and that sort of thing. And so it let us be able to think about, well, what are the things that we want to focus on? And what is the type of candidate we really care about? And it came up time and time again, that vision alignment and passion about metabolic health. And these sort of things are increasingly more important to us than how well you can whiteboard code, which is not necessarily an actual job skill that anyone actually needs. And so I think in many ways, a suite of tools has been built to try to automate technical filtering. And it’s a hard problem because, admittedly, the average candidate that’s applying to many software engineering roles is not the strongest software engineer. And it could be they haven’t had the right opportunities, or they’ve been in environments that haven’t pushed them quite the same way that a fast growing startup needs, or something like that. And I think it’s incentivized measuring things that are perceived to be objective and straightforward, and that kind of thing. Instead of leaning into vision alignment and culture alignment, which there’s no number that comes out of that.

Measuring engineers on creativity vs classic software interview tasks

Engineering interviews might traditionally include puzzles or coding challenges but the Levels team is careful to focus on creativity as a prerequisite.

when I think of really strong software engineers, I think of this creative aspect. That I’m not so sure how implementing a heap sort, or the classic joke of inverting a binary tree or something like that, I’m not sure those measure what we care about most. And it’s not to say that they’re meaningless, but I find that they put a wall very early on in the process that doesn’t necessarily give us strong signal. And potentially filters out people that just don’t have time for that kind of thing. And instead they want to talk to us as humans. They want to demonstrate their technical ability to us directly and proceed that way.

Orienting the interview process to how Levels works remotely

As Levels is a fully remote company, the team decided early on to align the hiring process with the way the team actually works day to day.

If you think about in a remote first company, there’s a lot of distributed work occurring. And with engineering, it’s technical distributed work. And so someone might be investigating a way to scale our data stores, or preserve privacy, or a product analytics tool or something like that. And the outcome of it often is some kind of technical communication. Where it’s like, okay, we have this really cool system that we’re going to build on top of… Here’s what it is, here’s how it works. And really transmitting that information as effectively as possible to your team. Because we don’t lean first on meetings, often that is a memo. It’s an engineering design. It’s a Loom video, or something like that. And so we were thinking of what can people oriented towards how we actually work, as early on in the process, but also help us design the rest of the process.

The advantages of recording “Teach Us Something” presentations

One added bonus of being able to record a candidates presentation is the ability to asynchronously loop in other team members to get a sense of how the candidate thinks about a problem.

the distribution of that recorded piece of content lets other people not in the interview process get a glimpse of the candidate. So the candidate might not have met someone across the team, but we can show their materials and show their application, and kind of send that over to someone to get a full picture. And because we’re recording every step of the way, the informal chats, the teach us something, and any other chats that happen in between, folks who meet that candidate later on, in the same way that the candidate already has an inside view of the company, has seen the form, has seen people present. We’ve seen that candidate. And so it might be a little bit, we can catch some folks off guard when it’s asking if we can record the interview. They might think it might be overanalyzed later. But in fact it just gives more people across the team the ability to meet that candidate without necessarily having to set up more and more 30 minute sync calls to the point they’re meeting the whole team.

Being transparent about everything in an offer

Compensation packages are often misunderstood or don’t include all the information that’s really needed for candidates to make informed decisions, the Levels process is designed to ensure this is never the case.

Especially in tech, I think a lot of people, more junior into their careers, don’t really know how to evaluate offers. They don’t know how to ask for shares outstanding, and these kind of things. To understand what their equity might be worth, and be able to wrap their mind around it and reason about it. And in my mind, that’s kind of ridiculous. It’s not very respectful to candidates to not be very forthcoming. And so we give people pro formas that basically answer all the major questions. How much money have we raised? How much dilution have we taken so far? How many share are there? What are our expectations in the future? What alternate financing might we be able to do? That kind of thing. And I think a lot of candidates are like, wow. Especially candidates that are receiving three or four offers from other companies. Realizing, well, at least I fully understand this. And we include our compensation philosophy memo. And so this is actually our internal memo. But how do we determine compensation and leveling, and that kind of thing. And I think it makes people feel really good. It makes them feel that there’s not a chance that there’s a gotcha, or that if they don’t negotiate correctly, that they’re getting a bad deal or anything like that.

