Lots of my friends are currently interviewing for jobs at various startups and I'm hearing all kinds of interesting stories, curious what are red flags to ya'll?
A simple one I've seen is if they doing lots of rounds of interviews (like in the 5-10 range) it's usually a sign they don't actually know to screen people.
Responses
I was part of a company that was sales-led for a long time. As such , even the interview process was not well defined
- Sometimes, the interviews were not pre determined and people were thrown in the mix. As a result, you would see there being a lot of confusion as to what needs to be asked and what doesn't. If you dont see any sort of preparedness from the interviewers and they still are ready to go ahead, its an insight into the fact that we dont know what we really want.
- Ask them the onboarding plan. Companies with well defined onboarding plans are more likely to succeed.
Excellent point about an onboarding plan. That's probably the single biggest leading indicator of how they do things.
The thing I'm always interested in: Is it a product led company or a sales led company? Or do they not know?
If it's a product-led company, and you're on the tech side, then you'll be driving a lot of the product ideas/iterations. This is great if you want to be working on new interesting problems, but a lot of work if you're not interested in this level of responsibility.
If it's a sales-led company, there will be a lot of dictates from the sales/marketing side of the house, which can be interesting if you're more interested in the work environment/benefits/tech stack, but not so much the application of that technology.
If they don't know, then that's the worst of both worlds, because they'll be a lot of cycles burned trying to figure out which is true. A lot of times when this is the case, the sales/marketing side wants the company to be product-led but the product leadership is having a hard time specifying a specific vision and strategy.
feel like there's a ton of one off examples but they all boil down to
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clarity: when the company can't explain why it spends time on something? anything from 'why is your interview process set up this way' to 'why do you think X is your biggest priority'
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prioritization: when the company can't give examples of good ideas they haven't pursued because they prioritized other ideas
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