This is a series of blog posts:

1. How did I ended up sending a CV
2. Interview Process at Automattic (current post)
3. My first 45 days at Automattic

How Automattic gets to know their future employees?

During Covid-19 everyone is familiar with zoom video calls. Anyone would expect that a swift zoom video call between the applicant and the interviewer would be enough. Though, Automattic takes it one step further. They have a 1 hour Slack text only process.

Why a text only process is better?

There are two main reasons. Firstly, it eliminates bias. You don’t know whether the applicant is black or white, tall or short, thin or fat, beautiful or not, young or old! Secondly, since Automattic is a distributed company ( without any offices ) it’s expected that the majority 90% of the communication would be text based. This is a good opportunity for the applicant to taste how it works.

My experience

An HR sent to me the interviewer’s empty slots (ranging from next day to two weeks in the future) from which I could pick any and then they invited me to Slack. Me and the interviewer were both on time as scheduled. We have quickly “broke the ice” and they move on with some expected questions:

– A problem I had with Javascript recently

– How I handle Legacy code

– Familiarity with Testing

– Difficult problems and how I solved them

I answered each of them and we had a brief discussion, essentially giving more context. They were very kind and after 60 minutes they told me that they will inform in ~ 1 week whether I would move to the next stage – The Code Test.

Next: 3/3 My first 45 days at Automattic – Coming soon 😜