Andrew Connor: We came up with teach us something, which is software engineer picks a technical topic they’re passionate about. Prepares a short lesson. It does not need to be super polished. I tell all of them pretend you are doing something to colleagues, not to professional customers, or something like that. Pick something that you’re passionate about. And so sometimes people write Notion documents or Google Docs, and then often talking through it with a Loom video or something like that.

Andrew Connor: And the wonderful thing is we get an insight for what they think is interesting. We get an insight for how do they communicate a hard technical topic. And it doesn’t even have to be something that we know nothing about. It certainly could be. It’s often how well can you structure something where there’s an interesting hook, and it validates why we want to solve this problem. And so we’ve very much enjoyed them. It also lets us learn what is technically interesting for the candidate that we might be able to focus on later in the interview process.

Ben Grynol: I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health. And this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is A Whole New Level.

Ben Grynol: As we’ve been building out the team at Levels, there are all these processes that we’ve been iterating on. We’ve been evolving them. And that is that we never want the interview process to feel opaque. We never want the company to feel opaque. We want people to feel truly like there’s a sense of value that is reciprocated both ways. Oftentimes in hiring processes with companies, there’s a sense of leverage where the company has leverage over the candidate. We don’t want to sell candidates and we don’t want candidates to sell us. It’s something that we think about with perspective talent. How do we create a transparent process that truly feels like people understand who our team is, who the team members are? Who are they going to get to work with and what are they going to get to work on every day? So how do we do that?

Ben Grynol: Well, transparency through things like investor updates. Transparency through our all hands weekly meetings on Fridays, called the Friday forums. We post these 12 months after they’ve taken place. But when we’ve got perspective candidates in the pipeline, well, we often send them these investor updates and Friday forum meetings, the links to YouTube. We send them in real time right after they’ve occurred. And so when people come on board, different teammates, they often say, “Hey, I feel like I already know the team.” Which is a pretty cool thing to feel that sense of chemistry between people.

Ben Grynol: Well, when it comes to engineering, engineers make up roughly half of our 33 person team as of October 18, 2021. With engineers, we don’t want there to ever be a sense of a process where we’re trying to trick people. Here’s a hard question, go and solve it. What we want to do is give people the opportunity to document things, find areas where they can offer insight into what we’re doing. Pick things apart. That’s what gives us value. That’s what gets us pumped up.

Ben Grynol: So Miz, Michael Mizrahi, head of operations and Andrew Connor, head of engineering, one of the co-founders of Levels, the two of them sat down and they talked about this process of building out our team, and onboarding new team members. Something that we invest a ton of time in as a company, and we think is the most important aspect of bringing people on board. Making sure that they are ramped up fully without expecting them to just start doing work on day one. The goal is to make sure that people are onboarded and supported so that they can be the most impactful team member once they start jamming on work. And so here’s Miz and Andrew.

Michael Mizrahi: It seems like engineering is probably the first org within the company that we did the most significant amount of hiring in. A lot of the roles have filtered in later. And a lot of our hiring practices have really taken after what we’ve set up with engineering. And so, yeah. How did it start? How did we get here? What do we do when we walk through it?

Andrew Connor: Yeah. I think one theme across Levels is when you build a fully remote company, you can reevaluate certain things that might have been best practices with co-located companies or the way things used to be when building tech startups. And so one of them we wanted to do was think very carefully about the interview process. And I think for many candidates, that starts with a good job posting. I’m kind of like a information management nut. And so I probably have something like 75,000 bookmarks or something like that. And for the past, maybe five or six years, I’ve saved good job posts that I thought were just really good. Where it’s they were transparent and they made it really exciting to learn more about the company and that sort of thing.

Andrew Connor: And so that was the very first thing I did was I pull up a lot of these good job posts that I’d seen before, and try to find themes for them. And one of the biggest themes I found was transparency around where is the company? What’s it actually like? Not a checklist of skills you have, but potentially passions you have. And what’s the type of person that we’re interested in? And also why might you be interested in the company? If you look at a lot of job posts, they all look pretty homogenous and very difficult to get candidates really excited about the company. And so I thought the very first thing we need to do as a small company is get candidates incredibly excited about our mission and the opportunity, and that sort of stuff.

