Hire the best talents

Our interviewing process is not short. But it helps us to find the best match. 

We believe finding a job is a match. We need time to find the candidates who match our vision and beliefs. Candidates need time to decide if we are the right design group for them in their current career stage. 

Matching is hard. It takes time and planning. 

The interview is a conversation.

We want candidates who apply to join our design team to feel informed, engaged, and supported throughout the recruitment and interview process.

To do this, our team will promise our candidates they will be respected, listened to, and given clear expectations and proper directions of the hiring process. In addition, our team members will give time, care and provide constructive feedback of reasons for acceptance or rejection while avoiding long-drawn-out interview processes that waste time.

This approach will help us stand out from the competition while showing that we value diversity, honesty, and vulnerability and that our decisions are not arbitrary.

What made our process unique?

To understand what made our process unique, we want to first talk about what we do similar to the industry. 

Our interview process consists of one-on-one interviews, portfolio review, whiteboarding exercises. There isn’t any shortcut to a design interview here. But how we conduct these interviews is unique to our team’s needs and provides the best candidate experience.

Personal

In most interviews, the candidates’ first contact is the recruiter. If your interview with us, the first contact is the hiring manager. Why?

Because more than anyone else, hiring managers care about the candidate’s success, furthermore hiring managers are the best group to evaluate if the candidates are a good match. Therefore, the first phone/ video call you get is not from a recruiter. Instead, it will be with one of our hiring managers. 

They will be the contact person to guide you through the interview process from this point on.

Besides the hiring manager, the candidate will have a team of supporting members to help them along the process. 

Our Design Operation team will help you with the detailed question about our hiring process. Our recruiting squad will also be standing by to answer any questions regarding the overall company hiring process, compensation questions, sponsorship, and legal questions. Candidates can reach out to any of these members along the process.

Flexible

We believe the interview process should be a conversation. It is a two-way street. We want to learn about your abilities and aspirations to decide if we can utilize your skill and help you grow. But, we also need to make sure your value align with our vision.

As for candidates, many companies are hiring. The candidates need to find the company that provides opportunities to work on projects they care about; find the design organizations to help them grow as designers. 

We have a set of one-on-one interviews, but depending on the conversation, we might introduce the candidate to speak with other team members that we believe they will benefit from the conversation. Some examples are: 

• Introduce the candidate to a PM director who leads the domain area the candidate is interested, or introduce the candidate to a PM director to gauge the candidate’s ability and interests in a specific domain.
• Introduce the candidate to a designer who is at their level to help them gain insights into the design org.
• Introduce the candidate to an engineer so that candidate can gauge collaboration opportunities on an open-source project.
• Introduce the candidate to speak with the DesignOps lead to learn what it is like to find life-work balance and work on a passion project, and what are the opportunities to teach and learn.

These are just some examples. And they don’t fall on a prescribed interview process. Instead, they are catered to the needs of our design group and the candidate. 

Inclusive

We strive to be inclusive when we interview candidates. Designers should always have a portfolio, yet we understand that not everyone has the time to create and update their portfolio; therefore, our portfolio presentation is a case study walk-through. We allow the candidate to pick one story (or more than one if they desire) they are proud of and tell us that story. Led by the hiring manager, during the portfolio/ case walk-through interview, the candidate will have the opportunity to meet with two designers from our team. 

We don’t assign take-home homework. This is because we know not everyone has time off from their current job or works on this kind of assignment outside of work. Some folks might be working multiple jobs or in a hostile work environment or have a family to care for, and they don’t have the time for extra “work.”

We don’t disguise spec work as a whiteboarding exercise. Our whiteboarding exercise is a workshop-style interview. Members from the product design team, product management team, and engineer team will work with the candidates to solve a problem together. These are real-world problems or fun problems to solve together. We will not judge your output. Instead, we care about learning your style of working with other members. 

A Conversation with people across the company and the leadership team members.

There are some additional required interviews for candidates interested in working with us. 

Orange Cloud— this is an interview conducted by trained Cloudflare interviewers. The main goal is to learn if the candidates are aligned with the overall company capabilities because the alignment provides the candidates a better chance of success at Cloudflare.

Leadership interview. The candidate will have the opportunity to speak with Design Leadership, Product Leadership, and one of the executive team members. Although this might sound intimidating, these interviews are essential. Our leadership team is actively involved in every hire here at Cloudflare. These are great opportunities for the candidates to see the big picture and the vision. Believe it or not, our cofounders Matthew and Michelle still take time to speak with many candidates.

Conclusions

Finding a new job is hard work. Likewise, finding new members for the design team is hard work. We are not perfect, but we strive to improve every day.