At babylon, we firmly believe that transparency is a core value that should be present in everything we do, and hiring the best person should reflect that belief. That's why we in the iOS team have open-sourced our recruitment process, for a fairer assessment process in which candidates know exactly what to expect, all the way to the questions we may ask during a face-to-face interview.
We also aim to be as flexible as possible by equally accepting applications from candidates who want to work on-site at our office in London, or who want to work remotely, or who have a limited amount of time to write a demo project, or who have open-source contributions.
babylon aims to hire only the most qualified people available at any given time. That doesn't mean that a candidate must have several academic degrees or have years and years of experience. We value potential equally as much as knowledge and experience. Above all, we value one's ability to think independently and to engage. As effective as they may be, we don't want robots.
Additionally, we want to hire people who are reasonable, professional, and fun to work with. After all, they are people we will spend a great deal of time interacting with on a daily basis.
As such, these are the main areas the iOS team will focus our assessment of candidates on:
- Technical expertise
- Languages (Swift, Objective-C) and platforms (iOS, watchOS, tvOS, macOS)
- Architectural design patterns (MVC, MVVM, Viper, etc)
- Knowledge of iOS APIs
- Knowledge of the development cycle
- Knowledge of reactive programming
- Interview demo project
- Interest in sharing one's knowledge
- Interest in learning new knowledge
- Interest in keeping oneself up to date
- Ability to think and work independently
- Ability to work in a large team
- Professional and personal maturity
- Overall attitude
- Likelihood of fitting in well with the company's culture
- Is the candidate someone we would like to work with on a daily basis?
Our recruitment process is different for candidates who are interested in working remotely and those who are interested in working on-site at our office in London, in three ways:
- remote candidates are required to be proficient in reactive programming (
ReactiveSwift/ReactiveCocoaorRxSwift) at an above-average level - remote candidates are required to use reactive programming in their interview demo projects
- technical interview sessions differ in number and duration:
- on-site: initial call -> demo -> 3-hour face-to-face technical interview
- remote: initial call -> demo -> one or more Skype interviews -> 1 working day with us (at our expense)
As indicated above, we expect all candidates to submit an "interview demo project" but, in order to be accommodating of different schedules, we provide three different ways in which a candidate can submit a demo of their work. Only one of these is required.
- The babylon demo project
- A project you've already done
- An open source project you've done or contributed to
A demo project should be an example of one's best work. We don't just want to see a technically good project; we want to be wowed by a candidate's technical skills and creativity. Note that we don't have a submission deadline so take your time to polish your demo project.
If we then think the demo project is interesting enough, we'll proceed to a face-to-face step, either on Skype (for remote candidates) or in person (for on-site candidates).
That face-to-face step, which normally lasts 90 minutes per session (there may be more than one), typically starts with a discussion around the candidate's project. We normally ask the candidate to implement a new feature (even if it's just using pseudo-code), or to refactor and unit-test a particular component, and in general we aim to have an informal discussion about the candidate's approach.
We may also focus on more technical aspects and ask a number of highly technical questions. As indicated earlier, we have open-sourced these questions as well since we believe that a fully open recruitment process gives all candidates a fairer chance to prepare themselves, and makes our assessment uniform across all candidates.
Above all, be yourself and thank you for taking the time to apply to babylon health! 🌈
Oh, and if you happen to know someone who might be interested in applying for a position with us, please point them to our careers page.