Southbridge has been supporting high-load servers since 2008. Now the staff has 55 employees, 19 of them are system engineers, more than half have been working for 5 years and longer.
In this article, we will describe the process of finding new employees, as well as tell a little about onboarding and team retention.
Our values and requirements for employees
At Southbridge, system administrators work in teams of three. One team maintains a loyal group of customers and communicates directly with them. The team's salary depends on the number of projects they accept to support. All work remotely and organize their working day themselves. This is where our values and requirements come from.
Customer benefit. At the head of everything is the client and his tasks. A potential employee must understand and accept this (we are talking about adequate requirements, no one gives clients to cross the border).
Fundamental knowledge and experience. If the applicant has a base, then he can be taught. If not, then it's like building a house without a foundation - you can, but everything will collapse. Understanding many things comes over time, so work experience is very important.
Willingness to optimize processes and learn new things. The more clients a team supports, the higher its income. Therefore, in order to grow, employees need to put things in order in current projects and take on new ones. If a person expects to set everything up at once and calm down, our format will not suit him. He will find himself in a situation where one project is closed, but there are no new ones and the salary has dropped.
Self-organization. Remote work implies compliance with many regulations and does not imply control. Nobody will ask why you came later. Only the result is important. And the result of the team depends on the actions of each participant. If a newcomer is not ready to work on an equal basis with everyone, then most likely he will simply not take root in the team.
Soft skills.Employees communicate with all clients directly, so advanced soft skills are necessary. The ability to understand the interlocutor, politely ask clarifying questions, answer correctly - all this is extremely important. Communication takes place in writing, so basic literacy and the ability to express thoughts in a structured manner are essential.
Selection
There is no HR in Southbridge. The first employees were hired by the general director Igor Olemskoy, then - together with the technical director Sergey Fomin. Now Sergey has taken the selection of system administrators into his own hands.
To get into Southbridge, an applicant needs to:
- Apply for job.
- Answer welcome questions.
- Answer specialized test questions.
- Complete the practice assignment.
Now how the process works from the inside.
Step 1. Post a vacancy A
common truth that does not become obsolete: before starting a search, you must clearly understand who is needed and with what qualities. We open a vacancy only when we create a new team, a person from one team moves to another or leaves. Therefore, we always know exactly who we want to find.
We place vacancies on the Southbridge website in the "Job" section, on Habré in the "Career" section and on HeadHunter.
The site is visited by followers who have been following the company for a long time and want to join us: Southbridge is 13 years old, so there are such people. On Habré and HeadHunter, we show vacancies only to people from the regions. According to experience, most often residents of Moscow and St. Petersburg are looking for money, not a job they love - not all, but very many.
It's not about saving. Moreover, we are convinced that an employee should receive a high salary. But if a person is less interested in the essence of work, then he is not for us.
In all vacancies, we indicate the salary below the market and we consider first of all those candidates who are ready to start with a small income. Already within the position, we create conditions for growth.
Step 2: Evaluate Your Cover Letter and Resume
Southbridge selection begins with a “first touch” —the cover letter. It depends on its content whether we consider the resume or not, and from what angle.
Often, candidates send a template unsubscribe or, even worse, just put a full stop - just to fill in a required field. For us, this is evidence of a little desire to work at Southbridge. If a person regretted 5 minutes for a meaningful response, then the vacancy is not very interesting to him. We are looking for people who really want to join our team.
The first letter reveals a lot about the candidate.
“When I read the letters of an applicant, I literally see his portrait. Maybe because hundreds of people were interviewed in this way. I notice a space before the comma and I understand some character trait. Each sign carries information. " Igor Olemskoy. Founder and CEO of Southbridge.If the cover letter is interesting, and the experience indicated in the resume meets the requirements, we write the candidate a response letter with several questions.
Step 3. Welcome questions
In the first letter we ask about the desired salary and invite you to tell about the most interesting experience from the past. These questions are needed to start a dialogue and are in themselves a filter - about 80% of candidates fall off on them: some do not answer, while others write such that they do not want to ask about anything else.
Sometimes we know the answers from the cover letter, but we still duplicate the questions - to look at the reaction. If the applicant is rude and bends his fingers, we are not on the way: in Southbridge, system administrators work with clients directly, so there is nothing to do here without advanced soft skills.
The answer to the question about money sets the bar. If a person names the maximum value, then we evaluate all his answers by the highest score. If you are ready to start from a lower position, then we approach the assessment less strictly, we can close our eyes to something.
I answered the welcome letter and did not be rude - already good! We send technical questions.
Step 4. Test questions The
list of questions has been compiled in advance. We update it from time to time, introduce examples from actual practice, but not often. The questions are different: both simple and complex; both general erudition and knowledge of specific technologies.
