In most Western countries, there is a shortage of good programmers. There are a lot of businesses in cities like San Francisco, New York, London, and Berlin that aren’t very big.
But to find modern programmers, you can’t use old methods like posting a job ad, networking, or paying too much for a local recruiter. There are months of open jobs while salaries keep going up because programmers move from one hot company to the next.
According to this Elance survey, 54% of business owners expect their workforce to be working remotely by 2017. “Business as usual” means adding someone to the team with whom you have already worked together, but imagine hiring someone you have never met. This post is meant to make it easier for you to find, hire, and train your next engineer or your whole remote development team.
15Five is a well-known performance management software company that is known for being creative and dedicated to keeping employees interested. To get a job at this forward-thinking company, you need more than just technical skills. You also need to know a lot about the company’s culture and values.
This comprehensive guide delves into the top 25 interview questions commonly asked at 15Five, providing you with the insights and strategies you need to impress the interviewers and secure your dream role.
Get Ready to Ace Your 15Five Interview
Whether you’re a seasoned professional or a recent graduate preparing for your 15Five interview requires thorough research and a strategic approach. This guide equips you with the knowledge and confidence to navigate the interview process successfully.
Unveiling the 15Five Interview Process
The 15Five interview process typically involves multiple stages, including initial screening calls, interviews with hiring managers, team members, and senior leadership, as well as panel presentations and technical assessments. Candidates report a positive experience overall, with friendly and responsive interviewers. However, some have encountered delays in communication.
The process can last between 4 and 6 weeks, and people are chosen based on how well they fit in with the company’s culture and values. Candidates like that the process is open and there is support throughout it, but some have had trouble with scheduling and getting back to them.
Mastering the Top 25 15Five Interview Questions
1. How would you find and interact with potential customers in a way that generates leads for our product?
- Highlight your understanding of the target market.
- Discuss past experiences in lead generation and customer engagement.
- Showcase your ability to find creative ways to reach potential customers.
- Emphasize your ability to nurture relationships and build trust.
2. Can you tell me about a time when you struck a deal and got it signed? What strategies did you use?
- Reflect on a time when you used effective negotiation tactics to close a deal.
- Discuss the strategies you employed, such as thorough preparation and understanding your client’s needs.
- Emphasize any creative problem-solving skills you utilized in overcoming objections.
- Remember, it’s not just about closing any deal but about forging mutually beneficial agreements.
3. Tell me about how you keep up with the newest languages, tools, and best practices for software engineering.
- Highlight your proactive approach towards self-learning and professional development.
- Mention how you regularly read industry-related blogs, publications, or attend webinars.
- Discuss any coding boot camps or courses you’ve taken recently.
- If possible, relate these learnings to practical experiences where you applied a new tool or language in a project.
4. Tell us about your experience managing relationships with customers after the sale to make sure they are happy and successful with our platform.
- Begin by outlining your process for managing relationships after a sale.
- Share specific examples where you’ve managed customer relationships effectively.
- Highlight your ability to understand customer needs, provide solutions, and maintain open lines of communication.
- If new to this role, describe steps you’d take to build trust, learn about the client’s expectations, and follow up regularly for feedback.
5. How have you handled difficult or escalated customer support situations and resolved them efficiently?
- Focus on your problem-solving skills and empathy.
- Describe a challenging situation you’ve encountered in a previous role.
- Explain how you listened carefully to the customer’s issues, showed understanding, and worked efficiently to find a solution.
- Highlight any strategies you used for de-escalation and maintaining professionalism throughout the process.
6. When developing user interfaces, how do you balance performance optimization with usability and aesthetics?
- Highlight your experience prioritizing user-centric design while maintaining performance efficiency.
- Discuss instances where you made trade-offs between aesthetics and optimization.
- Showcase your ability to create visually appealing interfaces without compromising speed or functionality.
- Describe how you use data, feedback, and testing to refine the balance between usability and performance.
7. Describe your approach to identifying top talent and ensuring they’re a good fit for the company culture during the recruitment process.
