step by step on how to hire w/jamon holmgren, founder & cto at infinite red, inc.

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Hello, hello. Thanks for listening to Guidance Counselor 2.0. Listen, I want to give you a quick rundown of what this podcast is and what you're about to get into as you listen to these episodes. We had Guidance Counselors in middle school. We had Guidance Counselors in high school, but we didn't really have Guidance Counselors in college and now as professionals, we don't really have anybody to turn to to ask a quick question to learn something about the job search or to navigate your career. So that is what I want this podcast to be for you. I want it to be a tool for you to navigate the job search and your career.

So that being said, I hope you enjoy this episode. And if you need to reach me, Taylor at vaco, VACO.com is how to get in touch with me, old-fashioned email, social media at T D S N T D E S S E Y N. And finally, please rate and review this in the app store because I want this to be discoverable for others so they can navigate their careers. Hope you enjoy the episode. Awesome. Well, thanks for having me, Taylor. I really appreciate it. It's awesome to catch up with you for one thing. Yes. Yes. It's been a little while since we've chatted. Yeah. So I'm Jamie and Holmgren.

I'm a co-founder and CTO of Infinite Red. We're a React Native Consultancy. So we basically, all we do is React Native. It's kind of an unusual thing. Most consultancies are React. It is very unusual. Yeah. So just doing the mobile side is a thing. We actually came from that. We were doing Native Mobile before React even kind of came out. So but we're about 30 people. We're mostly located in the US. We have a few in Canada, actually growing a little bit. Canada. Nice. Yeah, it's cool. And mostly developers. The three owners are developers and we mostly developers. We do have a team of three mobile designers as well.

And I live up in the Pacific Northwest near Portland, Oregon, but actually on the Washington state side of things. So yeah, just to hear with my wife and four kids and live on. And you have some land too. Yeah. Yeah. How many acres do you have? Yeah. I love it. It's just enough to keep me busy. Yesterday I was out like shoveling and raking for like a couple hours and I love it. It's good too. Yeah. And Jamon too is also a fellow ice hockey. Yes. So we are both ice hockey guys. Yeah. And I love keeping over Jamon's season over Twitter. So so keep tweeting because I love you up with you.

Yeah, I play goalie. You what do you play? I'm a defenseman. So you and I would be BFFs if we were on the same team together. Yes. Yeah. Some day we're gonna have to make that happen. That would be fun. I know you're at a higher level than I am. Absolutely blast. Yeah. I started playing well I played for a couple of years when I was like 19, but I just started playing again when I turned 37. I'm 40 now. And then you and then your team recently just won right? Yeah. Our third championship in a row. So so the league's like hey you guys got to move up.

I love that. That's awesome. Yeah. I love it. It's great to see you this morning. Jericho, it's great to see you as well. RJ, very hot and humid and grainy. I love it. RJ still sore about losing the thrashes. I'm not going to lie, the thrashes jerseys were some of the most nostalgic 90s. I like NHL jerseys there is or there ever was. I love that. All right. So, Jamon, let's dive in, man. People didn't log in to watch us talk about beer, the ice hockey. So, you know, I think one thing that I've always admired you on Twitter, and I think big in this, the power putting out content on Twitter, especially if you're hiring managers, your thoughts, your processes, how you do things.

And I've always loved your mindset around hiring. And for those of you who are tuning in, Jamon and I were chatting off air, and I was like, well, what do you want to get into? And he made a comment about interviewing. And I was like, ah, I want to dive into that. And so we're going to really dive into how, you know, Jamie Hughes interviewing, how they hire. But I wanted to dive into the first thing about being intentional. And, you know, Jamie was like, you know, you beat the drum on this topic. I was like, I know, but it'll be great to have somebody else beat this drum.

So we kind of break that down. And really more for advice to hiring man. He's like, I think it goes to the core of who are, who we are at Infinite Red a little bit to start with. You know, you can't really fake this because things will always take precedence if it's not a real priority. But we really care about who we work with. And I'm talking about their owners. Owners care about who we work with. We want a company. We started out trying to build a company that we would want to work with. And so I know that at some of my worst jobs, like in terms of just the type of work you were doing, there were cool people and they made the job bearable.