Michael Mizrahi: It’s funny you mentioned that because I’m thinking back to my recruiting process. About a year ago, the company was about 10 people. And what hooked me, one of the first things that caught my interest, was the job description for this ops role. It felt a little bit different. It felt really personal. If I recall correctly, there was the why you might be excited about us, but then there’s also the why you might not be excited about us. And I think that’s the part that actually won me over, thinking back to it. And I think to this day we still have that section in our job descriptions in our posts.

Andrew Connor: Yeah. If you think about hiring as matchmaking, and people trying to find a really good fit of a company that they’re excited to work for, and companies trying to find candidates that they want to hire, an important thing is letting both sides have transparency. And understand, I guess, realities of where each is at. And so it’s interesting that companies try to find where candidates might not meet expectations, but they’re not really candid in where they might not meet a candidate’s expectations.

Andrew Connor: And there’s certain things that might not be negative or positive, there’s just things about the company. Levels is 100% remote. If one of your favorite things is office culture, it’s not going to be a good fit. And so we should be completely upfront about that to let someone else filter out. Or if they’re looking for mentorship in their career stage, it’ll just be really difficult for us of being the right fit for them because we don’t have a co-presence where really strong mentorship can occur right now. And so I felt it was important, both in terms of honesty, but also just letting candidates naturally filter themselves out by presenting, I guess, maybe some of the more controversial things about the company. And I think it’s done us pretty well of just finding the things that a good candidate, that might be a really good fit for another company, might not like about ours. And just being open about it.

Michael Mizrahi: Yeah. You raised some good points there. I think about being transparent and making sure it’ a two-way process. Oftentimes I think companies approach it with, we have to find the right candidate. And so we’re going to search through this massive stack of resumes and applications, and sift through them to try and find the ones that we’re excited about. We have a unique opportunity with this async and documentation culture that keeps paying dividends, where we can show ourselves to candidates pretty transparently. We can open up all of our docs. We can have them to our Friday forums. We’re sharing a lot of that information anyways.

Michael Mizrahi: And so by doing that, we let it’s really see what it’s like to work here to the point where when they start on day one, they already feel like they’ve known the company. They’ve known the individuals for as long as they’ve been in the recruiting process. I certainly felt that way. And it’s something we continue to hear from each and every person that starts is, day one actually isn’t that intimidating because they already know how things run. They’ve already read the docs. They’ve maybe not seen the full picture, but a pretty good understanding of how it works and how things run.

Michael Mizrahi: And so it’s great that we can do that, but it really is a two-sided experience where we show everything we can to the candidate, and also make sure they understand everything that they would like to about the company. And then through the interview process itself, which we’ve structured with some getting to know you chats, technical discussion, a technical challenge, we get to understand them and how they work and think. And so it seems to have worked out well so far.

Andrew Connor: Yeah. And it’s interesting. One difference I’ve found of very senior people that have worked at a few different companies and more junior people, is I think senior people recognize how important it is to find a good fit of the company that you’re working at, both in terms of product space, but also how they operate and people you want to work with. And I think in general, the average candidate doesn’t spend enough time genuinely thinking deeply about it. And I think that goes both ways to some extent of companies giving exploding offers to people. Where it’s like you have to choose quickly, and there’s FOMO. When in reality, I want someone to think really slowly and compare all their options, and feel really good about wherever they want to work. Because it’s hundreds and thousands of hours of their future life dedicated to something. And if they’re not fully engaged and it’s not the right fit, then it’s not going to be good for either side.

Michael Mizrahi: We had a candidate recently who was exceptional. She was incredible. I think we all loved her through the interview process. Really strong skillset. And I think she self-selected out because of some of the remote pieces. And it wasn’t the first thing. It was pretty late in the game in terms of the recruiting process. But that always sticks in my mind, just the way that she navigated it in a very mature and thoughtful way. And it’s nice that she felt so supported through the interview process in order to make that decision. I think we exchanged some words when that happened. But this has happened a few times and something that comes to mind.