- Discuss how you use a blend of technical assessment and cultural fit evaluation.
- Outline your method for assessing skills, such as testing or task-based interviews.
- Explain how you gauge cultural fit through behavioral questions, exploring candidates’ values to ensure alignment with the company.
- Highlight any unique strategies you’ve successfully used in past roles.
8. Can you share an example of a successful upsell or cross-sell strategy that you’ve implemented with an existing client?
- Provide a specific example that showcases your ability to identify opportunities for upselling or cross-selling.
- Discuss how you assessed the client’s needs, explained the benefits of an additional product or service, and successfully convinced them to invest more.
- Highlight your communication skills, strategic thinking, and customer understanding during this process.
- Remember to present quantifiable results if possible to make your success tangible.
9. How do you manage multiple team projects simultaneously while ensuring quality and timely delivery?
- Highlight your organizational and prioritization abilities.
- Discuss how you use task management tools or planning systems to track progress and deadlines.
- Mention instances where you had to balance multiple projects and were successful in delivering quality work on time.
- If applicable, talk about strategies such as delegation, setting clear expectations with the team, and regular communication with stakeholders.
10. Walk us through how you’d handle a situation where a prospect is hesitant to commit due to concerns about integrating our product into their existing systems.
- Begin by expressing empathy for the prospect’s concerns and reassure them that many clients have successfully integrated the product with various systems.
- Highlight your understanding of the product’s compatibility and ease of integration.
- Share examples, if any, where you’ve assisted in similar situations to give them confidence.
- If new at this, explain how you’d involve technical teams for a smooth transition while ensuring customer satisfaction is maintained throughout the process.
11. Share an example of a complex technical issue you encountered in your work and explain how you solved it.
- Consider an example where you used your technical knowledge and problem-solving skills to overcome a challenge.
- Illustrate the complexity of the issue, how it impacted the work, your approach in identifying solutions, and the final outcome.
- Highlight your ability to troubleshoot, communicate technically complex information clearly, and collaborate with others if necessary.
12. How do you handle feedback from clients or colleagues regarding areas of improvement within the product or service offered?
- Start by expressing your openness to constructive criticism as it’s vital for growth and improvement.
- Discuss how you prioritize feedback, noting its source and relevance to the product or service.
- Highlight a situation where feedback led to substantial improvements in your past role.
- Show your ability to distinguish between valuable insights and subjective opinions, illustrating your strategic thinking process.
- Make sure to conclude with your commitment towards continuous learning and enhancement.
13. Describe your experience training new team members or implementing onboarding processes for new hires.
- When answering this question, focus on specific instances where you’ve been directly involved in training or onboarding.
- Discuss the methods and strategies you used to ensure a smooth transition for new hires.
- Highlight any innovative ideas you implemented that improved these processes.
- If you’re less experienced with formal onboarding, discuss times when you’ve helped coworkers learn and grow, showing your collaborative nature and willingness to support team development.
14. Explain your methodology for tracking key sales metrics and leveraging data-driven insights to improve overall performance.
- Start your response by emphasizing your strong belief in data-driven decision making.
- Discuss the key sales metrics you regularly track.
- Highlight any specific tools or software you’ve used to monitor these metrics.
- Then, describe how you analyze this data to identify patterns, trends, or areas of improvement.
- Share a brief example where your insights from data have led to improved sales performance.
15. Discuss how you prioritize tasks and manage your workload across different responsibilities.
- To successfully answer this question, talk about your experience and strategies in managing multiple tasks.
- Mention specific tools or methodologies you use for time management.
- Discuss how you prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance, and allocate time accordingly.
- If possible, include examples where effective prioritization led to successful outcomes.
16. How do you build trust and rapport with prospective clients throughout the sales cycle?
- Highlight your relationship-building strategies that align with the sales cycle stages.
- Discuss how you establish trust initially by being knowledgeable and reliable.
- Explain your methods for maintaining open communication, providing timely responses, and delivering on promises to foster rapport.
- Share instances where your proactive problem-solving attitude helped in retaining client trust during challenging situations.