We send the list by mail and do not limit the candidate by time or sources. Yes, a person can ask a friend or google, but what's the point? If we notice that he "wrote off", then we will immediately refuse. If we don't notice, then at the next stage, his ignorance will still be revealed. Only time will be wasted.
We value accuracy in answering; mistakes made due to carelessness are not allowed. The administrator will have to work on the clients' servers, so it is important for us to know that he can get together and check everything thoroughly.
No one answers 100%: the questions are motley, you can answer them in different ways. We look at work as a whole, as a person thinks. It is important that his knowledge structure is close to ours.
If you are satisfied with the answers to the test questions, we send a practical task.
Step 5. Practical task The
applicant receives a description of the task and access to the test server. We take the problem from everyday practice. What customers usually ask for.
We do not limit the time - some applicants do the task for weeks. Google is also not prohibited. It happens that the candidate sees the proposed task for the first time, but understands and performs well.
We evaluate the result according to the checklist. Let's see if we took into account all the requirements, what tools and approaches we used, if there is a mess in the configs. One and the same task can be performed in dozens of ways, and by their choice, the person's experience is visible.
« , : , , , ».Personal qualities are more important than professional skills, therefore, all other things being equal, personal qualities are a decisive plus.
. Southbridge.
Step 6. Meeting with the team
This step did not exist before. If the candidate went through all the stages and successfully completed the practical task, we invited him to work. Fun fact: we hired most of the Southbridge employees without seeing or hearing. Absentee communication was enough to make sure that a person was apt.
But recently we have begun to add an interview with the team for which we are looking for reinforcement. Whether to meet or not, the team decides for itself. Sometimes he just accepts our choice, sometimes he wants to look at the applicant.
On a video call, the team and the candidate ask each other questions - both technical and any other. The meeting has several goals. Existing employees assess whether they like the new person, whether they are ready to work with him. The applicant learns about the specifics of the tasks and the details of the interaction.
It's good if the team accepts a person. This is important for us, since we adhere to a flat management structure and try not to impose anything on our employees.
Onboarding
It takes about six months for one employee to onboard. During this time, a person becomes an independent combat unit.
The responsibility for training the employee lies with the team. If a beginner joins a group of two people, then one of them becomes a mentor. If a newcomer comes fourth, relatively speaking, for an internship, then the load on his onboarding is distributed among all three team members. We rarely have internships, because they take a lot of time and energy from the team.
To speed up the training of new employees, we created several internal courses, and then a whole training center - "Slurm". We started with training Kubernetes, over time we added courses on DevOps, Docker, Ceph, SRE. And all this is done by the existing employees, engineers at Southbridge. Now the capacity of "Slurm" is enough not only for internal training, but also for corporate training for other companies at their request, a stack of technologies and tools.
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Since in most cases we employ experienced administrators, they do not need to be taught the basics, but we need to introduce them to new technologies (this task is solved by Slurm) and our approaches to administration. For example, we edit the Nginx config by including the configs, and someone figure it out in one. There are many standards and they are needed so that in the event of an accident, the administrator on duty knows where to look first.
All our regulations and standards are described in our internal documentation. Every beginner needs to read it and thoroughly understand it.
Retention
We choose employees for a long time and carefully, but if we have chosen, we try to keep them. People have been working in Southbridge for 5 years or more for a reason. We provide well-structured processes, interesting tasks, a salary at the level and the opportunity for growth.
Several years ago, we began our transformation into a turquoise company (moved from a hierarchical structure to a flat one), and first of all it affected the team. If you want to influence processes, increase income - everything is in your hands.
System administrators now work in teams of three. One team supports a group of clients and receives a portion of the money they bring. The more efficient your work is, the more you earn. Therefore, the guys are interested in automation, structuring, order. They are motivated to do well once. And many are great at it.
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. Southbridge.
The number of clients affects the salary. Southbridge engineers who prepare and deliver courses at Slurme receive a substantial boost. But sometimes we also revise the basic conditions. For example, in Covid, metropolitan companies began hiring remote employees and offering relatively high salaries. We did not wait for our employees to start comparing their income with the new market, and revised the conditions: we made allowances for passing internal certification (to stimulate internal training and at the same time influence salary growth), and increased the share that teams receive.
In addition, we have loyal working conditions. We never require sick leave. It is enough for employees of one group to notify each other: today is a family holiday, I will appear later - cover it up. A working day in Southbridge is from 10 am to 7 pm Moscow time, and at this time clients are waiting for a prompt solution of problems. But we have no literal control when the employee sat down at the computer.
And what is the result?
Rigorous selection, thorough onboarding, the ability to influence processes and income, loyalty to employees - it all works. We have a little turnover.
Of course, people quit: someone can't keep up with the pace, someone wants to try themselves in large organizations (large companies like Mail.ru are happy to hire our admins). We have no right to restrict anyone. All we can do is offer such conditions so that people like it and want to continue working.
