A lot of candidates ask me "what does it take to get hired as an engineer at ReadyTalk".  I simply respond, "passion".  Lets first think about what passion really means.  Wikipedia states "Passion is an intense emotion compelling feeling, enthusiasm, or desire for something."  

ReadyTalk Engineering has built itself on passionate developers who love to "geek out" any chance they get.  Creating a geek culture is something we take pride in and make sure to maintain as we grow.

As a candidate goes through the interview process, each step involves a screen for passion. Our process is a 3 step process which covers both passion, technical and cultural fits.

1. Talents Interview - the first step of the process involves meeting with our VP Engineering and two of our Engineering Managers.  This first step is to discover not only what the candidate brings to the table from a technology perspective but also to find out what else can this person bring to the team. We want to find out what keeps this engineer motivated, driven and excited.  The Talents Interview helps us discover a deeper understanding of why a candidate became an engineer in the first place.

2. Technical Interview - The second step is the technical Interview.  This step is a combination of discovering the candidates technical capability, team work and ability to communicate.  The candidate has the opportunity to solve fun problems, do some whiteboarding and meet with engineers that they could potentially be working with on a day to day basis.  Even though this is specific to finding out technical strengths, the interviewers are trying to gage passion throughout the interview.  They  try to figure out if the candidate has a natural ability and interest in solving a problem.

3. Cultural Interview - The cultural interview is ReadyTalk's way of ensuring we are making a good fit. We not only want a new engineer to fit in on his or her own team but we want the person to thrive at ReadyTalk as a whole. ReadyTalk as a company has its very own fun and quirky culture. We want to be excited about hiring a new engineer and It is important that the engineer is excited about working here day to day.  The cultural interview is conducted similar to a casual conversation. There are typically 4 interviewers in the cultural interview and they too are gaging team fit, geek fit and passion.   

We believe engineers that are passionate about technology make the best teammates and the best developers.  We want people who like to break things and put them back together better than when they found them.  We are big proponents of open source technologies and in fact have an engineer on the team that developed his very own JVM known as Avian which is what our main service is based off of.  This project was accomplished from the 20 percent time that ReadyTalk Engineering has the benefit of utilizing for pet projects. For more information on Avian go to  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avian_JVM and http://oss.readytalk.com/avian/

At the end of the day we want passionate geeks who want to accomplish greatness!