And at cool jobs I've had, there have been people who were miserable and they made a good job miserable. So it's all about the people you work with. And that starts with the hiring. That's where it comes from. Like it's very, very simple. It sounds so, but it doesn't end up being that way because it always seems like it slips in priority compared to all the other things that need to happen. and hiring such a kind of a long-term vision thing. Well, this person will come on board and they're gonna be kind of like, I mean, reality is new people don't usually have all that much internal political power at first and things like that, but eventually they'll get some and eventually they'll start having an impact on the culture and you have to be thinking about it.

So I want to, in the market right now, and Jamin and I were talking a lot there about this, It's not the hundred people. We're not hiring a hundred anymore. We may be hiring five. And, Jamie, you've obviously added around five individuals to your team this year. What do you, what, when we talk about being intentional, what are some things that you do during the interview process? Like, can you give me like, Jamie's top three things to, you know, cause intentionality during the interview process? I don't know if I can stick to three. Yeah, it was. The whole process. The whole process is designed to be like, yeah.

Yeah. We can run it through right now too. Yeah, no, I don't mind. You know, first off, we hire slowly. We're not going to hire quickly, and this is on purpose. So the 37 signals people have put out a thing, and they said hire when it hurts. And I don't know if I totally agree with that. But I mean, OK, two things we want to bring down real quick. Yeah. One, when you say hire slow, what's your typical time or turn around a time? Well, we're a little too slow, I think, compared to some of the opposite. Yeah, yeah, we're a little too slow. So 45 days.

I mean, it's like, for us, we don't have much turnover. And we don't intend to grow all that much. So for us, there have been years where we've only hired a couple. And then this year, we've hired five. I think in between, you know, for our size, we're only 30 people. So five people is an impact. Um, but like, uh, yeah, I mean, I think just just whatever, however you define slowly for your organization, uh, probably more slowly than you think it's, you know, the, the, then you maybe are getting pressure on. Um, just because the, you know, intentional intentionality, you got to, you got to make sure your process can handle it.

You got to make sure that your culture can absorb it. I love that. These things all really matter. And what do you mean hiring when it hurts? You mean like you mean like you're like in a dire need, then higher type situation? And again, I don't know if I totally subscribed to the idea, but the idea that the 37 Signals people say is that you shouldn't rush to hire more and more people. you know, there are real impacts to doing that, not just financial, but to your culture again, to the structure, you know, absorption, things like that. So when there's something that like, you know, is like, hey, I mean, an example of this is we had, I had, unfortunately, my sales coordinator left earlier this year, and she was fantastic.

Love working with her, and, but she just had some other things she wanted to do. We didn't hire right away. I just, I started doing some of that stuff and I was like, I'm just gonna do it for a little while and just kind of feel the pain, right? You know, like feel to be doing what she used to do. And it was, it was a lot, you know, it was a lot of work and it took me away from some other things that I probably needed to be doing. But then we actually had one of our developers who was really interested in stepping into some other of things.

He has been stepping up on the sales side of things and it's been great because he has, you know, his background obviously in software engineering, he's been for over 20 years. He can talk to, you know, engineering managers who are we usually talking to or CTOs or whatever. And he can talk the talk. So it was a situation where I was like, okay, well, we can actually just shift people around a little bit here. We don't have to fire right away just to see how this works. That isn't always going to happen, you know, but in that case then we could hire, but then I'd have a more tangible feel, visceral feel of like what we need.

Yeah, I love that. So, um, so how many steps is your interview process typically? Like do you have a set phone screen, technical screen, you know, did you have those set parameters already? We do. For many years we didn't. It was something, and so I'm speaking from painful experience of not formalizing our process as much as we should have. It was kind of a typical process that a small business goes through. But we, when we started, it was a lot of like, I'm not even going to go through that. A lot of it was informed on just kind of random things, but we finally were like, you know what, we're not doing this right.

