If you are considering applying for a role at Human Made (or at any company), here is a checklist and some suggestions for you to submit an application that may help you stand out or, at least, increase your chances of advancing to the next step in the interview process. We don’t abide by a be all and end all policy, but we sure need some general compliance with essential criteria.
- Make sure you meet the following requirements:
- Role title and responsibilities: We can’t stress this enough: it is very critical that your previous experience and roles are commensurate with the listed responsibilities and requirements. If you are looking to make a career shift into a different field, we strongly advise you to seek career counseling or mentoring to pursue a new path before even applying to any new job, be it at Human Made or elsewhere.
- English Language Communication proficiency: Although fully global and remote, English is the lingua franca we use to communicate internally and with most of our clients at Human Made. No matter where you are from and what your native language is, you will be expected to express yourself efficiently and effectively in English both in written and spoken form. We assess this directly as part of the hiring process by conducting email and video interviews, which are good opportunities to determine whether your communication skills meet proficiency standards, even if you are not a native speaker of English.
- Region and/or location: We are a globally distributed company but often we require specific roles within specific timezones. This is because we might require coverage in one region as opposed to another, or because the team needs to be synchronous for some of their work. If we state a timezone or region and you are not within that timezone we will not consider your application. It does not matter if you offer to work within the timezone of that region. We have experience of this and it does not work long-term. It’s not possible to maintain a healthy work-life balance if you are working for an extended period of time at unusual hours and it runs contrary to our values to encourage this.
For reference, our regions are:- EMEA: Europe (the UK included), Middle East and Africa
- APAC: Asia and the Pacific Ocean, which comprises all South East Asia, South Asia, East Asia and Australia and New Zealand.
- Americas: North, Central and South America, and the Caribbean
- Legal residential status: We expect you to hold legal authorization to work in your country of residence be it as a citizen or a resident. Human Made prides itself of hiring individuals in all parts of the world, but due to the remote nature of our company, we can’t provide any work visa/permit sponsorship. We strongly advise you to seek legal counsel upon joining and if planning to change your country of residence.
- Experience: Every job description will specify the minimum number of years of experience you need to have while performing in the same or similar roles. If unsure, please see below:
- Entry / Junior Level: 1 – 3 years of experience. Examples: Level 0-1 Engineer, Sales Representative, Operations Associate, Commercial Assistant.
- Junior to Mid-Level: 3 – 5 years of experience. Examples: Jr Sales Manager, Account Executive, Operations Manager, Marketing Manager, Level 2 Engineer, Project Manager, Product Owner.
- Senior Level: 5+ years of experience. Examples: Senior Web Engineer, Engineering Manager, Head of Product, Creative Director, Director of Talent Acquisiton, Marketing Director.
- C-Level / Executive Level: Leaders with over 10 years of combined industry and market expertise. Examples: VP of Marketing, COO, CFO, CMO, CEO, CTO, VP of People and Culture, VP of Engineering.
- Salary: We disclose the salary offering in most adverts in the Benefits section, so as to inform applicants of the current budget for each opening. Please check that your current expectations are in line with our package. You can always provide feedback if you think this could be improved. We do however, use the Radford dataset for generating our salary bands and are confident that they meet industry standards for the role and level we are looking for. We are open to negotiation but we can’t commit to meeting your salary requirements. We would appreciate if you are transparent with us about salary expectations up-front so that we don’t both invest time in a process which has no outcome.
- Role title and responsibilities: We can’t stress this enough: it is very critical that your previous experience and roles are commensurate with the listed responsibilities and requirements. If you are looking to make a career shift into a different field, we strongly advise you to seek career counseling or mentoring to pursue a new path before even applying to any new job, be it at Human Made or elsewhere.
IMPORTANT ADVICE
Write a brief but concise cover letter: The quality of your submission will be very much tied to how you convey your interest in Human Made, what we do, our team and culture. If there are any key drivers that motivated you to submit your application don’t be shy – let us know what got you excited about the role and our company. We read through dozens and dozens of cover letters that end up sounding generic and somewhat robotic. If you are particularly passionate about an area in Web Development or WordPress Development, or PaaS, get creative and write up something enticing that speaks to your passion: we want to know and we want to see that about you!
Individual Contributorship v. Leadership: We list roles that can develop either into Individual Contributorship or Leadership. Since everyone’s career goals are different, we ask of you to review that your experience matches the scope of the role: if applying for a line Manager role, we expect you to have had some relative experience managing and leading teams; for an IC role, we hope your career plan is within the scope of the role in that regard. Once you’ve made it past probation at Human Made, we accompany and explore a career plan with you, but it is important that you understand whether you are expected to have leadership background or not.
Communication Etiquette: The People Team at Human Made is driving all hiring efforts to support all teams throughout their growth spurts, so they can focus on their most important projects. We ask all applicants to be courteous and patient, and to refrain from reaching out to other humans on social/professional networks (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc). This can be easily misconstrued especially if the addressee does not have any hiring or stakeholder power. We will try our best to always send an update or rejection email, but if you haven’t heard from us, it is very likely we haven’t gotten to your submission yet.