PostHog Handbook Library / People

6,237 words. Estimated reading time: 28 min.

# Hiring process

Auto TL;DR

## At a Glance

This long page covers these main areas. The list is generated from the article headings, so it updates with every handbook rebuild.

1. Our approach to hiring
2. Countries where we employ people
3. External recruiters
4. Deciding to hire
5. The role of the Hiring Manager
6. How to write a great job description
7. Job boards
8. Referrals

### Our approach to hiring

Our goal is to build a diverse, world-class team that allows us to act and iterate fast, with a high level of autonomy and innovation.

Our recruitment strategy is to run:

- 100% inbound by default – effectively a word of mouth strategy, like our marketing and sales model.
- Supplement this with occasional, targeted sourcing to increase the pool of diverse candidates (if needed).

This has resulted in the highest number of qualified and motivated candidates reaching final stages with us compared to other methods, such as more generic sourcing. As a result, we invest most of our energy in:

- Writing exceptional job descriptions, and re-writing them frequently
- Ensuring our careers page and application experience are world class
- Sharing our roles within our networks for exposure in unusual ways (as candidates are likely to be pre-qualified)
- Where we can, giving candidates genuinely useful and direct feedback if they weren't successful with us
- Running a smooth and incredibly slick recruitment process, from application to offer

### Countries where we employ people

<CountriesWeHireIn excludedCountries={[ 'Afghanistan', 'Armenia', 'Australia', 'Azerbaijan', 'Bahrain', 'Bangladesh', 'Belarus', 'Belgium', 'Bhutan', 'Bolivia', 'Brazil', 'Brunei', 'Cambodia', 'China', 'Comoros', 'Cuba', 'Denmark', 'Djibouti', 'Eritrea', 'Ethiopia', 'Fiji', 'France', 'French Polynesia', 'Georgia', 'Hong Kong', 'Iceland', 'India', 'Indonesia', 'Iran', 'Iraq', 'Italy', 'Japan', 'Jordan', 'Kazakhstan', 'Kenya', 'Kiribati', 'Kuwait', 'Kyrgyzstan', 'Laos', 'Luxembourg', 'Madagascar', 'Malaysia', 'Maldives', 'Mauritius', 'Mongolia', 'Myanmar', 'Nauru', 'Nepal', 'New Caledonia', 'New Zealand', 'North Korea', 'Oman', 'Pakistan', 'Papua New Guinea', 'Philippines', 'Qatar', 'Russia', 'Samoa', 'Saudi Arabia', 'Seychelles', 'Singapore', 'Solomon Islands', 'Somalia', 'South Korea', 'Sri Lanka', 'Sweden', 'Switzerland', 'Syria', 'Taiwan', 'Tajikistan', 'Tanzania', 'Thailand', 'Timor-Leste', 'Tonga', 'Turkey', 'Turkmenistan', 'Tuvalu', 'Uganda', 'United Arab Emirates', 'Uruguay', 'Uzbekistan', 'Vanuatu', 'Vietnam', 'Yemen', ]} />

We are all-remote, but we have a few limitations on the countries we are able to employ people in:

- Our hiring is strictly limited to candidates physically based in GMT+2 through GMT-8 (following the sun's rotation). Unfortunately, we cannot hire people outside this range, even if they are willing to adjust their working hours. The only exception is for countries that are normally GMT+2 but move to GMT+3 during daylight savings (e.g. Bulgaria, Greece).
- In some cases, we include a preferred time zone range for certain roles to help balance coverage and support across the team that is hiring. This allows us to distribute responsibilities more evenly while maintaining strong collaboration and responsiveness.
- Due to US sanctions, we can't hire folks in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, or Syria.
- We don't currently employ people via EOR in France, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Iceland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Uruguay, Bolivia, Denmark or Brazil, mainly due to the very high employer costs.
- In some of these countries we _may_ consider hiring as a contractor, provided there is no misclassification risk. We have done this before successfully in Brazil and Uruguay.

### Hiring Process

#### External recruiters

All of our recruiting is done in-house, and we do not work with external agencies for any of our roles. We frequently receive unsolicited messages from agencies – sometimes 20 in a week – who want to work with us. The best response is to simply ignore the message. If they attach any candidate profiles or résumés to their email, please _do not_ open the attachment. If you are ever unsure what to do, feel free to forward any unsolicited messages to careers@posthog.com.

