Lever builds modern recruiting software for teams to source, interview, and hire top talent. Our team strives to set a new bar for enterprise software with modern, well-designed, real-time apps. As the applicant tracking system of choice for Netflix, Eventbrite, Cirque Du SoleiI, ClearSlide, change.org, and thousands more leading companies, Lever means you hire the best by hiring together.
Whenever someone new joins Lever, they do a “meet me” presentation to introduce themselves beyond who they are at work. Every member of the team also shares their user manuals whenever kicking off a new project. User manuals are documents that each engineer completes about their working styles. How do you like to receive and give feedback? What skills, technical and soft, are you focused on developing? What do you want your teammates to know about you and how you work? They set teams up for success and help “Leveroos” focus on open communication.
The entire company actively practices inclusion by including sessions like “You Belong Here” in onboarding. We get personal with why D&I matters, celebrate the wide variety of identities in the room, and talk about how each person can help keep Lever diverse and inclusive, from being pronoun conscious on Slack to how inclusion has shaped each program and initiative at Lever. We’ve have multiple employee resource groups (ERGs), including Leverettes Who Code, a growing subgroup of our Leverettes Women’s ERG. Leverettes Who Code get together for lunch once a month and create open forums to have discussions about work, company culture, and any topic that may impact members of the group, both personally and professionally.
Twice a year, every employee goes through a compensation calibration to reassess market data and ensure that you have a candid conversation with your manager about your compensation, growth, and promotion path. We do this at Lever because women and other minorities often don’t advocate for themselves, and we believe that promotions and raises shouldn’t just go to those who who ask for them.
Every engineer at Lever has the opportunity to review code, even if they are not the responsible reviewer or primary decision maker. We’ve also incorporated demo sessions into our Eng Weekly meetings. Spearheaded by our newer engineers, our demo culture allows folks to show bit of what they have been working on and provides a way to celebrate work in every form. We encourage everyone to participate as a way to feature what each person has build or is working on.
At Lever, we use “Individual Impact Plans” and “Team Impact Plans” each quarter as written guides for what you, and your team, want to accomplish and what your growth goals are.
We have continuous coaching conversations between managers and their teams that take place more regularly than just once or twice a year. We believe that having these ongoing conversations helps us identify what concrete things will help us work towards our goals, and helps us create an environment where coaching and feedback is a complete norm.
Lastly, we also provide an annual stipend for employees to attend whatever conferences help them develop. From groups attending Lesbians Who Tech together, to workshops or panel discussions on management.
Just looking at the stats:
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 with one another.
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 (more on that later).
Everything we do is team based. We have two pairing rooms (called Pairadise), which are always occupied. 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.
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 a 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.
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.
When you first join Lever, you’ll be assigned an eng buddy who is your go-to person as you ramp up. Having a dedicated buddy to answer questions (none of which are stupid) and support your early months will help you to feel safe, right off the bat. When questions are asked in Slack, team members immediately jump in with “that’s a great question” or “thank you for asking that, I have a similar question.”
We also use root cause analysis which is blameless and fact-focused. When things don’t go right, we talk about issues as opportunities for learning. Our retros every other week are the same: we discuss what went well, what didn’t, what we can do to fix issues going forward, and always keep it blameless.
If there’s one thing that’s very clear at Lever, it’s that we do not have a hero culture.
In terms of daily schedules, you’ll find that it varies depending on each person’s preference. Some people get in really early, some get in later, not everyone stays until 5pm or 6pm because they have families to get home to. To accommodate the various lifestyles and needs of our team members, we never schedule important meetings early in the morning or too late in the afternoon. We also have work-from-home Wednesdays.
For the most part, people work somewhere within the 9am to 6pm range, but we keep it flexible. To encourage folks to go home, we never serve dinners at the office. There are no pull requests after 7pm and we always do daytime deploys. This wasn’t always the case, but we made it a team policy a couple of years ago in order to be inclusive of everyone’s schedule. Once your work day is done, it’s really done!
When it comes to our on-call shifts, we always make sure there is a secondary person so that no one person is on an island. We have mandatory trainings about being on-call, and part of that is stressing the importance of sleep and taking care of yourself. As another example of how team oriented we are, we all pay attention to alerts and recognize if someone has had to carry undue burden. When that happens, the team invests on correcting issues together and we the encourage that person on taking some extra time for themselves afterwards.
Our engineering interviews are split into two equally important parts: code reviews and project interviews. Project interviews are very heavily EQ focused. We say at the beginning of each interview that we’re not interested in the technical aspects of the project, we’re more focused on how you work on a team, how you approach working with others, and how you reflect on how things went, almost like a retrospective. Many candidates come in ready to whiteboard the system design of the project rather than discuss team dynamics, we understand it’s rare to walk into an engineering interview and have the interviewer say “I don’t care about the technical part of the project.”
In management interviews, we center conversations around values, psychological safety, and the leadership style. How do you mentor vs. teach? It is important to us that all of our managers are on the same page, and we prioritize people management skills more so than technical prowess.
At Lever, we place a tremendous amount of value on communication. Updating documentation is one example: we expect everyone to be consistently updating and improving documentation. It might not be a lot of new work, but when you introduce a new thought or clarify an existing one that makes it better for everyone after you, everyone is really appreciative and grateful. Sometimes it’s the small things!
Lever has a flexible, unlimited vacation policy. We trust everyone to make the best decisions about when to take off and recharge and to get a ‘thumbs up’ from their managers and teammates to make sure projects continue smoothly.
Lever uses our own open source MVC framework called Derby that syncs all data via Operational Transformation (the algorithm behind Google Docs). OT is the way we handle concurrency conflicts for any piece of data that is edited at the same time. In addition to real-time sync, OT allows us to provide a smoother UI since we can render updates on the client instantly without waiting for our backend to respond, while still guaranteeing consistency.
Lever makes extensive use of AWS, Docker, Node, Mongo, ElasticSearch, and Redis within our infrastructure. We use tools like Hubot to streamline deployments and Grafana to see what’s going on under the hood. In addition to automating all the things, we love to version them too! Our systems are all created using Terraform and Chef, working together to ensure consistency at all costs.
Our interviews are typically done in 1 full day on-site with multiple members of the team. Our interviews include a project interview, pair programming session, code review, hiring manager conversation, and a career trajectory interview with your recruiter. We care just as much about how you work with other engineers as we do about your technical skills, and our interviews are set up to get a broad and complete view of you and your skill sets.
1.) Project interview: During the Project Interview, we want to give you an opportunity to talk about a significant technical project that you are proud of. We're interested in all aspects of the project: planning and scoping, missteps and iterations, and your specific role working with your teammates.
2.) Pair progressing session: Your interviewer will provide you with a number of technical problems which you can solve in your language of choice. You will then have approximately 50 mins to pair on with your interviewer. You should use them as a resource, but you will also have the internet available to you. This interview is not about finishing all of the problems, it's more about how you solve them and work with other engineers.
3.) Code review: For this interview, you will read through some code and review it with your interviewer. The idea is to get a feel for how you think about reviewing code.
4.) Hiring manager conversation: You'll spend time talking about the engineering team at Lever, its structure, and what you can both bring to the team and learn from it.
5.) Career trajectory: This interview will be about an hour long and we will spend time together discussing you and your work history to uncover what is important to you, how you operate, and how you make decisions. Learning more about you in this way helps us identify how to best set you up for success at Lever.