Hiring
The Moment in Time
Before we ever redesigned our own hiring process, we spent more than 5 years getting an intimate insider’s view into the hiring processes of over 100 tech companies. Through our flagship program - The Fellows Program - we helped undergraduate Black and Latinx technologists secure internships within the tech industry.
Alongside working with students we partnered with the companies that hired and managed Fellows. We knew that cultivating a community for Fellows wouldn’t be enough, we also needed companies who were ready to receive them with good resources, managers, and cultural competency.
For the companies, we reviewed job descriptions and interview questions. We noticed that terms like “bad culture fit” were the polite way companies said "not like us." We spotted that hiring processes often prioritized performance under pressure over real job skills. And we watched hiring managers expect responsiveness from Black and Latinx students balancing full course loads, finals, and full-time jobs - and make negative inferences when unspoken expectations were not met.
It was through the Fellows Program that we saw how much of the hiring systems that weren’t working for our Fellows we also replicated within our organization. So the Fellows Program was our original learning lab and testing ground for some of the innovations we would later adopt in our own processes. It also taught us a lot about what we didn’t want.
In 2020 after George Floyd was murdered and protests for Black lives reignited across the country, there was a reinvestment and commitment in racial equity from philanthropy, corporate America, and tech companies. Six years later as our racial equity organization closes its doors, we understand those commitments to have been largely performative, but we nevertheless answered the call from our funders, company partners, and community to double down on our work, so we expanded, tripling our headcount over the next two years.
As we quickly planned for growth, we dreamt about building something that could change what people of color experienced in a hiring process. Could we design something that respected candidates while balancing our organization’s urgent need for skilled, values aligned, thoughtful new team members?
What We Were Solving For
Through the Fellows Program, we used the tech industry as our learning lab, but we knew that those lessons were extrapolatable to the experience of Black and Latinx people at large. We decided to expand the recommendations we made to external partners to our internal organization processes and procedures. We considered:
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If the hiring experience is a candidate's first impression of us, how did we want it to feel?
How could we create a process that respected a candidate's time, energy, and lived reality?
What would an interview process look like if it reflected the actual work rather than testing performance under pressure?
How could candidates meaningfully evaluate us, just as we evaluated them?
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How could we scale the organization without sacrificing the culture we had worked so hard to build? How would we make space for new hires to contribute to the direction of culture when we liked it as it was?
How many new people could we realistically absorb and onboard well?
How could we build a hiring process that was clear, replicable, and sustainable for both hiring managers and the People team?
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How could we move beyond vague ideas of "culture fit" and assess the skills, competencies, and ways of working that actually mattered?
How could we evaluate not just whether someone could do the job, but whether they would thrive in our organizational context?
How could we design a hiring process that set new employees - and the teams welcoming them - up for long-term success?
What We Built
We approached hiring as a crucial and essential part of our organization, and alongside onboarding new employees, our 2022 top priorities. It was an all hands on deck effort and because we knew having the right people in the organization was key to our next stage, we acted like it.
From the moment a role opened to the day someone accepted an offer, every step was intentionally designed to reflect our values while giving hiring managers a clear, repeatable process to follow.
Putting It Into Practice
The process itself mattered and made the process slow and intentional but the practices we wove throughout it is where you could really feel something different for both our candidates and our team.
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Before a job description was ever drafted, hiring managers completed an intake form defining the role's responsibilities, required experience, management style, and what success looked like. That clarity became the foundation for every step that followed - from interview questions to final hiring decisions.
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We shared:
salary expectations on the job description and confirmed them in our initial screening call
hiring timelines on the job description
interview questions before the interview
evaluation criteria in our job description and at each interview stage
Candidates who didn’t move forward were offered the opportunity to receive feedback.
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Past the initial screening, we paid candidates $50/hour for every interview stage. We preset the rates based on our estimated time for prep and actual interview time. We wanted interviews and demonstrations of work that highlighted their expertise and the job they’d be doing. We didn’t want to extract free labor from our candidates. We believed candidates' time deserved to be valued just as much as our own. We saw the hustle it is to be looking for a job - oftentimes unemployed - and wanted to offer our monetary support.
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The hiring process was collaborative between the hiring team and the hiring manager. We kicked off the process and co-designed most elements together. We respected the hiring manager as the subject matter expert within their functional team and they respected the hiring team as the guide for best practices, process, candidate experience, and project management.
Candidates had diverse touch points with our team - team members they’d work with, their manager, people who worked in the role before. If a candidate was going to manage someone, their future direct report was a part of the decision making team. If their role would impact the whole team or they would be a senior leader, they met the whole team and was part of a Q&A. We didn't let the interview process leave people out of decisions that affected them.
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Before extending an offer, every finalist had a candid conversation with our CEO about the realities of the role, the organization's challenges, and what we saw as a potential growth path for them.
