RVU empowers consumers to make confident home services and financial decisions. We sat down with Ryan Greenhall, Engineering Manager at RVU to learn more about hiring during COVID-19.
If you’ve ever used some of the top comparison websites, you’ve probably interacted with RVU. Founded in 2018, RVU is a group of online companies that work to empower consumers by helping them compare home services and financial products. Their leading brands, Uswitch and Money, exist to empower the consumer to make more confident home services and financial decisions.
Uswitch is the UK’s top comparison website for home services switching; Money is one of the UK’s leading comparison websites for financial services.
When RVU was looking to grow their tech team, they ended up hiring four recent Makers. We sat down with Ryan Greenhall, Engineering Manager at RVU to learn more.
What do you think are the biggest challenges when it comes to tech talent?
Ryan: Finding skilled engineers that are aligned to your organisational culture and convincing them to join is hard — then once you have them, keeping them. Skilled engineers, pre-COVID, have lots of opportunities, especially in London. Even amidst the uncertainty around COVID, skilled engineers still have options.
Across the industry we continue to observe demand for engineering jobs continues to outpace supply, and this has meant that, generally, our headcount has always lagged a little behind our internal demand.
Another challenge is diversity. There’s a growing body of evidence that increased diversity drives higher team performance. Yet software engineering, industry wide, remains overly homogenous — especially at higher leadership levels.
Why did you decide to work with Makers?
Ryan: We had been trying to find a way to bring in early stage engineers with a view to building a pipeline of future technical leaders. Traditionally we have hired experienced engineers so did not have the internal training capability to take on graduate level hires and provide adequate support and development.
Makers candidates come with experience, so are generally already relatively skilled in non-technical aspects of any role: communication, teamwork and feedback. While a Makers grad would still be inexperienced from a technical perspective, their maturity from a previous career/life experience reduces the learning curve — we are able to focus on growing technical capability.
We were impressed with both cultural alignment and blend of diversity, for example, 35% of makers are female, and the prior commercial experience was very broad. We spoke to people with varied careers such as architects, entrepreneurs, nannies and management consultants. So whilst diversity wasn’t the primary reason to work with Makers, it certainly has helped us to become more diverse across several dimensions. 75% of hires have been female.
Photo by Arnold Francisca on Unsplash
Can you describe the recent successes you’ve had with the Makers you’ve brought on board?
Ryan: We have been really impressed with both the technical ability and cultural alignment. We’re a culture that biases towards getting things done, growing yourself, putting yourself in ever-challenging situations. These are people that have chosen to pursue a new career. They’ve taken a risk to retrain and personally invested a significant amount of money to do so. We have found makers to be driven, enthusiastic and eager to make their mark.
Given that we weren’t overly experienced with bringing on early stage engineers, we came up with some KPIs to both set growth expectations and to understand what was a reasonable expectation:
- Time to unbuddy — All makers graduates are paired with a buddy on production work from the outset. We have found that people often relinquish this level of support as they grow in confidence and require less direct supervision.
- Time to pick up new stories and drive their own work rather than being told exactly what to do.
- Time to story breakdown and design
We were delighted that within the first 90 days our first two makers were doing all of those things, and had been doing so for a considerable amount of time before the end of their probation. The work that they have been doing is high value evolution of our customer journeys on some of our biggest revenue products.
Our RVU CEO Tariq Syed has said:
“I’ve been fortunate enough to personally interview all the Makers candidates we’ve hired and I’m so impressed at the calibre of people and how they are so culturally aligned to how we work. They’re well rounded from their previous experience and have a real hunger to succeed in their new career path. I look forward to seeing them developing into future engineering leaders at RVU.”
What advice would you give to other companies who are hiring remotely?
Ryan: The key thing to effective remote hiring is to build on the existing processes that you have and adapt as necessary to remain effective when done remotely. We have found screen sharing an effective way to run our coding pairing exercise. We use video conferencing for all interview stages including our initial phone screen.
Acknowledge that this is a period of time where levels of anxiety are higher, so to reduce interview nerves you should provide clarity around what the process is going to be like: what are the stages? At each stage, who will people be meeting? What are the key areas of assessment?
We found that this really helps to put people at ease and leads to a better candidate experience. Similar to when you’re face-to-face interviewing, having a clear set of skills that you are assessing for and having a clear structure around the interview really helps the interview flow. This also leads to objective assessment, making the process fair, and also allows you to be more direct with your questioning. That gives opportunities to get the same signals from the candidate, but perhaps in less time.
A key thing is to ask candidates for feedback on the experience. Obviously we’ve never done remote on-boarding before, or remote recruiting, and this will be the first time people are interviewing remotely. So getting feedback from people and adapting based on that.
Also, expect the unexpected — pets and children appearing — it’s important to be accepting of that. Make people feel at ease — it’s okay. These are unusual times and you shouldn’t make people feel that they’re going to be down marked because their child ran into the room looking for them!
Be open about challenges your business faces and how you have responded to the crises. Many people are seeking an element of certainly and are likely to ask about current business performance and outlook for the future. Many candidates are asking detailed questions around our response to covid and what the road back to “normal” may look like — be prepared.
Finally, be ready to sell your organisation (more than usual) as people may be cautious to change jobs given so much uncertainty. A careers webpage is a great way to describe your purpose, values and culture. Many candidates are finding videos of our office helpful in trying to visualise the environment into which they will enter when safe to do so.
Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash
Is there anything you will change about your hiring process once you’re back in the office?
Ryan: We will likely be keeping the video call for the initial phone screen. That just helps to build a rapport and helps for both sides to get to know each other better.
We would consider running some parts of the interview remotely to make it easier for people to attend and align on availability. This is especially useful for later interview stages when meeting our senior leadership team where it may be more difficult aligning calendars for an in office meet.
Anything else you’d like to add?
We host a bi-monthly remote meet-up called Programmed in Pencil bringing together engineers from across the tech industry to listen to talks on digital product engineering.
Interested in hiring from Makers? Learn more here.
