Interview Process

Owned by Nick Hellemans
Last updated: Mar 18, 2024 by Jonathan Belanger
2 min read

Process

The interview process at Awell consists of 6 phases:

  1. Screening (30min)

  2. Written interview (60min)

  3. “Day-in-the-life-of” exercise (60min)

  4. Panel culture interviews (75min)

  5. Final conversation with Thomas, Awell’s CEO (45min)

  6. Reference calls

Screening Generic

The screening call may be performed by the hiring manager or by a third party. The objective of the screening call is to:

  1. Do first introductions

  2. Assess the motivation of the candidate (e.g. why Awell, what gets you up in the morning, etc.)

  3. Ensure we don’t encounter blockers later in the process (e.g. salary expectations, responsibilities, remote culture, etc.)

Written interview Role-Specific

The written interview is based on the experiences from Safegraph. More info can be found here.

We include a written interview in our process for several reasons:

  • Written communication is extremely important in an asynchronous work culture like Awell’s - this helps us to assess if this fits the candidate

  • Written interviews give everyone in the company a baseline about the candidate - it’s not only the resume that every interviewer can read before the interview

  • Written interviews help reduce biases

The interview contains 2-6 questions and we ask two types of questions:

  1. Research Questions: the ones that require the candidate to do some research. For example, we might ask a marketing candidate: “Evaluate our website. What do you like and what can we do better?”

  2. Thought Questions: the more open-ended questions that take consideration to provide meaningful answers. For example, we might ask: “What would you like to achieve in the first 90 days”?

The objective is that the candidate can complete the interview in ~60 minutes.

“Day-in-the-life-of” exercise role-specific

The best way to predict performance on the job is to actually do the job. Therefore, we include an exercise that mimics what the candidate would do once hired.

Some examples:

  • Engineering: Review/discuss a piece of code that was written recently, discuss how to implement a new functionality requested by a customer, etc.

  • Sales: Mock sales call with a customer

  • Marketing: Brainstorm ideas to increase awareness of CareOps

  • Customer support: mock support requests by customers

Panel culture interviews generic

As mentioned in our hiring principles, culture comes first. Therefore, we include approximately 75 minutes of conversation with 2 Awell team members. They’ll assess the fit with our https://awellhealth.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/AH/pages/3503882307.

Final conversation with Thomas generic

Thomas, Awell’s CEO, will interview every candidate that successfully passed the previous rounds.

Reference calls generic

As a final step, we also do 1-2 reference calls with a candidate’s previous employers.

Interview evaluation

To make the evaluation as objective as possible, we use a scorecard to assess each candidate.

The interview lead decides after each phase if the candidate continues to the next step. After the panel culture interviews and after the final conversation with Thomas, we have a group debrief to collectively take a decision.

We aim to avoid recency bias in our decision and strive to provide candidates with a properly formulated reason in case of a negative answer. For these reasons you will always receive feedback via email, after the interview and never during the interview itself.

The screening call is the exception to this rule. It’s possible that you receive direct feedback during the screening call, either at the end or even during the call. We want to be mindful of your time and ours, and if it’s clear we won’t be moving forward we will respectfully inform you at that time.