#### Deciding to hire

‘You're the driver’ is one of our values here at PostHog. We think carefully about each new role and the complexity it introduces to the organization. We also have an extremely high bar for the people we do hire!

We use Pry to plan our hiring. We use the hiring forecast as a guide, but iterate on this pretty much every month, so we can stay super responsive to changes PostHog's needs. Typically we know:

- 3 months out – exact job titles we want to hire for, and in which month
- 6 months out – number of each type of job (e.g. 1x designer, 3x engineer)
- 12-24 months out – number of hires overall we want to add to the team

For each new role, please open a new issue on the Ops & People project board and add all the requested information from the new hire form. Everyone will have the opportunity to give their feedback on the proposed role before we publish it.

#### The role of the Hiring Manager

The hiring manager is a role assigned to the person who will work most closely with the People & Ops team to make a hire. Usually this is the person who will manage the new hire or is a Small Team lead.

If you are a hiring manager for a role, you will usually:

- Give input into the job spec to make sure it's right
- Give the People & Ops team feedback on candidates
- Conduct the technical interview
- Kick off the SuperDay and be the candidate's main point of contact on the day

##### How to write a great job description

The People & Ops team will then write up the full job description in Ashby.

We frequently iterate on our specs, but we have a template for a product engineer role that you can use as a starting point. Generally, the "About PostHog" and "Things we care about" sections should be used in all ads, and you can adapt the other sections to your specific requirements.

We find the following approaches work well:

- Being extremely clear and precise about what this person will actually be working on (including linking to example PRs/Issues of similar work in GitHub where possible)
- Sharing why this role specifically is exciting, and the impact they will get to have
- Linking to as much useful contextual information as possible, including the small team they will be working on
- Using the absolute minimum number of requirements needed - 5 'must-haves' absolute max
- Run the text through a gender decoder tool to check for unconscious bias
- Don't use specific years of experience as a qualifier

Once the hiring manager has signed off on the spec, we will publish it on Ashby – instructions on how to do this are here.

##### Job boards

Ashby will automatically add the role on our careers page. It will also 'helpfully' publish it on a bunch of other free but irrelevant job boards - you should manually remove all of those except for Ashby and LinkedIn. Wellfound will need to be posted manually.

As a Y Combinator company, we can post jobs ads on the HackerNews front page for free at https://news.ycombinator.com/submitjob. This requires a founder's HackerNews account to do so.

Ashby also had a partnership with YC's job board so all roles to YC's Work at a Startup will push out automatically. For certain roles, we also publish on other job boards:

Design

- Behance
- Dribbble

Engineering

- Hacker News Who's Hiring - see Tim's comment history for a template.

Product

- Mind the Product
- ProductHunt
- Lenny's Job Board

#### Referrals

Every time we open a new role, we will share the details and ideal profile with the team during All Hands.

##### What qualifies as a referral?

A referral must meet these criteria to be eligible for a bonus:

- _No retroactive referrals_: You cannot claim a referral for someone who has already applied to PostHog. Referrals will only be applied retroactively if you can tell us how you've been involved in this person applying to PostHog, and you should provide the Talent team with this information as early in the process as possible!
- _Must provide valuable context_: Your referral should include meaningful insights beyond basic resume information
- _Be proactive_: Don't only wait for your network contacts to apply first - actively identify and reach out to potential candidates

##### Personal referral

If you know someone who would be a great addition to the team, please submit them as a personal referral. If they're successfully hired, you'll receive a $2,500 referral bonus! The bonus can be either paid to you directly, or towards a charity of your choice where we will match the amount! You can also split the amount between you and the charity.

##### What makes a strong personal referral:

- You've worked directly with this person and can speak to their abilities
- You can provide context about their motivations, work style, or how they'd fit with our team
- You can help with closing them if they're interested (explaining PostHog culture, answering questions, etc.)

Especially when referring cross-team, feel free to reach out to #team-talent and gather context before doing the work of referring (will save us all some work, and the candidate a rejection email!) Referring someone means we'll review them carefully. It doesn't guarantee they'll get an interview. We hold referred candidates to the same high bar as everyone else, and we'll let you know if they don't progress and why.

