Our Interview Structure

Developer, First Round

Congratulations if you've made it through to interview. On average, we invite 1 in every 7 developer applicants to interview at all. Whether you're front, back, or full-stack, junior, mid-weight, or senior, the structure of the first round is pretty much the same in all cases.

We're interested in you as a person as well as your skills as a coder, so we'll spend the first 10 to 15 minutes talking about your background, what drives you, and getting a bit more depth on your CV. At least one of the directors will be with you, often joined by a relevant senior member of staff.

We follow this up with around 20 minutes of some simple coding tests. We'll stay with you during this time, making the process more conversational, as it would be in a real working environment.  There's no need to be worried here; we're more interested in how you approach the problems than your specific knowledge in any particular area of coding. After all, it's completely infeasible to test the entirety of your programming experience in such a short space of time. 

We'll feed back on the tests quite quickly and then finish with about 10 minutes of reflection and questions from you about us, if you have any. The whole interview should take around 45 minutes, but it's always wise to plan for a bit longer.

We believe very strongly that interviews are a two-way process. We each have to feel comfortable that we would work well together and that what Global Initiative provides is really what you're after. It doesn't serve your interests at all to be anything less than clear about what your professional ambitions and needs are.

We'll let you know within a few days whether you have been successful in this stage of the interview process. We will tell you in the interview exactly what the deadline for letting you know will be. Success at this stage means being invited back for a second-round interview.