Andrew Connor: And I think I alluded to earlier, every company has controversial things about it. And I don’t mean politically controversial or anything like that, but opinions the company has of how they should operate. And it’s not a good fit for everyone. Hiring in many ways is mutually finding really good fits. Whether it’s a vision alignment, passion alignment, skills alignment, that kind of thing. And so in many ways, we tried to design the interview process to reflect that. And one of the things early on that I recognized is the strongest candidates can work for many companies. They have many options. And so thinking very carefully about how do we want to structure the funnel that might not necessarily be the most time efficient, but ends up with people that are incredibly excited and incredibly passionate about us, our space, and that sort of stuff.

Michael Mizrahi: Yeah. Maybe we should jump in and talk a little bit about our process and explain the steps that we have through it. The first thing is just awareness of the company and awareness of our mission. So on the first part, how we work, how we think, how we operate. And there’s a lot out there publicly about that we’ve released. And then also on the mission, in terms of the metabolic health crisis, how we think about the CGM space, how we want to impact people’s lives. We’ve been lucky to date to say that a lot of our candidates have found us organically. They’ve come across us from podcasts, from their network. We haven’t done a lot of outbound sourcing to try and get candidates in. But really have had candidates flowing through to us. I think the first hire we made on the engineering side was John. Is that right?

Andrew Connor: Yes. And that was actually just a really good confluence. I posted on Hacker News very early before we had anything all that public. And he was incredibly passionate about metabolic health. And I structured the posting kind of similarly where it’s looking for people that are really into what we’re doing. Because at the time it wasn’t even clear exactly what we were going to build. And so I think vision and mission alignment was one of the most important things.

Andrew Connor: From there, you’re right that we’ve been able to benefit from being able to even just hire from our customer base, which is kind of special. Especially comparing to something like a B2B SaaS company, which is their customers are other companies. And so it’s very difficult to do that. We have a very large wait list of people that know who we are, are passionate about the space. And so that’s actually been our largest hiring funnel is people that weren’t necessarily looking for a new job found us first. And then from there, started discussions about potentially joining the company.

Michael Mizrahi: Yeah. No, that’s a good point. I think a majority of our team has come through as members of Levels first before candidates or prospective hires. There’s also something interesting that I think I’ve noticed. We are lucky in both the content that we produce, and maybe not lucky, we put a lot of work into it, but the Levels education around the metabolic health crisis I was talking about earlier. Our blog and our kind of articles that we’ve written take care of a lot of that education and build the excitement, sell the mission up front. Such that the interview process itself doesn’t need to spend as much time on that.

Michael Mizrahi: And I think part of our intro call is sharing that problem, explaining how we’re going to approach it. But we don’t really have to get lost in all the details, and not waste the time, but use that time speaking with of candidates when they can educate themselves. And then we can spend the time talking about how we work, how they work, what they’re looking for, whether there’s a fit there. And that makes the interview process a little bit more efficient. Otherwise I think it’s very easy to spend a lot of time just talking about the product itself when a lot of that can be done asynchronously. Which again, leaning into our principles, seems like the right way to do it.

Andrew Connor: Yeah. And very much in addition to what’s out there, we try to be as transparent as we can. When we find a candidate that we’re excited about, we basically open everything up. And so we add them to our investor update list. We send them our most recent company all hands. Building on what you were mentioning before of we want people to really understand what it’s like internally in the company. And we write the investor update no matter what. They’re for our investors and advisors. And so it’s very easy for us to give people inside peaks into how we’re operating, how things are going, what are the challenges we’re working on?

Andrew Connor: And I think people, they really appreciate that. They recognize that we’re not necessarily hiding anything about the company. And we’ll share internal memos with people. Anything that’s not protected by an NDA or anything like that. Very happy if someone’s interested in marketing strategy or wants to see an engineering design document of a major feature we built. I am incredibly open to share those with people to really let them have as clear of an image as possible early on.

Andrew Connor: And then it becomes really interesting because our calls after that are largely driven by their curiosity. Instead of trying to understand what is the business, it’s a understanding how do we operate? How do we get around very few meetings? How do we decide what to work on? What does our product roadmap look like? These kind of things. And these are the most exciting things to talk about. Instead of what is it that we’re building and that sort of stuff.