##### Examples of insufficient referrals:

- "Worked with X at Y company, very nice person"
- Basic resume forwarding without additional context
- Generic LinkedIn connections you don't actually know

Please make sure the candidate has given their consent before putting them forward.

We occasionally open up short term contracts, and you'll receive a $1,000 referral bonus if you recommend someone here too! The contract just needs to be on a full time basis and at least 3 months long.

Unfortunately people who actively work on recruitment in the People & Ops team at PostHog are not eligible for referral bonuses, to mitigate the risk that they influence the process unfairly. If you would like to refer someone and are not sure if this applies to you, speak to Tim.

##### Help with your network

We recognize everyone is busy with limited bandwidth. If you'd like help identifying potential referrals from your network:

- Reach out to the Talent team! We can go through your network and find interesting candidates.
- We'll collaborate on outreach strategy
- Together we'll decide who makes the initial contact
- You'll still receive the referral bonus if they're hired

##### What's the process?

If there is an ongoing conversation, please cc careers@ into the email thread with the referred candidate, and we will take it over from there. Otherwise, please upload the profile to the Ashby referral page.

Important: If they have applied themselves already, you cannot claim them as a referral - this includes candidates who applied weeks or months ago.

##### Social referral

You will sometimes get people emailing or messaging you on LinkedIn asking to chat about a role or get referred in. If you have a chat with them and think they are worth referring, but you don’t know them enough to provide the talent team with valuable context, you can submit them as a social referral. If you don't know them, you can point them back to our careers page, or just ignore them. We get dozens of these kinds of messages every day, so don't feel bad about not engaging! If they are asking for advice, you can point them to this article.

The referral bonus for social referrals is $500, and we again match any amount you choose to give this to charity.

If you are consistently posting about jobs to your networks, please note that Ashby does not currently support referral links in a way that lets us reliably track those applications as social referrals. If someone reaches out after seeing your post and you want them to count as a social referral, ask them not to apply directly yet. Instead, submit them through the Ashby referral page.

##### Family referral

We welcome referrals of family members as long as they will not work on the same team or within the same reporting chain as the referring team member. To maintain a fair and balanced team environment, we do not hire spouses, as this can create interpersonal dynamics that are difficult to manage in a professional setting. This approach helps ensure that all hiring decisions remain objective and that team interactions stay healthy and unbiased.

##### Referral payouts

You'll get paid the bonus 3 months from the new team member's start date, and it will be processed as part of payroll. If this date falls close to the payroll cutoff for that month, it may be included in the following month's payroll instead. Bear in mind that you might be liable for income tax on the bonus.

##### Non-team referrals

We also welcome external referrals, e.g. from:

- From our investors
- From the PostHog community (by posting on our social media profiles for our followers to see)
- From the YC community (Slack / WhatsApp / Forum)

As a thank you, we will give you $50 credit for our merch shop.

### Managing candidates

All of our candidates are managed in Ashby – all team members have access to the platform and Ashby will automate your specific level of access based on the role you play during the hiring process (i.e. hiring manager, team member, etc.). If you need additional access, please reach out to Coua or Charles.

We record all candidate-related comms in Ashby, so we can ensure we provide all candidates with the best experience we possibly can - even if they are unsuccessful, they should come away feeling like they had a great interaction with PostHog.

Ashby is a pretty intuitive platform to use, but here are a few helpful tips to get you going

- A guide to getting started with the basics - this is pretty much everything you need to navigate through Ashby to provide feedback and review candidates.
- Link your Gmail account in Settings if you are in direct contact with candidates. This means any emails you send directly from your inbox will automatically be captured on their Ashby record for everyone on the hiring team to see.
- When emailing candidates from within Ashby, you can select a Template from the dropdown bar (and customize it if you want). If you find yourself writing the same email, it is worth saving as a template.

If you receive an application via email or some other non-Ashby channel like Slack from a candidate you think we should definitely interview, tell them to apply directly via the website and forward it to careers@posthog.com. You will get people reaching out to you over LinkedIn regularly - only forward the high priority candidates to the talent team.

#### Managing sourced candidates

For roles we're actively sourcing for, please make sure that an extra step is added to the interview process as "Sourced Screen" after "Replied". All sourced candidates need to be added to Ashby from the "New Lead" stage and should be moved through each stage until the end of the process. If a sourced screen goes well, the candidate can be moved to "Technical Screen" directly.

