Blogs· 4min February 15, 2023
Alexandra Forsberg is a Talent Acquisition Lead at Form3. She joins us to share tips for landing your next remote job. Alexandra covers all aspects of the interviewing process including where to find remote opportunities, how to stand out to hiring managers and how to prepare for a remote interview. Finally, she shares Form3's approach to the interview process.
Alexandra Forsberg is a Talent Acquisition Lead at Form3. Alexandra co-leads Form3's Engineering hiring across the UK, Europe, Argentina and Canada. She is currently leading a team of experienced Talent partners. Alexandra joined the business in 2018 and has had the privilege of growing Form3's Product, Engineering and Security departments. She has a background in agency recruitment, but is passionate about talent acquisition. She has shared her top interviewing tips in her article "How to Land Your Dream Remote Software Engineer Job".
On average, engineers look for a new job every 2 or 3 years. Alexandra begins by discussing the timing of these job searches. The short answer is to look for a job whenever you're ready, but it can be difficult to predict across locations and industries. Alexandra recommends to always be prepared by:
A lot of companies do hire at the start of a new financial year or quarter, so that is something to keep in mind as well. In the UK, the financial year starts in April, but you should check when it runs in the locations you're interested in.
Alexandra recommends a few remote job boards to use in your search for a new role, which you can easily find using Google. The top boards she recommends are:
You can also check Slack channels related to the languages you're interested in. For example, if you're interested in Go opportunities you can check the Gophers Slack.
Once you find an opportunity that you're interested in, Alexandra shares some red flags or concerns you should watch out for. Make sure that you ask the talent recruiter or hiring manager questions about:
The red flags would be in the answers to those questions, which could be vague or unsatisfactory. It's important to ask these questions early on to ensure that you don't waste your time on an opportunity that isn't a good fit. Alexandra underlines that in the remote world, the company culture and working practices are extremely important, so ensure that you receive satisfactory answers for your questions.
In the remote world, salary banding becomes tricky. Alexandra shares that there is no set rule in a how a company sets salaries for remote roles. Typically, they set salaries in two ways:
In either case, Alexandra recommends to research before salary negotiation. You can use Glassdoor or PayScale to get a good idea what your salary should be for the location and job you are applying for. You should be confident in what you're worth and don't be afraid to ask for the salary that you think you should receive. Once you know what your salary expectations are, you should communicate them clearly and early in the process. This will help you avoid disappointment and wasted efforts during the interview process.
Remember to consider all aspects of your benefits package, not just your salary amount. Companies stay competitive by adjust benefits, as well as pay. Alexandra shares the LinkedIn Global Talent trends survey which concluded that remote working was the number one benefit that candidates look for from their employer, trumping basic salary.
Alexandra has vast experience with this and can share some top tips:
In the case that you want to transition to a role that doesn't match your previous experience, make sure that you connect the dots for the recruiters by highlighting your transferable skills. For example, if you are looking to transition from a Java role to a Go role you could highlight your experience working with microservice architectures. Tools and technologies can be taught and learned, so make your transferable skills obvious to the recruitment team.
Alexandra shares that the preparation for a remote interview is no different from the onsite interview. You only have one chance to make a great first impression. You should definitely prepare and think through how you will present yourself and your experience.
In practical terms, you should also consider the logistics. Make sure you are in a quiet place, with reliable WiFi and that your equipment is working. You can also double check the video link and ensure that you can dial into the interview. Finally, during the interview, make sure you highlight your remote working experience and how you keep engaged.
As with everything we do, practice will help, especially if you are a nervous interviewee. You can practice with a friend, record and watch it back to see how you're coming across. However, you should always be yourself in interviews.
If you're serious about interviewing and have many scheduled calls, you can create yourself a Calendly account to keep track of your scheduling and ensure you are pacing yourself. You can also create a spreadsheet for tracking your applications.
Finally, Alexandra shares what Form3's recruitment approach is. The interview process is designed to be fair, transparent and accesible. The goal is to allow engineers from any background to apply for a role. Each stage is aimed to replicate the day to day problems that our engineers solve, so the interview does not include algorithmic style questions.
The Form3 interview process consists of three stages:
The interview process does not include a live coding task in order make it easier for people to fit the interview process in their busy lives.
Written by
Adelina is a polyglot engineer and developer relations professional, with a decade of technical experience at multiple startups in London. She started her career as a Java backend engineer, converted later to Go, and then transitioned to a full-time developer relations role. She has published multiple online courses about Go on the LinkedIn Learning platform, helping thousands of developers up-skill with Go. She has a passion for public speaking, having presented on cloud architectures at major European conferences. Adelina holds an MSc. Mathematical Modelling and Computing degree.
Blogs · 4 min
Kaspar Von Grünberg is a the CEO and founder of Humanitec. He joins us to discuss what an Internal Developer Platform is and what to focus on when you're building your own. Finally, he provides an overview of Humanitec's platform, which provides open-source tools you can use when you're building your own IDP.
March 15, 2023
Blogs · 3 min
No system is free of security vulnerabilities, which can be exploited to gain access to restricted resources. Ethical hackers are our allies, using the same techniques as malicious actors to help us find and fix the security vulnerabilities of our systems. In this short introductory article, we explore: the different types of hackers, the goals of ethical hacking and the main activities of ethical hackers.
March 2, 2023
Blogs · 5 min
Once upon a time, there were project boards in GitHub. They helped you plan, they looked like Trello, and they were much loved. They were classic. Then, one day, they were deprecated! Along came project v2 boards. They were like Trello, but also like a spreadsheet, and much more between, and they became the new project planning tool in GitHub. This post is about migrating project boards in GitHub. It's not, as you might expect, about migrating from classic project boards to v2 projects. GitHub offer a migration tool for that in their UI, and it's easy to do. Instead, this post is about migrating from one v2 board to another.
February 22, 2023