We're not getting the results we want out of this. We had a few misses. And we're like, we have to, you know, we're engineers, let's engineer this, let's design it, let's actually be intentional about it. And so we sat down and we did that. And that, like, structure that we set up, which I'm happy to talk about in more detail, has mostly stayed in the same shape since we did that. It was a couple of years, two, three years ago, something like that. And it's been really good. It's been fantastic. We've gotten great reviews from people who we've hired and who we haven't. People who we haven't hired have given us good reviews on how we've treated them during the process.

Yeah. So do you mind running down, running through kind of the y'all's interview steps? Yeah, yeah, I can do that. Now, there's a few things that I'm gonna be a little bit maybe vague in a few places. Yeah, it's fine. You know, as people tend to be. And the reason is, it's not so much that we surprise people, it's more like there are a few places that we still like to be a little organic and see where the candidate feeds us. So, but I think the first thing that people see, obviously we want them to hear about us outside of, you know, maybe like an ad or something like that.

We want them to see our community work. You mentioned that earlier, how we put out content on Twitter and other places, YouTube, and now I'm streaming on Twitch and things like that. Those things, I think that's important because I want people to get to know who we are and be like, I want to work there. And I want to work with those people because then you kind of get, we want this even with people who maybe would hire us as a consultancy to you. Yeah, it kind of goes to who we want to be. So that's the first thing. Yeah. I want to rock you too because for the job seekers who are watching this that are on the hiring side, take note because if you go to Jamie and be like, hey, bro, I saw your tweet twitch stream.

I was about to say tweet stream, twitch, twitch stream about the latest version of React Native. And I loved your thoughts on that. I'm pretty sure Jamie is probably going to get back to you a lot quicker than some person going, Yeah, yeah, I just saw you. I just want a job. Yeah, yeah, totally. So, the best hires often have already listened to our podcast, either React Native Radio, my Twitch stream, or even better our Building Infinite Red podcast, which is just 13 episodes, and we did it several years ago, but it just kind of lays out our company culture, and it does a really good job of that.

You can go to Building.infinite.read if you're interested. And it's just the owners of Infinite Red talking about our philosophy. So a lot of this stuff is not private. It's stuff that we've already put out there. So yes, I really love our careers form. I think that this is something that people just sort of like, we need a careers form, so let's have them put in all the things that was in their resume anyway. And people know this pain. Yeah, you're about to get some angry pitchforks or something. Right, exactly. We want to hear what's not in the resume. And so not only that, but I also think that the application form is a really great way to have people self-select out as well as in.

So when they're filling it out, it's a little subtle. Maybe it's not that subtle. It's actually probably a little bit in your face, but it's selling us and it's talking about our culture and it's really kind of approaching it from like a conversational tone and a friendly tone and like, hey, this is who we are, is this what you like? You know? I have any questions, five, ten. I haven't counted, it's probably 25 to 35, but they're really fast. They're like, there's like, there's some free form stuff, you know, like, what do you like about Infinite Red? You know, like what do you like, what you see, and some of the things we let people, or some people that put pages and pages of stuff, some people put shorter blurbs.

Obviously something in the middle is kind of usually, usually the best, you know, like pages and pages. Yeah, but then if you just give two sentences, we're like, you know, you didn't really take it seriously. And, but like, it really does kind of, you know, It tries to get people to, well, one of the big things is I try to get people to self-evaluate. I want people to say, tell me how good you are at TypeScript. Tell me how good you are at React New York. I don't want to have to, like, I don't want to have to, like, deduce that from some heuristic. I want you to tell me how good you are.

And it's really like, it's things like, I've dabbled with it a bit. I've used it in production apps. I'm an expert in it. Some people undersell, some people oversell, but generally we want them to be as accurate as they can. And then later on in the process, we don't have to deduce these things. We can then just make sure that they were accurate, reasonably accurate. Yeah. So it's interesting you brought up the form thing. So for hiring managers that watch us an hour in the future, Brandon Bayer of flight control, he also has implemented a form. we talked about that rendered together. And he said it has allowed him to basically get out of, like kind of weed out a lot of people.