#### Booking interviews through Ashby

Schedule interviews through Ashby itself. Do not use Google Calendar, otherwise the event won't be populated with useful candidate info, and we won't have a record of the meeting anywhere.

When we book a meeting, we have the option of selecting a Google Meet or Zoom call which Meet should be the default.

If you are involved in interviewing it is important to keep your calendar up to date. Candidates can book directly into your calendar so having your calendar blocked when you are not available to interview is important. This includes things like personal appointments, travelling, attending off-sites etc.

If you have an interview booked in you cannot make, do not just respond "no" to the calendar invite, please let the ops team know asap, or even better find a replacement for your interview and let Ops know, and we can update the interview. We aim to provide a great candidate experience and moving interviews is one way to reduce the quality of that experience.

### Hiring stage overview

#### Application

The Talent team reviews applications and resumes/portfolios carefully and leaves their feedback as a comment on the candidate's record in Ashby if relevant.

### Blocked application for multiple open roles

Our Talent team reviews candidates across all relevant open roles company-wide. If our system shows that you’ve applied to multiple roles at the same time, your original application will be retained while the others may be temporarily blocked within your candidate profile. This helps us review candidates fairly and thoroughly. No action is needed on your end— your information is already in our system, and the Talent team will ensure you’re properly considered for other similar opportunities.

If a candidate hasn't customized the application or resume to the role, it is a flag they aren't that excited about working at PostHog. Cover letters are definitely _not_ mandatory, but at an interview stage, it's important to note how passionate they seem about the company. Did they try out the software already? Did they read the handbook? Are they in our community forum?

Candidates who are unsuccessful at this stage will receive an automated rejection email. Due to the volume of applications we receive, we usually don't provide personalized feedback.

#### Interviews

As a rule, all interviews at PostHog are conducted in English. Whilst this might seem obvious to some, we are lucky to have people from multiple different countries, that speak multiple languages. We are hiring for people to be successful at PostHog, and at PostHog we conduct our business in English, so it is important the hiring process is also conducted in English.

If you are paired with an interviewee who speaks your native language, just politely acknowledge this and let them know all interviews are conducted in English. We also require these calls to be conducted as a video call, so a working webcam is necessary.

#### How interviews are scored

Scoring Scale (1– 4)

- 1: Strong No = This candidate is clearly not a fit for PostHog now or in the future
- 2: No = Not a fit now (maybe in the future)
- 3: Yes = This is a solid hire
- 4: Strong Yes = This is an exceptional person we need to hire. (we might go to extra lengths to hire them)

> A good rule of thumb when deciding whether not to progress at any stage: if the candidate is between a 2 and a 3, then it's a 2. It's almost never worth putting through someone who is a 'maybe'! We provide lots of information about PostHog to enable candidates to put their best application forward.

When you have conducted an interview, you should leave feedback no later than the end of the day after the interview. Moving candidates through the process quickly is critical to us being able to hit our hiring goals, waiting more than one day for feedback can kill the momentum and leave the candidate with a bad experience. If for some reason you cannot give feedback before then, alert the talent team ASAP.

#### 1. Culture interview with Talent

We start with an interview which is designed to get the overall picture on what a candidate is looking for, and to explain who we are. A template scorecard has been created for this stage in Ashby.

This is to allow both PostHog and the candidate to assess whether the candidate is a great cultural addition to the team (not culture fit), and to dig into any areas of potential misalignment based on the application. We are looking for proactivity, directness, good communication, an awareness of the impact of the candidate's work, and evidence of iteration / a growth mindset.

This round is loosely structured into 4 different sections:

1. (If we sourced them) PostHog – quick intro about the company and role
2. Candidate background and mindset
3. Talk about the hiring process and check if the candidate has seen our compensation calculator, so we know we're roughly aligned.
4. Answer any open questions

This stage is usually a 20-minute video chat.

Candidates who are unsuccessful at this stage should receive a short personalized email with feedback.

#### 2. Technical interview with the hiring manager

In this round, the candidate will meet a future team member. This round is usually 45-60 minutes and will focus on a mix of experience and technical skills. Please check the specific hiring process for each team for more details.