We endeavored to be as transparent as possible with candidates. We wanted candidates accepting offers with as much information as possible about where we were at as an organization and where they could be expected to be pushed and coached as a member of the team. The intent was to give candidates genuine agency to opt in to joining the organization and to ask questions directly to the CEO, which was common on our small team.
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Our interview process wasn't something we invented separately from everything else. It reflected our competency model and the way we already thought about performance, growth, and feedback. We wanted to understand what someone could do but also how they would do it, what kind of team member they would be, and if they would thrive at Code2040 within our own organizational culture. We didn’t approach hiring as a standalone process - we started using the same tools the candidate would see through their full employee lifecycle. It became the beginning of a shared language that continued through onboarding, performance conversations, and career growth.
What Time Taught Us
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We expected candidates to appreciate a more transparent, respectful hiring process. We didn't expect people who weren't hired to thank us, refer friends to future openings, or apply to other roles! Our first open role attracted about 15 applicants. By the end of our hiring sprint, we were receiving about 60 - 80 applications per role.
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Our hiring process became one of the best models for what we were trying to build and accomplish with culture at Code2040 - it was intentional, transparent, and deeply human. It also set an incredibly high bar for the rest of the organization. We love that and we were still rebuilding after COVID, navigating a strategic shift, and growing faster than we could absorb. Our hiring process was all of those things but the rest of our organization was still catching up. Hiring is often the first experience someone has with your culture. Make sure it reflects the organization they'll actually join - that gap can become a source of disappointment and distrust.
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We tripled our team in two years. Looking back, we simply asked our organization to absorb more change than it could. Hiring is absolutely about finding great people and it's about having the managers, systems, and culture to support them once they arrive. For us as a small org, that looked closer to 2 hires per year rather than 4-5 or doubling our size over two years rather than tripling.
BUT ALSO external pressures - especially nonprofit funding cycles and capacity strains - create urgency that pushes organizations to hire faster than they're ready. Whenever possible, build hiring timelines around organizational readiness, not funding deadlines.
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We believed in giving candidates not only an honest picture of the organization but what we thought might be their growth trajectory or challenges they’d experience. We wanted them to have the information they needed and the agency to make their decision, which we accomplished. But also we used that level of transparency as permission to move forward with hires we should have slowed down on, positions we should have restarted the hiring process for, or positions we should have paused hiring on altogether. Yes, a candidate should have transparency and agency in their choice but it is - at the end of the day - the organization’s responsibility to make the decision and support them once they arrive.
Candidates had diverse touch points with our team - team members they’d work with, their manager, people who worked in the role before. If a candidate was going to manage someone, their future direct report was a part of the decision making team. If their role would impact the whole team or they would be a senior leader, they met the whole team and was part of a Q&A. We didn't let the interview process leave people out of decisions that affected them.
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We wanted to build an organization where people were treated with respect, even when things weren't working out. That meant we moved thoughtfully (and honestly avoidantly!) through offboarding - if you're committed to moving slowly when someone isn't the right fit, you need to be equally intentional before you hire them. The harder thing to do by far is to part ways with someone. So the more disciplined your hiring process should be.
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We spent a lot of time evaluating whether people could do the work and whether they aligned with our values. What we didn't evaluate as intentionally was if they would thrive in our organization’s operating conditions: How did they navigate ambiguity? Did they like building from scratch? Would they roll up their sleeves when things got messy? Could they maintain high work standards without needing perfect conditions? We learned that qualified candidates with strong values creates alignment for the role itself, but doesn't replace the ability to adapt, execute, and grow alongside an evolving organization. We underestimated how much someone’s preferred way of working shaped whether they would thrive (or even like!) our organization. The right candidate isn't just someone with the right skills - it's someone whose desired working environment matches your organization’s reality.
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We originally wrote job descriptions to help us hire. Over time, they became the foundation for onboarding, performance conversations, accountability, and career growth. People & Culture tools shouldn’t live in silos - they become shared language across the entire employee lifecycle.
What We’d Tell You
Design your hiring process to mirror what it’s actually like to work with you. The way you hire people teaches them what it's like to work with your organization long before they receive an offer.
Respect candidates' time as much as you expect them to respect yours. Share timelines, interview questions, salary expectations, and pay people for meaningful demonstrations of work whenever you can.
Don't build hiring as a standalone process. Connect it to your job descriptions, competency model, onboarding, performance conversations, and compensation philosophy. The strongest People & Culture systems build on one another.
Hire at the pace your organization can actually support. A great hiring process can't compensate for managers without capacity, weak onboarding, or an organization growing faster than it can absorb.
Design your process around the employment relationship you want to have. If your organization believes in coaching, thoughtful feedback, and respectful offboarding, your hiring process should reflect those same values from the very beginning.
Be transparent - but don't confuse transparency with good judgment. Giving candidates honest information helps them make informed decisions. It doesn't replace your responsibility to make one yourself.
Remember that every hiring decision is also an organizational design and culture decision. You're not just filling a role. You're shaping how your organization works, collaborates, and grows for years to come.
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