Maybe really, really looks for intention out of behind those answers. And so, and it seems to be working for you. So maybe more people need to do it. And I want to give a few more shout outs with Steven, good morning, Rami. Thank you for the kind words. Deb, it's great to see you man and then Abdas. Thank you so much. I'm glad you're enjoying it this morning. So you do the form. So somebody completes the form and all that jazz. What's next? We dump the applications into a Slack channel and then we have in the Slack channel, we have a group of volunteers of software developers who are gonna be working with these people if we hire them.

They review the application, they screen it. They chat in like a thread underneath it. You know, as it comes in, we have one person sort of shepherding. Importantly, none of the people who are like, like none of the owners are a part of this. Like the, the pre screen is done more like by your peers. So, several, you know, several people at Infant Red, it's volunteer. They're interested, they're keen on making sure that we kind of preserve this culture. And so they review it and they're very empathetic people. Some of the most empathetic people at Infinite Red are the ones that really care about this.

So they kind of self-select in. But they also want to make sure that they're going to be working with them, pathetic and cool people. people that love React Native that really just this is what they want to do because that's what we're about. So they kind of go through green light, yellow light with explanation. And then we gather all that up and then the coordinator of all that then gives us a recommendation based on that. Do we move them forward or not? And then, and then, you know, initial phone screen, zoom call, is it technical, is it not, what's kind of the first call look like?

Well, we are in Slack all the time. Like Slack is our life. And this is something, again, that's a little different. The first part of our interview is in Slack. No way. Yeah, it is. Okay. And we want to know how good they are at Slack. This is a little secret and I don't tell people this. Don't tell anybody else. If you're listening to this, don't tell anybody else. don't know where this is it. But yes, you're going to be talking to someone in Slack at some point. And that's actually one of the first things. And by the way, the person you're going to be talking to is our CEO.

Our CEO will be the very first person you talk to, other than me emailing you and telling you how to get connected up to Slack. But it's that important to us. We want people who are good at Slack. And if you're not good at Slack, it's just not going to work. I'm curious you mean good at slack in a sense like how to communicate effectively through chat yes 100 because that's entirely so I so I had a live show with with Sam he is a Think of engineering man drug github and he and I the entire episode was about emojis And the importance of like exclamation marks and emojis and like Because I feel like that's a lost art and and is that kind of what you're judging in this situation There are elements like that.

Yeah, it's, it's, you know, like right here we've got body language and we've got tone of voice. Yeah. And we've got pacing and we've got all of these cool things that we, that we as humans are very attuned to. And you can hear a little something in my voice if maybe something's not quite right. And Slack, you can't do that and it causes misunderstandings and it causes miscommunications and it causes all kinds of issues for a fully remote company like us. And we've been fully remote since well before the pandemic, like way, way back. And so we know that if you're not able to kind of have a good vibe in Slack, it's not going to be a good time for you or first.

And so it's just, it's like an initial part and you can kind of tell within the first little bit like how someone's going to do. It's, we've been doing this long enough, we can kind of tell. And it seems like a weird thing. It's like, well, you're hiring a software engineer. Why is it so important to be good at chat? But, you know, like I would say you're spending, I don't know what percentage of your time for me. It's a huge percentage. But yeah, yeah, and you're and you're not just chatting with us. You're chatting with our clients. We're consultants. We have chat channels set up in our clients.

I think that too. And you need to be able to communicate effectively with their clients. So yeah, that's a piece of art there. That's a little. And then yeah, Seeker just us. And then technical call. I mean, do you run them through React Native? they bring their own solution. Again, you don't have to spill all the beans, but just kind of high level. Yeah, I mean, we do. We have three technical screens, but that sounds bad. It's not even, it's not that bad. Essentially, the technical part of it, if Todd passes them on, their CEO passes them on, we've got Gantt, who's the other business partner.

We've got one of our developers and we've got me as the other two. It's partial like interview, you know, just to make sure that all three owners are like, you know, on board with this person. So all three owners of Infinite Red are involved in every hire. And Gantt's process is more just question and answer in Zoom. Just doing a little chat. And I just noticed RJ Hill says I want to come hang out on a slide. It's a good time. We enjoy. And one of our developers does a pairing session where he, and I don't remember exactly, I think he's got his own process, but everybody who comes out of that is like, he's great.