As a rule of thumb, everyone interviewing must feel a genuine sense of excitement about working with the candidate. Again - if it is not a _definite yes_, then it's a _no_. Ask yourself - does this candidate raise the bar?

For engineering roles only: during high-volume seasons, this round might be recorded for training purposes to help us onboard and train new interviewers faster. The candidate will, of course, have the chance to opt out by either letting their recruiter know in advance or letting the interviewer know at the start of the interview.

#### 3. Small Team interview with an Exec Team member

This is a call with either James, Tim, Raquel, Paul, Ben, or Charles depending on which Small Team they are being hired into. They will probe further on the candidate's motivation, as well as checking for alignment with PostHog's values.

Candidates who are unsuccessful at this stage should receive a short email with feedback.

#### 4. PostHog SuperDay

The final stage of our interview process is what we call a PostHog SuperDay. This is a paid full day of work with us, which we can flexibly arrange around the candidate's schedule. We are not able to bypass this stage so if the candidate is not interested in conducting this final round, unfortunately we will have to part ways and the candidate will no longer be considered for the role.

> If it is difficult for a candidate to commit to a whole day in one go - they may not be able to get the time off, or have childcare commitments that make this difficult - we can be _very_ flexible. For example, we can split the SuperDay across two or more sessions, and can align timezones to suit the candidate, given we have a team that's globally distributed. A candidate will never lose out because they are not available to do a SuperDay right away.

The candidate will be working on a task that is similar to the day-to-day work someone in this role does at PostHog. They will also have the chance to meet a few of their potential direct team members, and if they haven’t already, our founders. This gives the candidate a chance to show off their skills, and for us to see the quality, speed and communication of the candidate.

As we grow, we find the need to hire engineers who are comfortable working with existing codebases to be increasingly fundamental. During SuperDay, Product Engineering candidates will also have a 45-minute debugging session. There is nothing to prepare in advance for this; you'll work with your interviewer in a pairing session to get through a bunch of bugs! It is a demanding day of work.

We pay all candidates a flat rate of $1,000 USD for their efforts on the SuperDay. On rare occasions, if we have to cancel a scheduled superday because we have filled the role with another candidate who was further advanced in the process, we will pay a $500 USD term fee to the candidate for their efforts up until this point.

If the candidate is unable to accept payment for the SuperDay, we will donate by default to Django Girls Foundation. Payment and donation for SuperDays are expected to process every Wednesday so it'll depend on what day your SuperDay falls on. Either way, please feel free to flag your talent partner if you don't see the payment deposit within one week of your SuperDay.

This day will be _the same_ task each time for a given role, to be shared with the candidate at the start of the day. The task is generally designed to be _too much_ work for one person to complete in a day, in order to get a sense of the person's ability to prioritize and get things done.

Overall, the candidate should aim to spend at least 80% of their time and energy on the task and less than 20% on meeting people, as we will base our decision on the output of the day.

> For everyone on the PostHog team meeting a candidate, ask yourself – will this person raise the bar at PostHog? The answer should be yes if we want to hire them.

In advance of the SuperDay, we will need to do some additional prep to ensure that the candidate has a great experience:

- Send the candidate, Blitzscale team member, (depending on the role), the talent team, and the SuperDay buddy (technical roles) or the lead (for all other non-technical roles) a Google calendar invite to remind the team when the SuperDay will take place (mark the invite free and all day or split days)
- Send them an email in the first instance to schedule the SuperDay - we aim to do this as soon as possible, as candidates often will need to book a day off work. Use the Ashby email template for this. If the task involves them doing 'real' work for PostHog, we should ask them to check that their current employment contract permits this - we try to create fake tasks for this reason. For all US candidates there is a requirement we collect a W9 from the candidate for accounting and tax purposes (_this doesn't apply if the US candidate decides to donate the funds to one of our sponsored projects_)
- We also send the candidate a follow-up email with details of the day, and ask them for their day rate and bank details right away, so the candidate can be fully-prepared for what to expect and who they will meet. There is a template for this email in Ashby, depending on the role - this will probably need customizing.
- When scheduling in Ashby, please make sure to turn on the option to create a private Slack channel for the candidate and all relevant people - this will be where they can chat to us over the course of the day if they have any questions etc (`#superday-[first-name]-[role]`). Invite the candidate as a single channel guest. We might need to add the candidate to one of our systems depending on the role, e.g. Ashby for a recruiter SuperDay, but on the whole this should be minimized.
- The last step will be to schedule the appropriate engineering task to go to the candidate's GitHub handle the day of their SuperDay. Sign in to your Vercel app and click on Manage SuperDays and fill out the form for the candidate's info. Please be aware the task is case-sensitive.
- For the Clickhouse Engineer task, please follow this task and click on the "Code" button and hit download button and upload the zip file into the candidate's slack channel to go out the morning of the SuperDay by 8:00 am in the candidate's timezone.
- (One day before the SuperDay) For non-technical roles, invite the candidate to a kickoff meeting with the hiring manager at the start of the day and send the candidate the task - aim to send this before the kick-off session so if the candidate has any questions they are able to go through them during the kick-off session. We encourage the candidate to ask questions throughout their SuperDay, but sometimes it is nice to have any questions answered in advance, so they can kick off their task appropriately.
- It is important for product engineer candidates to be prepped for their check-in call to do a deep dive of their progress so far with their SuperDay buddy while other non-technical roles in Sales, Onboarding, and Customer Success, the candidates will be running a demo mid-point of their SuperDay.
- (On the SuperDay) Give the candidate a warm welcome! Make it clear that the team is here to answer any questions, and they should feel free to reach out any time! Otherwise don't feel like we need to check in with them - let them get on with the task and trust that they will message us.

> For some roles, we may occasionally set a task that goes over multiple days. For example, we have set Content Marketer tasks that last 3 days in order to create a piece of content.

#### Decide if we will hire

> We aim to make a decision within 48 hours of SuperDay - being decisive is important at this stage, as great candidates will probably be fielding multiple job offers.

After a SuperDay, everyone involved in the day leaves their feedback on Ashby. This is hugely important to us in making a final decision so team members should make an effort in completing their feedback as soon as possible. If there are wildly different opinions, you should open an issue in `company-internal` to discuss.

If a decision is made to hire, the People & Ops team will open an onboarding issue once the candidate has accepted and James/Tim will share in our Monday All Hands Meeting a brief overview of the following:

- Who we ended up hiring and their background: what they will be doing, and a summary of the recruitment process (how long open for, no. of applicants etc.)
- Why we are hiring them: feedback from the interview process, both positive and areas to improve
- Start date and location
- Share the output of their SuperDay (if applicable)

If we don't make an offer, it's important to clearly outline to the candidate why that decision was made. Highlight what went well, but also mention specific points of improvement. Offer to schedule a call if they would like to discuss further. Make sure to leave the door open for the future so they can apply again in 12-18 months time as circumstances and people change.

#### Making the offer

Hooray!

The People & Ops team will prepare the offer details. James and Tim give final sign off. We then schedule an offer call with the candidate - this might be Charles, Fraser or a member of the people & ops team.

During the offer call, we'll share feedback from the interview process, and sell the opportunity here at PostHog. We will also briefly cover the offer details (salary, equity, benefits), and answer any open questions. Afterwards the person who made the offer will follow up with an offer email, outlining all the details. If a candidate is proving tricky to close, the team may escalate to James or Tim to help.

Once the candidate accepts, the People & Ops team will kick off the onboarding process and take the role offline, after rejecting all remaining candidates.

#### How Ashby works for interviewers

We pay Ashby per seat, so as an interviewer your access is limited to those candidates that you will interview, to save us some money. You will be able to see their application (inc cover letter), their resume and all previous feedback left about the candidate.

You will not be able to see every other candidate in the pipeline, this is because of the per seat pricing. However, we will keep a couple of seats aside so you can login to see other candidates in the pipeline and do a bit of profile/assessment calibration. If you would like to do this, please contact the talent team on slack and they can provision this for you. You won't keep this access forever but you can get it for a few days/ a week to get an overview of how some other interviewers are doing things.

### Visa sponsorship

Building a diverse team is at the heart of our culture at PostHog, and we are proud to be hiring internationally. In some cases, this includes the need for visa sponsorship. We are currently only able to provide visas in the UK.

- If the candidate is already in the UK on a visa (e.g. employed, youth mobility), or require a new visa to remain in the country (e.g. student converting to employed), we will cover the costs for any employee, new or current.
- If they wish to relocate and need a visa, we unfortunately will not cover the cost for obtaining the visa or any relocation costs.

