At Hike, we have a strong desire to see a better world, one where human consciousness is evolving in the right direction. We exist to bring joy to people through our breakthrough and innovative products. We do that by challenging the status quo and doing the unthinkable.
The unforeseen pandemic last year led us to make radical changes to our culture and organisation to ensure our employees’ safety and well-being. With this, we implemented and moved to a remote work set up ahead of the national lockdown last year. We continued to support Hikers with adapting to perfect our remote work culture and ensured timely appraisals.
Additionally, while the startup ecosystem in India was going through a challenging period, we played our part to support startup talent by prioritising & hiring candidates who were facing job and salary cuts.
In August 2020, we seamlessly transitioned to a remote-first setup.
Remote Hiring
With over 20 open positions, we are hiring talent across roles in product, engineering, art, design, marketing and partner roles (more details here).
Championing young talent
While we are hiring across roles, we have a focused initiative for young talent. Our way to bet on young talent is via a unique program called ZeroTo2 that provides incredible opportunities for anyone with up to 2 years of experience. This program offers a phenomenal way to jumpstart your career with challenging, impactful work in a pro-sports team environment. ZeroTo2 program gives young talent a unique opportunity to work with incredible people, build exciting, consumer-facing products & work directly with incredible, experienced talent.
Since its inception, the program has been really popular. In our second edition (which we conducted fully remotely) we had an acceptance rate of < 0.075% with over 4,000 applications!
We have also been tapping into graduating and alumni talent from leading institutions — like IITs, NSIT, DTU, IIIT Delhi, NIT Kurukshetra, and Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology — for recruitment drives (read our blog on ZeroTo2 — Championing Young Talent at Hike).
Tools for streamlining workflows
As a tech-forward company, we rely on tools in a big way. Our early investment in tools has helped us transition hiring and other critical processes smoothly into remote processes. Here are the main tools we use that have made remote hiring seamless for us.
- Workable — Applicant tracking system (ATS)
- LinkedIn, iimjobs & AngelList — Talent mapping & discovery
- Slack — Internal company communication
- Google Meet & Zoom — Conducting meetings & sync ups
- HackerRank & Collabedit — Conducting tech simulations, tests & assignments
Interview Process
Our interview loops are 21 days — from start to finish. Here’s what they entail.
- Application review — Apply to one of our open positions. We ensure that we respond within 2 days.
- Shortlisting — If you’re a good fit, we’ll set up a telephonic round.
- We interview you — You’ll have 5 rounds including a culture round that’s based on the Hike Code.
- Offer roll-out — Congratulations & welcome aboard!
Remote Onboarding
Remote onboarding is one of the things that we anticipated when the lockdown began in 2020. Working in a remote-first setup for over a year now, we’ve championed the art of remote onboarding for new Hikers.
Once the offer is accepted, we congratulate & welcome the Hiker by sending a personalised goodie box. The blue Hike goodie box contains — Hike branded T-shirts for the employee, vinyl Hike stickers, Mac book & other IT accessories (as per requirement). This small gesture goes a long way in extending the Hike spirit to our new joinees remotely.
Roadmap for new Hikers
On the first day of joining Hike, new Hikers get a note from the manager with an overview of the onboarding plan — an X days roadmap for themselves — on Coda (a project management tool we use internally). The goal of the roadmap is to help the Hiker get up to speed across all important aspects of the company — vision, principles, people, product and processes — by interacting with the key stakeholders within Hike.
- Vision & strategy — Overview & roadmap of the entire company
- Processes — IT training & employee training (remote working principles, feedbacks systems, etc.)
- Principles — Hike Code training to be culturally aligned
- People — 1 on 1 catch-ups with manager, teammates & other functional teams (teams the Hiker will cross-collaborate with)
- Product — Overview of all products along with the roadmap of the product the Hiker will be working on
Virtual catch-ups
To function more efficiently in a remote-first setup, we use Google Meet for catch-ups via video calls to help new Hikers get in sync with the company’s rhythm.
We continue to hold our monthly All Hands over a video call once every month. It’s extremely important for each Hiker to attend to be updated on everything Hike. We also hold our bi-weekly TGIFs and Q&As over a video call where Hikers are part of fun activities.
Closing Thoughts
Working in a remote-first setup has definitely led to higher productivity. Given the flexible work hours, individual productivity continues to remain high. Remote-first setup has also opened up doors for pan-India hiring of talent. Not being limited by the geographical location, we’ve been able to hire great talent from across the country.
Constantly optimising and evolving our Remote Onboarding product, we recently launched its V2 which makes a new Hikers experience even more seamless & joyful. More on this another time.
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