We love doing this. And that's not usually, you know, usually the kind of feedback, right? And he's really looking for general programming knowledge. like, can you think through problems? Can you think, have you done this? He's also kind of validating a little bit how, you know, how they said they did on, or how they self-validated it. Oh yeah, how they, yeah, that's right. Yeah, so like, are they good at type, they said they're expert at TypeScript, but they didn't know the difference between a type and an interface. Actually that might not be a big, you know, what I'm saying, like there's something like that. And then when they do get to me, I have a take-home that's more react native focused and it's actually kind of It's pretty simple really I mean like it's it's a few things that are Most react native developers would have run into in their in their lives at some point You know the careers they would have run into this problem and they probably know how to fix it And there's a what's cool is there's a variety of ways to fix it and I'm always curious how they do it I've gotten probably, I don't know, eight different ways, general kind of ways that people fix this problem and also implement some other things.

And it's always a little fascinating to me. But yeah, so that's just validating that they have some reactative side things. And then let me ask you this, communication throughout the interview, it sounds like you have an interview coordinator that kind of keeps in touch and makes sure Cants know what's going on. If a candidate gets rejected, I'm curious, I'll put you on the spot. Do you send some sort of feedback you give specific feedback like, hey, listen, you kind of missed here and here, like, because I'm kind of getting passionate. I get passionate about certain topics and kind of ebbs and flows. And this is one of the things I'm starting to get passionate about.

So what do y'all do from that perspective? Such a great question. I try to. I try to give feedback. such a hard thing because you know like I've gotten people who will argue with me you know the listen back thing yeah yeah like no you didn't test me for that yeah I didn't even interview you why you get mad at me exactly it most often tends to happen when it most often tends to happen when when we're rejecting someone based on the pre-screen. So I'll say, hey, we were looking for more reactative experience or something along those lines. And I've had people email back angrily and say, you didn't even ask for that.

And kind of like, the form is pretty clear. There's a lot of options. Yeah. But even with that, I try to take that in, if I'm getting a lot of feedback like that, to make sure that we incorporate it into our process and stuff. But yeah, I try to. I sent a couple of no thanks emails recently where it was like, yeah, you didn't have quite enough reactative experience or I didn't get enough green lights. But the more specific you are, it feels like people on the wall are you. Yeah, exactly. Trey comes in, no feedback is worse the bad feedback. Yeah, I mean, I think people just need to know.

And honestly, honestly, you just saying, hey, it's not going to be a fit is at least 50% better than no feedback. And I agree, that's something I've struggled with throughout my entire career. It's something that I've trained my recruiters on as well, giving feedback. I mean, a lot of times managers managers don't even give us feedback. And so then people get angry at us and it's like, Yes, not really us the manager. Yeah feedback. So yeah, I think the art of feedback is tough. I'll tell you this anybody's watching this Don't get upset Don't get upset jamming don't get upset at me. Don't upset recruit another hiring major Because we're all trying the best we can and if they took the time to at least get back to you to say no Just respect that and yeah Absolutely, and and I feel like if I if I have a report with someone I'll definitely be I'll have more I'll have more specific actionable feedback.

It's surprising how often I never get a response at all, like zero, like I send back. After you send the feedback. Yeah, after I send feedback. And I'm really like trying to make it good. Don't complain about feedback if you don't respond back. Yeah, it happens quite often. So I do wrap up here and I'm glad we started. Like I knew it would be a chock full of good stuff. So I want to put an emphasis on something you said, and I'm very passionate about, and you're one of the few mayors that have said it almost verbatim, how I say it. You don't view this top-down approach.

You don't feel like you should beat people up in the interview process, and I think it speaks to your retention. It's funny, I tweet this all the time. The companies who don't beat people down actually have a conversation with people in the interview process have better retention. It's crazy. So talk to me just real quick about your philosophy around that. Oh man, I love that. It's such a great topic. Yeah, we're not trying to exhibit some sort of power dynamic here and imbalance. I am a firm believer that the best relationships, and yes, that includes employee employer, are those where both feel lucky to be in the relationship.