Michael Mizrahi: Switching gears a little bit, there was a few week period where we were trying to filter through a ton of candidates using some kind of technical challenges, using these platforms that exist which kind of test general engineering skills, knowledge. We ultimately decided not to go with those. I think the signal that we were getting wasn’t necessarily the right one. But do you want to talk about that in a little bit more detail?

Andrew Connor: Yeah. So I was previously at Google. And Google is famous for our algorithms and data structures heavy, whiteboard style interviews. And I think a lot of that reflects back to both the work they do and the history of Google, which is very academic and that sort of thing. And so it let us be able to think about, well, what are the things that we want to focus on? And what is the type of candidate we really care about? And it came up time and time again, that vision alignment and passion about metabolic health. And these sort of things are increasingly more important to us than how well you can whiteboard code, which is not necessarily an actual job skill that anyone actually needs.

Andrew Connor: And so I think in many ways, a suite of tools has been built to try to automate technical filtering. And it’s a hard problem because, admittedly, the average candidate that’s applying to many software engineering roles is not the strongest software engineer. And it could be they haven’t had the right opportunities, or they’ve been in environments that haven’t pushed them quite the same way that a fast growing startup needs, or something like that. And I think it’s incentivized measuring things that are perceived to be objective and straightforward, and that kind of thing. Instead of leaning into vision alignment and culture alignment, which there’s no number that comes out of that. Or there’s no objective thing that’s able to be measured quite so easily.

Andrew Connor: And so all these tools try to measure data structures and algorithms interviews in a very impersonal sort of way. And I think the outcome of this is measuring trivia more than it’s measuring problem solving ability. Because if you think about what a software engineer primarily is doing, it’s a very creative position. It’s creatively solving problems and thinking through trade offs and coming up with alternate ways that you can do something.

Andrew Connor: And when I think of really strong software engineers, I think of this creative aspect. That I’m not so sure how implementing a heapsort, or the classic joke of inverting a binary tree or something like that, I’m not sure those measure what we care about most. And it’s not to say that they’re meaningless, but I find that they put a wall very early on in the process that doesn’t necessarily give us strong signal. And potentially filters out people that just don’t have time for that kind of thing. And instead they want to talk to us as humans. They want to demonstrate their technical ability to us directly and proceed that way.

Michael Mizrahi: Yeah. Your classic engineering jokes are lost on me, but the points stands. The person who nails the LSAT or the MCAT doesn’t necessarily make the best lawyer or physician. There’s a rote learning approach and a rote testing and filtering approach. And then there are other ways to get at what we’re looking for. I think the way we do this mostly is just through conversation and understanding their background and walking through what they’ve worked on. But also the technical challenge at the end, we’ve called it different things for different roles, that teach us something.

Michael Mizrahi: But what we do here basically is let the candidate run through, either live or asynchronously, a video presentation walking us through something that they’d like to teach us. And it could be related to their role. It could be related to one of their interests, but it just gives us an inside view into how they communicate, how they structure a lesson, how they think about teaching. Gives us an insight into what their interests are.

Michael Mizrahi: And also by asking questions in that process, we can understand and where their knowledge actually exists, and how deep they can go. And how much they can nerd out on a particular area that they’ve chosen to teach us on. And that’s been incredibly effective at filtering out candidates by running that process. And so we tailor it for the roles. Engineering might have engineering specific teach us somethings. Operations might do something else. It might be something related to what they learned earlier on in the interview process, or it can be something else completely. But it is a nice format that I think has worked well given remote and given what we like to learn about people.

Andrew Connor: Yeah. If you think about in a remote first company, there’s a lot of distributed work occurring. And with engineering, it’s technical distributed work. And so someone might be investigating a way to scale our data stores, or preserve privacy, or a product analytics tool or something like that. And the outcome of it often is some kind of technical communication. Where it’s like, okay, we have this really cool system that we’re going to build on top of… Here’s what it is, here’s how it works. And really transmitting that information as effectively as possible to your team. Because we don’t lean first on meetings, often that is a memo. It’s an engineering design. It’s a Loom video, or something like that.