For employees where PostHog covers the costs related to obtaining a visa, the employee agrees to reimburse PostHog if they voluntarily terminate their employment prior to the completion of 12 months of service. The costs will be calculated on a monthly basis, so when the employee decides to leave after 10 months, they will have to repay 2/12 of the costs related to the visa.

If a candidate needs visa sponsorship, including sponsoring or transfer of H1B visa in the US, at this time, we cannot hire them.

### E-Verify

We participate in E-verify for all US new hires which allows us to verify employment eligibility remotely and continue hiring in multiple states. E-Verify is not used as a tool to pre-screen candidates.

### Location

For some teams, it's important to have a wide range of timezones covered by the small team. This allows us to have closer to 24 hour coverage in case of incidents, and is particularly relevant for infrastructure or pipeline teams.

For teams working on a pre-product market fit product with no users, it is preferable to hire people within a few timezones of each other, so it's easier to get together in person and to do synchronous meetings if people wish to work that way.

Currently, we are hiring a lot – aiming to go from ~96 people to ~185 by the end of 2025. Our pace of hiring is the biggest blocker to shipping all the tools in one and driving our growth, so we need to go fast while keeping the bar high. Therefore we should _not_ restrict hires to certain timezones, even if in the short run a small team would prefer to have everyone closer together. This is because over the next six months, we'll have enough new people, that we can later re-org our teams to group people back together by timezone if needed as we have higher density of talent everywhere in the timezones we cover.

### Internships

We regularly receive enthusiastic requests from students about internships, which we're always flattered by. Currently, we don't offer internships, placements or work experience - we’re a bit too scrappy to do them well right now. Once you ~~escape college/university~~ graduate, you're welcome to apply to full time roles via our careers page. Your details will then go straight through to our hiring team (who _are_ real humans, not AI) and you'll hear back from us shortly after.

### Post-mortems

We won't get every hiring decision right. So when we do let somebody go in their probation period, or shortly after, we need to try and figure out what went wrong. This is why we hold post-mortems, these are not massive inquests into who is to blame, these are figuring out one or two high leverage things that we can introduce to the hiring process to improve it going forward.

#### The Process

##### Pre-work

The process will be owned by the talent partner that was responsible for the hire. It will also include the blitzscale team member and the team lead involved, where the team lead was not involved in the hiring process we will include the other main person involved in the hiring process.

The talent partner should create a private slack channel (mainly out of respect to the colleague who has left, the main results will be shared publicly) with everybody involved and share all the feedback from the hiring process. The Blitzscale member will share all the relevant feedback the team member received that led them to failing their probation. Once this is shared the following work should be prepped before the post-mortem call. The talent partner can share a google doc so everybody has access.

- each interviewer involved should review the signals that they saw in the process and they discounted, any why. ~3 bullets is enough
- each interviewer involved should also write the signals that were missed in the process, if any.
- talent partner prepares ~3 bullets for where in the process is meant to catch the reasons the person failed their probation.
- The team lead should also take time to consider the onboarding process and how that went
- Did the in-person onboarding happen? Was it successful?
- What potential flaws in their onboarding could have been improved?

The pre-work here is the most important part, the call shouldn't happen without this being done.

##### The Post-mortem call

The talent partner should remind everybody that we are here to fix the process, not re-litigate the decision or apportion any blame.

The first 10-12 minutes are about discusssing the pre-work and trying to answer two questions:-

- what did we see but discount?
- what were we not even looking for that we should have been?

Once agreed the second half should be focused on agreeing one or two fixes to the process that can be shipped. Try to avoid creating long lists as this is harder to implement.

##### post post-mortem call

The talent partner should write up the post-mortem and share it in the #team-talent channel cross-posting to #tell-posthog-anything. They should then update any handbook pages about the process and be sure to share any findings with the relevant interviewing channels like #technical-interviewers.

Canonical URL: https://posthog.com/handbook/people/hiring-process

GitHub source: contents/handbook/people/hiring-process/index.mdx

Content hash: `9fccbc4b602a3216`

Static reader notes

- `MDX_COMPONENT_STATIC_ADAPTER`: Adapted interactive MDX components for static reading: CountriesWeHireIn, PrivateLink.