Insights into the Hiring Process at Buffer in January: 3,864 Candidates, 13 Interviews, 3 Offers made

It’s been a great month for growing the Buffer team in January. With the fantastic responses to previous reports on in revenue, customer happiness and content, we thought we might be able to do the same with hiring and be more transparent about our hiring process.

Here’s an overview of everything happening in the individual areas:

Applications overview

We saw an incredible amount of 3,864 applications come in in January, which has been absolutely positively overwhelming. Here is a breakdown of the different areas:

• Engineering:
  • 8 Android Hacker applicants
  • 40 Frontend Hacker applicants
  • 22 Reliability Hacker applicants
  • 285 Backend Hacker applicants (some of the above also part of this group)

• Happiness:
  • 1294 Weekend Warrior applicants & Happiness Hero applicants
  • 676 Community Champion applicants

• Marketing:
  • 907 Content Crafter applicants

• Operations:
  • 597 Lifesaver applicants

• Designers:
  • 233 Designer applicants

Here’s an overview of all the positions we’re currently hiring for.

Interviews & Offers made

Out of 13 interviews in January we made 3 offers to amazing new team members to take part in the Buffer Bootcamp.

Here is a break-down by area:

Outlook and thoughts

Improved flow for new applicants

Right now, it can often happen that applicants need to wait for quite a while, as we have such a large pool of amazing people applying. To improve this, we’ve started a pilot where we direct people through a form first and let people fill in a form. That way, we believe to be able to get more useful information about the applicant up front and decide more efficiently.

More positions

Next to the currently 9 different positions that we’re looking for, we’ve started to look for 3 more candidates to expand the Buffer team:

• Customer success
• iOS engineer
• Inbound Sales

This means that we’re trying to grow the team fast in key areas.

Hiring goals for 2014

We sat down and thought about how we want to expand the team in various areas in 2014. With the fantastic growth over the last few months and a lot of key areas where we need help, we’ve set down our goal to reach 50 Buffer team members by the end of 2014.

Given our big focus on culture, where we often say “no” to truly fantastic candidates, in case there is a slight misalignment with our values, this’ll be a steep goal. We certainly want to make sure not to lower our standards as we charge ahead to expand the team rapidly.

What does it take to get an interview at Buffer?

There was a particular question on Quora that caught my eye, asking what it takes to get an interview at Buffer. I thought it might be interesting for a wider audience and suits this particular report well: What does it take to get an interview at Buffer?