Andrew Connor: And so we were thinking of what can people oriented towards how we actually work, as early on in the process, but also help us design the rest of the process. And so we came up with teach us something which is, as you were talking about, a exercise where a software engineer picks a technical topic they’re passionate about, prepares a short lesson. It does not need to be super polished. So I tell all of them pretend you are doing something to colleagues, not to professional customers, or something like that. Pick something that you’re passionate about.

Andrew Connor: And so sometimes people write Notion documents or Google Docs, and then often talking through it with a Loom video or something like that. And the wonderful thing is we get an insight for what they think is interesting. We get an insight for how do they communicate a hard technical topic. And it doesn’t even have to be something that we know nothing about. It certainly could be. It’s often how well can you structure something where there’s an interesting hook, and it validates why we want to solve this problem, and that kind of thing. And so we’ve very much enjoyed them. It also lets us learn what is technically interesting for the candidate that we might be able to focus on later in the interview process.

Andrew Connor: And so through that, we learn more about their experience, what sort of problems they’ve had to solve before. And it’s also very time efficient. Both on them, where they’re not having to do a eight hour take home kind of thing, where they don’t really get good feedback on. They can actually do it based on something… Sometimes it’s based on something they’ve already prepared. And so we’ve actually received people’s public conference talks. Or recently we had a candidate that shared a internal lesson they actually taught someone else earlier. And so it’s a very time efficient way of doing this. And then allows us to consume it asynchronously. So our team can take a look at these lessons on their own time and provide feedback, and that sort of thing. So it’s actually been very illustrative of how we actually work and what it might be to be inside of Levels.

Michael Mizrahi: One other thing there, the distribution of that recorded piece of content lets other people not in the interview process get a glimpse of the candidate. So the candidate might not have met someone across the team, but we can show their materials and show their application, and kind of send that over to someone to get a full picture. And because we’re recording every step of the way, the informal chats, the teach us something, and any other chats that happen in between, folks who meet that candidate later on, in the same way that the candidate already has an inside view of the company, has seen the form, has seen people present. We’ve seen that candidate. And so it might be a little bit, we can catch some folks off guard when it’s asking if we can record the interview. They might think it might be overanalyzed later. But in fact it just gives more people across the team the ability to meet that candidate without necessarily having to set up more and more 30 minute sync calls to the point they’re meeting the whole team.

Andrew Connor: Yeah, definitely. And the one thing that we do with engineering is the teach us something always informs our technical discussion. So we do a 45 minute, hour long technical discussion, which is basically a deep dive into their experience. How they like to solve problems, how they structure their time, how they work with product and design teams, that sort of thing. But we always begin by asking follow up questions about their teach us something. And the wonderful thing is it allows us to actually go to deeper than their actual lesson. And this gives us a lot of signal about how deep does this person go? Do they fully understand the thing that they chose do a lesson on? But also it’s just a really good conversational launching point of what’s interesting to them, and that sort of thing.

Michael Mizrahi: What might be challenging for us is figuring out how to keep this much of a personal interview experience as we get larger. And I think that’s true across multiple parts of our company, right? It’s much easier to do things with 10 people and pat ourselves on the back, but doing that same process with 100, look very different. So we’re in October, fall 2021. We’ve just crossed the 30 person mark for full-time employees. And we have pretty the ambitious hiring and recruiting goals, particularly in engineering, through the next few quarters. We’ve done all of our recruiting on our own so far. So we don’t have any recruiters on the team. No recruiting coordinators. We’re just right in there ourselves. At some point, this’ll break. And I think we know that there are certain trade offs that come along with it in terms of our responsiveness, ability to stay on top of things. No one’s full-time job is just recruiting. And so there’ll come a point where that changes, and we need to make sure that some of these pieces that are important to us don’t get lost.

