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Cross-Department Collaboration
One of our company values is cross-functional empathy.
This plays a big role in how people at Lever interact with one another. We’re looking for team players who have empathy for the particular challenges of a given role or team. Any time there’s a challenge, we always make the assumption that everyone is doing their best and lean in to support one another rather than pointing fingers.
As an engineer, you can expect to work closely with the customer support team to learn about any pain points our customers are facing or bugs that need to be fixed. You’ll also interface with project managers (who set the tasks and organize the team), project owners (who do the research to come up with what the feature will be), as well as designers. If an issue can’t be easily resolved in Slack, we’re quick to hop on a huddle call to help move things forward. You should feel empowered and comfortable to reach out to anyone in any department if you need help or more information.
At the end of the day, while technical skill is important, we prefer candidates who can communicate what they’re working on and bring everyone on board.
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Customer Comes First
Our customers are our North Star.
We’re transforming the hiring process by allowing companies to easily manage their talent pipeline from one, centralized location. Our customers include everyone from early-stage startups to public companies and we’re all united by the goal of making sure they are all happy and successful. Feedback from customers is openly shared in a Slack feedback channel and we also have a customer advisory board that meets regularly. Similarly, when thinking about new features and tools, our product team will often meet with customers to share demos and get early feedback. This feedback drives the engineering roadmap and we make sure to prioritize the features and upgrades that are most impactful for our customers. For example, we recently shipped a feature where candidates could opt-in at the end of their interview to answer a short diversity survey. Questions could include answering whether they were a veteran or identified as male, female, or gender-non-conforming. However, this didn’t work for every company, since in places like Germany, it might be more culturally acceptable to ask the prior question but not the latter, whereas in the US companies might want to have both questions on their survey. Thus, we shipped a change so you can configure a different survey based on the candidates’ location (and not just the job location).
We’re constantly listening to our customers and strive to maintain a balance of building new features and improving others as efficiently as possible.
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Flexible Work Arrangements
As a distributed team, flexibility is baked into our culture.
While we have two HQ offices in San Francisco and Toronto, we also have many team members across the U.S. who work remotely. With our new hybrid policy, folks will have the option to go into the office if they’d like, or work remotely in certain approved states. Ideally, we try to optimize for overlapping hours as much as possible (9am-2pm PT), but there’s a great deal of flexibility for engineers to get their work done however suits them best. For example, some people like to work from 7am-4pm, while others prefer to start their days later and end a little later. Want to pick up your kids from school? Go for it! We all have commitments, hobbies, and passions outside of the office and trust you to manage your schedule.
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Heavily Team Oriented
There are no solo projects at Lever.
Everything we do is team based. We focus on aligning around team goals throughout projects, which means we’re incentivized to give and receive help (pairing, mentoring, whiteboarding, unblocking tickets, etc.) over focusing on solo hero work. When we’re in the office, our two dedicated pairing rooms (called Pairadise) are often occupied.
Collaboration also prevents us from creating silos of knowledge. It facilitates information sharing and there are many “game-changing” instances where one person’s good habits or use of an awesome tool gets shared across the team to everyone’s benefit.
Above all, we are big believers of succeeding and failing together as a team. We celebrate feature launches with a physical trophy ceremony where the team presents who built what and why. They then place a small token that represents the project in a glass case with white gloves, music playing, and all the pomp and circumstance a feature release deserves.
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High Employee Retention
We consistently hit our quarterly goal of 95% employee retention.
There’s a good reason folks at Lever tend to stay here. As Christina (a senior software engineer) says, “there’s a very positive culture here, where you don’t have the ‘10x developer.’ Everyone is collaborative and supportive.” We regularly make space for team bonding, whether it’s in-person (when it’s safe to do so of course) or virtually. For example, we got creative with remote activities like team cooking challenges, book clubs, talent competitions, and more. Our CEO even taught a class on baking bread.
We’re extraordinarily proud of the company we’ve built so far (not to mention humbled to be recognized as the #1 place to work in San Francisco, as well as a top workplace in the entire United States). Our people are Lever’s biggest competitive advantage and we’ll continue investing in our “Leveroos” and people-first culture.
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Product-Driven
Lever’s revenue source is entirely from our product.
We do not build ad-based consumer software, our product is our value. Our reputation as a company is based on having the best product in the industry, and we have never strayed from being a product-focused company. We’re proud of what we’ve built, and naturally, we are big users of our own product.
Not only is Lever committed to making a high-quality product, but we also want every team member to be able to connect their personal contributions to the overall business. Results from our most recent R&D Engagement survey showed that 100% of Lever employees understand how their work impacts Lever’s goals. It’s easy to feel connected to our product, and maybe more importantly, easy to see how your work contributes to making it better.
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Promotes from Within
We champion our own talent and want you to grow your career here.
We pride ourselves on making sure everyone is engaged in work that is both fulfilling and challenging. Whether you want to grow as an IC or move into people management, our goal is to understand where you want to go in your career and help you gain the exposure and experience to get there. This starts even before you join the team, since part of our interview process includes a discussion about your career trajectory so we can understand what is important to you and help set you up for success. We’ve had engineers move up who started as interns from bootcamps and others who changed industries entirely.
In addition to regular performance reviews every six months, we always look internally first to see if there’s a good fit before kicking off a new role. In fact, we have a company-wide goal to fill 25% of new roles with internal candidates, and just in the last six months we’ve filled 37% of our roles internally!
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Team is Diverse
We’re proud to work on a diverse engineering team at a company that has been intentional about and successful at creating a diverse and inclusive workplace.
As a company that makes recruiting software, we believe diversity at Lever starts with hiring. We have carefully designed our interview process to mitigate bias by training every interviewer and balancing the skillsets we hire for. We pair technical interviews with ones that focus on how candidates work on projects with others, run mock code reviews, and give and receive feedback.
Just looking at the stats:
- 44% of our coding engineers identify as female or nonbinary
- we have a 50:50 gender ratio as a company
- more than half (54%) of our leaders are women, including our executive team
- 50% of Lever is non-white
Beyond the numbers, we also represent a diversity of professional backgrounds (four-year CS programs, bootcamps, entirely self-taught, and pretty much everything in between). Before Lever we were teachers, product managers, FBI security experts, and designers. We came to Lever with different experiences, communication styles and preferences. As a result, our team has worked towards having better overall communication practices that ensure that everyone can effectively communicate and work well with one another.