And you can't have that if you're beating people down and saying, I'm from up above, looking down on you. I mean, I have been in that position before. I have been, I've felt those feelings before. I don't want to be treating someone with a lack of respect or just even like an empty suit. I want to treat them with respect even if they wouldn't fit at Infinite Red. And you find that comes back in so many different ways even if people don't end up working at your company. And throughout the process, I mean, Our CEO is awesome. He's like, you know, chief emotional officer, you know, like he's like, he's very empathetic.

And if he passes you on, he's rooting for you. Like the rest of the way, he wants this to happen. And you'll feel that. Like he will actually be on your side throughout the process. Now that doesn't mean that people haven't been rejected at different points in the process. But like you always feel like you have someone the CEO himself, you know having your back and That's I think that goes a long way toward the retention. We've had which has been fantastic. I love that. I love that All right last question before we wrap it up Because I started to ask yes this Because you know this show is called guidance counselor 2.0, you know We had guidance counselors in middle school and high school as an adult not so much we call those they are pissed now Now, the question I'm gonna ask you, what would you give your younger self advice when it comes to your career?

And like, I guess if you could go back in time until you're, I don't know, 21 year old self, what would it be? Wow. Yeah, there's a lot I'd have to tell that idiot. But, yeah, there's a lot. I think, you know, I would certainly encourage the relentless optimism that kind of got me to where I am right now. But at the same time, I would also be telling him that there's a lot that other people can bring to the table and especially seek out mentors and people with more experience because it was, I can look back at like inflection points in my career that were always kind brought about by introduction to someone new who had an impact, who had been there, could give me good advice, could give me, you know, could even just, I could just kind of watch them and kind of emulate how they were.

And, you know, I can name a bunch of people that had that kind of impact. But I was a little too, I can do it myself back then, a little too, I'm going to kind of outwork everybody. And at the end of the day, those weren't the points that got me ahead. They got me by, but they didn't get me ahead. When I got ahead was with people with listening and meeting people who had been there before who had a lot of great advice. That's good. That's good. Trey, we'll end on Trey's question. In what ways can I stand out to companies that put out content and have communities.

Yeah, that's a great question. And we love having people who put out content. It's fantastic. There's a number of different ways you can do this. Obviously, a lot of different things can happen. You can put out different types of media. You can just show that you're working on stuff. You're active. You're interested in this stuff. Obviously, for React Native content, there's open source. There's tutorials blog posts, YouTube videos, all these things, live streams, all of that. If you are, for us, we have things like newsletters where we aggregate these things together, so you can submit those to our React Native newsletter and get that content published.

Just be active in the communities. We have a Slack community that has a bunch of React Native developers in there. Yeah, if you're active, I'll notice you. I'm a very kind of very online guy. And if your name is popping up at some point, especially if it's reactative related, I'm probably gonna follow you. I'm probably gonna be connected with you. I can't say that every company out there is gonna do that, but I know that's for me. Yeah. Well, and I think what Jamie said too, is his name pop up, like Trey, even you just asking this question is, the way you think that out.

Yeah, exactly what and that's a We joke it's so true So now like Trey if you messaged J-Man next week on LinkedIn because he put out something James gonna remember you because of this comment right here, and that's and that's all it takes Well, Jamie, thanks again for hanging out with me man. I appreciate it Y'all, thank you again for hanging out with me today Tomorrow morning unicorn finders is back. I'll probably be at this coffee shop again AT&T is not supposed to get here until tomorrow night Whatever. So we're interviewing an individual from from Mux and UX. They do a lot in the video space.

There's a bunch of like words and things I don't understand so we're gonna break it down tomorrow so very very excited from that. So, Jamie, thanks again for hanging out man. Stay on as we end. But y'all go to the gym especially on Twitter. He's had a fantastic follow and I'll see y'all tomorrow for unicorn Finders, please. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode, and I am very grateful, because you know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes. And I myself rarely finish an entire episode, so I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the App Store.

I want this to be discoverable to others, and the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it. Please, like right now, unless you're driving, then don't do it. So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me, Taylor at Vaco.com or at Tdastin on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.