Andrew Connor: Yeah. One of the things I’m optimistic on is, as Levels proceeds, there’ll be more and more content out there. So certain things that required a lot of human time will be able to scale, such as conversations like this and that sort of thing. So I’m hopeful there. We’ve also been able to find people to join the company that really care about keeping the company culture strong, and people to be vision aligned, and that sort of thing. And so because of that, there’s been a lot of passion across the company to be involved in hiring. And so that’ll be another way that we try to scale this. But absolutely, we’ve taken a sales first approach to candidate discussions in hiring. It’s incredibly time intensive, but it’s one of those things that early on, first 100 employees in Levels, will be so meaningful to the outcome of the company that I think it’s a healthy and good trade-off for us to make right now.

Michael Mizrahi: Yeah. Fully agreed. I think it comes through, which is great to see, that we’ve been able to maintain it.

Andrew Connor: Yeah. And the last step, we talked about the teach us something and the technical discussion. We do have a technical evaluation at the end. And for different job roles, it looks different. For engineering, we try to have problems that resemble actual work as much as possible. So to give you an example, we recently hired our first dedicated data scientist. And as a part of it, we wanted someone that thought really creatively about data science. And so we actually structured a problem that was using glucose data that was publicly available, and really seeing how creative can they get finding interesting things in the data. And so that was exactly what we were wanted to measure. And so for our software engineering, we try to structure coding exercises that resemble the job as much as possible.

Andrew Connor: Nothing’s perfect, but one of the things I flag to each candidate is we’ve really genuinely tried to not waste their time. I’ve talked to candidates where they’ve been interviewing at other companies, and the first step at a lot of companies is this half day technical challenge, or something like that. That in many ways is almost disrespectful to candidates, especially people whose resume speaks for itself. And so we definitely still do want to establish a high technical competency bar, but by the time someone gets to that stage, they understand what we’re about. We understand what they’re about. And they’re able to more directly demonstrate how they like to approach problems and that kind of thing.

Michael Mizrahi: It’s funny. I’m thinking through past friends or coworkers that I’ve spoken to who are engineers, and have griped about interview processes at past companies. And a few of the things that have come up consistently. One, the extremely long technical challenges that take them at least a few weekends worth to get through that the company has expectations on turnaround time for. And so they’re actually doing a lot of work to actually apply. The other is exploding offers, that has come up, where someone gets an offer, they have a day to accept it. And they don’t have enough information to make that decision. And I’ve heard complaints about that. So it’s great that we’ve taken the things that traditionally we’ve disliked that we’ve seen in the industry, that we’ve seen in other companies, and just corrected for those in our own interview process. Hopefully to make the process that we would want to go through ourselves and to attract the people who appreciate that as well.

Andrew Connor: Yeah. And it’s I am still very humble about our process. I’m sure it’s going to iterate. And so if you’re listening to this in six months, it might be a bit different. But I think that’s good. And it’s good that we keep a level of humbleness, and being receptive to feedback from candidates. In many ways, hiring is awkward, just like dating or any kind of matchmaking can be awkward. And so we’ve tried to think about it as candidate first as we can. And as the realities of the company change, I’m sure we’ll be able to adapt the process also.

Michael Mizrahi: And I think that’s an important acknowledgement too. The process is far from perfect. We’ve had hiccups along the way. We were running this manually a while back, let’s say a year ago. We introduced an applicant tracking system, Workable, let’s say six months ago. Which added some structure, but introduced other challenges of just visibility, communication. We use Calendly for scheduling. So it’s a big dance in coordination to get this to run well, especially as we’re focused on it and we want to get it right. But it’s a hard process to nail. So there’s a lot of room for improvement as we continue to grow.

Andrew Connor: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And to build on what you said about exploding offers, it’s kind of so sad. Because in many ways, I think companies approach it like closing a sales deal. And to some extent it is. You want people to accept and be excited. However there shouldn’t be any gotchas there. It’s very strange to start off an employment relationship on such a weird foot.

Andrew Connor: And so after the coding evaluation, whether it’s a take home, or we have a few different options for people to do based on whatever works best for them, we really just want them to feel really good about where we’re at in the company. And so we let people talk to as many people as they want in the company. And so it’s not unusual for a software engineering candidate to be like, “I get the engineering story, I get the product story. Can I talk to your chief medical officer? I want to understand the medical side of this and kind of the longterm possibility.” And I think people very much appreciate that and get excited when they understand the entire organization and where they might be able to have an impact once joining.