- If you’re new to sales, outline your potential approach based on understanding client needs and ensuring their satisfaction throughout the process.
17. Can you describe a time when you had to overcome a significant challenge or obstacle in your work?
- Choose a situation that demonstrates your resilience, problem-solving skills, and ability to adapt to changing circumstances.
- **Explain the challenge you faced
Recruiting & Onboarding Your Dev Team
Dan Norris, co-founder of WP curve wrote this instructive piece for remote recruitment from start to finish. Using Lucid Chart, I will share Dan’s secret sauce:
Step 1 – Trigger
We decide whether or not to hire and then kick off the process.
Step 2 – Recruitment
Here we find potential applicants, pre-screen them, trial them, and make a hiring decision.
Step 3 – Onboarding
As soon as we decide to hire someone, we add them to our systems and start their orientation.
One of the toughest jobs in hiring virtual players is the screening process. As people can’t visit your office without considerable investment, your abilities to interview are limited. You can’t see the candidate’s body language or listen to the subtle changes in the tone of their voice. But there is a sequence you can follow to get as close as possible to determining if the developer candidate will be good for your company:
1. Schedule a call. I recommend live video calls, which are always more effective. These are the best way to test for culture and values fit from afar.
2. Technical Proficiency. Dig a bit deeper with a technical interview and administer a short 2-4 hour technical exam. Then give the candidate a trial project.
For non technical roles, I have found selection to be more complicated if you do the recruitment remotely. Programmers can objectively be tested on their output (code quality, analysis skills, logical skills…etc…).
For a manager (e. g. content marketer, customer success manager), selecting a candidate is less objective. You need to understand the attitude and competencies of the person. And doing such interviews remotely via video conferencing can often convey the wrong of a person.
I finally figured something out. Agile development is a culture, not a process. @jevnin
I am a strong believer in having an office/management structure in place to hire managers. At Ekipa’s India office, we have an HR department, technical and project management, and a lot of programmers. These people make the hiring decisions. They do this with the local cultural setting and the company culture in mind. This makes it much easier to hire for cultural fit.
This method has been indispensible for hiring and selecting great remote colleagues. I recommend reading Who: The A-Method for Hiring, which also discusses how to coach and retain ‘A-players’.
1) Create a score card
Briefly describe the job you’re looking to fill, along with your goals and expected results for the job. By making this scorecard, you have to really think about the person you need and the work you want to see.
Next, define the competencies you seek for this role. Topgrading has a set of 40 competencies that are well documented. For each competency you give an expected ‘score’ on a scale of 1-6. Here’s a sample score card that I recently used to hire our marketing and sales director.
2. The telephone interview
For sales positions, there’s very useful standard script in Topgrading for Sales. You talk with the candidate for 10-30 minutes to filter out the obvious mismatches. For remote positions, you can also perfectly do this through video conferencing.
3. Competency-based interview questions
There are proven questions linked to each competency, which I always use during interviews (sometimes to the annoyance of the candidate I must admit). The questions trigger responses that are about the candidate’s past experience; they must come up with specific cases or situations, no fictional or hypothetical answers.
15 SHORT ANSWERS to COMMON INTERVIEW QUESTIONS! (How to PREPARE for a JOB INTERVIEW!)
FAQ
What questions are asked in a Valumart interview?
What is a manager interview question?
What is a 15-minute family interview?
The 15-minute family interview is a condensed form of the Calgary Family Assessment and Intervention Models (CFAM and CFIM) that aims to contribute to the establishment of a therapeutic relationship between nurses and family and to implement interventions to promote health and suffering relief, even during brief interactions.
Why should you use 15Five?
15Five’s features will give you space to have a voice. Your manager, senior leadership, and even executives now have deeper insight into, for example, your priorities, objectives, recognition, which can all lead to more effective 1-on-1 conversations with your manager.
What is a high five & how does it work?
Using High Fives to give recognition is an example of how you can enhance the existing culture in your organization—like a real life high five, but more amplified. As you may already know, the heart of 15Five is what we call the Check-in. More on the Check-in feature in a minute.