Michael Mizrahi: Yeah. They’re buying into a pretty big mission, and contributing a sizeable amount of their life and time and energy and effort to this. And so making sure that they feel aligned and feel invested in it and have given it a full look is certainly important. I think this also extends to the offer process itself, where we’re fairly transparent about the benchmarking data that we use, the pro forma that we share to explain how we think about equity. Very employee friendly in terms of the approach there. And that the process extends beyond the recruiting, through the offer process, through the onboarding, and through our actual employee people processes, which are very employee friendly and focused.

Andrew Connor: Yeah, that’s true. Especially in tech, I think a lot of people, more junior into their careers, don’t really know how to evaluate offers. They don’t know how to ask for shares outstanding, and these kind of things. To understand what their equity might be worth, and be able to wrap their mind around it and reason about it. And in my mind, that’s kind of ridiculous. It’s not very respectful to candidates to not be very forthcoming. And so we give people pro formas that basically answer all the major questions. How much money have we raised? How much dilution have we taken so far? How many share are there? What are our expectations in the future? What alternate financing might we be able to do? That kind of thing.

Andrew Connor: And I think a lot of candidates are like, wow. Especially candidates that are receiving three or four offers from other companies. Realizing, well, at least I fully understand this. And we include our compensation philosophy memo. And so this is actually our internal memo. But how do we determine compensation and leveling, and that kind of thing. And I think it makes people feel really good. It makes them feel that there’s not a chance that there’s a gotcha, or that if they don’t negotiate correctly, that they’re getting a bad deal or anything like that.

Michael Mizrahi: Yeah. And it doesn’t cost us anything to do this. We’re not showing any cards that we need to play later. It’s just the way we roll. And it’s a pretty fair process so far.

Andrew Connor: Yeah. And then from then, I must say, you have such a wonderful process to onboard people of such a clear onboarding document and calendar of things, and that sort of stuff. I think when you started doing that, the number of questions I was receiving basically dropped to zero. Where candidates fully got it. They’re like, oh, cool. This is when my Google account will be set up. Here are books I should be reading if I’m interested, and that sort of thing.

Michael Mizrahi: Yeah. Thanks for the compliment there. It’s a work in progress and constantly being improved. When things come up over the course of a regular work day that someone references or that, oh, this might be really good to make sure people see this in the future, you just have to put it in at that exact moment. And that’s how the project gets built. Versus a point in time where you build it once. So just constantly iterating on it, making sure that the pieces that are important are getting in there, the right memos are being referenced. Super important to make sure that new hires have that full visibility to what we think is important and want to impart as they get started. So, yeah, I guess that is a continuation of the process. I think we can call it there. We’ve given a pretty good overview how we think about hiring, recruiting, interviewing. Anything else in your mind?

Andrew Connor: No. I think if anyone listening has any feedback or tips for us, we’re very open to improving the process the best we can. And it’s interesting, even though we’re hiring quite a bit as people, we’re not interviewing other places. And so we don’t really get data of what are the best practices and what are the ways we can improve our process. So yeah, very open to ways that we can improve, be more candidate friendly, be more open, that sort of thing.

Michael Mizrahi: Yeah. Absolutely. Do you want to share email. Is that the best way to throw suggestions in? I guess if candidates are already in the process, they’ve got it.

Andrew Connor: Yeah. And anyone can reach out to me, [email protected].

Michael Mizrahi: Great. And I’m Miz, M-I-Z, @levelshealth.com. Great. Yeah. Thanks for the chat, Andrew. This is fun.

Andrew Connor: Yeah. Thank you so much. And I look forward to chatting soon. What do you think is the right hook?

Michael Mizrahi: Yeah. What’s the?

Andrew Connor: Like the right place to start?

Michael Mizrahi: Yeah. Maybe we can.

Andrew Connor: Probably not our process. Maybe our philosophy.

Michael Mizrahi: Yeah, that sounds right.

Andrew Connor: Okay.

Michael Mizrahi: I can lead us off with a little bit of an intro.

Andrew Connor: Fantastic. I’m ready.