how gilad shoham cracked 52 interviews in 30 days

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Okay, so my name is Gila Chuan. I'm from Israel. I am leading the development team at Bit to Dev or Bit.Cloud. You can look. We are building a platform from engineer to component management platform to share collaboration, reuse. Apart from this, I also have some experiences in the new. I'm in Angel for startups, for developers, for team leaders, and also some doing some engine investment, mostly on dev tool space, but not only a platform this. I also have my own brand about smart home, adorn automation. It's in Hebrew, but I have a podcast, a blog, a YouTube channel, about the topics. So a lot of hats.

Yeah. I love it. I love it. All right. So we had dinner last night, which was great. So I got to know a little about you. I want to talk about how many interviews did you do again? Okay. So we're looking for a job recently. So the last time I was looking for a job, I did 52 different companies in one month. That's crazy. Yes. That's so crazy. Few interviews in each one of them. Most of them. So I think I did like around like six interviews, average each day, something like this. Don't try to tell me if you're looking at this. It's crazy. It's not for everyone.

Yeah. So talk. So that's insane. Right. Like there are some people who can't even handle like one to two interviews a day. You do six interviews a day. Let's start. One thing we talked about dinner last night just was you being so meticulous. Talk about you would get you would finish an interview and you would like write how you felt. Yeah. Because you missed. Talk about that. Sure. So when you're running so many processes together, it's hard to remember what was happening in each company. So I had some kind of a diary or like I opened a Facebook group with some close friends. You really?

So I can write everything there and if they want they can comment but they must write for myself. So I share after each interview I share like what question I was asked of course, what was went good, what went wrong for me. And most importantly how did I felt in this company like what were the vibes? Did I feel like he missed with the interview with the company, with the space? Because after two days I'm like after another like 12 interviews. So trying to remember what was there. Yeah. So it's pretty hard. So write everything down. I had like a very big spreadsheet with a lot of categories like a lot of technical stuff, like a company size, company location, fundraising and stuff like this, the product, what do I feel about the product, enjoy the product and stuff like this.

So a lot of information, mostly role information right away. So then I can process it during evening and like write another session like on the evening about the day I just had, so like a combination of writing just after the interview and processing the evening and then process like each week and like a bigger, larger processing of this flow. That's crazy. That is absolutely crazy. So talk about just some other job tips for people who are looking for a job. What are some just encouragement that you have for people who are looking for a job? So few tips. First, if you do want to kind of optimize the place you're going to work like mine and you are trying to do a lot of processes together, you need to be sure to not move too fast with one of them because then you will need to respond.

So you need to delay stuff even if you have time. I learned this on the previous one when I did like 22 companies that session before and I got a contract day after I started. So now I had to move everything really, really fast because I have a contract which I need to respond to. So don't do this. Don't go too fast with one company and just like add spaces between meeting even if you have time if you do want to optimize it. I also really, really recommend that if you really want to get your dream job, you need to sit down with yourself and write down everything that is important for you.

And it's important to do this before you start any process. Because once you start a process and you have concrete companies on your list, you have start convincing yourself why you want these companies and if you have a contract you will convince yourself that this is the good company for you because you are kind of invested in it. You are emotionally invested in it. And if you do really want to prioritize your stuff, you need to do it when you are like free for it before doing anything. And I did a lot of categories of what important for me, like tech stock, company size, product consideration, tech consideration.

And a lot of this and I also did like kind of weightening these stuff so I can say this is more important than this is less important. So I can eventually give grade on each category for each company and get like the eventual grade which is not an average. An average with some stuff or more important than others. So I really recommend doing this process with yourself before. What other steps, if you want to have a lacking interviews, there are some tips which are really not time consuming and really improves your chance to get a job. For example, going into the product, before going to the interview and find some bugs, prepare some questions and then on the interview saying I saw you did this and this, I thought maybe you can do this or how do you when comparing to this specific competitor on this specific feature because this shows that you did your homework, that you are, if you do your homework for the interview, you did your homework doing job.

You get a lot of points and it's really like, I don't know, a fan hour to do this and go into this product landing page, find maybe some bugs and tell them in the interview like for free, let's say. And this wins a lot of points really easily. And practice also, I probably don't like when you need to tell about yourself. If you do it a lot of time, it's really helpful. Yeah. And I love that. So one of the things you talked about at dinner last night as well is really your team size and where they're at. So can you talk about, yeah, just can you talk about your team at a high level?

Yes, sure. So we are a team which are globally located. We are a fully distributed company working from home, no offices at all. And for my team, I especially hire top talents across the world, mostly based on open source contributions. And it's like, it's a very unique process and method that I developed for a long time about how to find these people, how to reach out to these people, how to convince them to join like a small startup from Israel. Yeah. We have 30 people in the company. So why someone from I don't know? From Singapore will join a small startup from Israel. Right. It's not an easy one.

Some people at my team is Zoltan, the maintainer of P&PM. I have JJ was co-od team member in the VUGS. I have a live year co-od team member in the Angular team originally. And some other people, I also have some less known people, but also really white across the world, the globe. We have like JJ, which is Chinese, living in Singapore. We have David, who is Israeli, living in Miami. It's awesome. Love from India originally, living in Canada. That's crazy. Zoltan from Ukraine, living in Hungary, all the way from France, living in France. I'm from Israel. And we used to have a cost of recently, which is a Greek, living in London.

So how do you manage those people? Yes. That works. So there are a lot of challenges managing such things. I bet. Of course, time differences. So we have Europe. We have Singapore. We have states and Canada. So it's like, if you try to make a team meeting, it's not that easy. So a lot of us work. And also when I'm hiring the people, I put special effort to checking their ability to be independent, to their ability to decide which decision they should take a loan because no one is working right now. And which decision they should wait with and how else they can communicate their work, their block, their staff so they can communicate offline really well, like, as in runxly, very well.

And then I'm a work-o-o-o-kolic. So I'm available all the time, pretty much. So mostly from mobile, if needed, so I can answer questions and stuff like this. Also I put a lot of effort when interviewing such top talents about their ego and to prevent like ego wars and such a big challenge. Such a team that can be a real pain and can destroy the team completely. I can say really gladly that I don't remember any ego war in the last few years. The boundaries are well defined. We took people with the best skill to do very specific stuff. So we have dependency management. Zoltan is the number one in the world for dependency management.

We have the angular integration, Olivier is the number one in angular integration. So we have clear boundaries to prevent issues. And also this is like the character of the people, our people who are not think they are smarter than others. So do you really try to dig into the ego part of the interview? Yes, I feel like that's huge. Yes, totally. And I can say that I declined candidates which were really famous and well-known in the industry just because I suspect or I was afraid that it will lead to ego wars. And I cannot allow myself even one of these people because even one can kill the entire team productivity and...

So how do you find these people, right? Because I think a lot of people that listen to this podcast in the future will be like, wow, this sounds to be able to find those type of talents and saying, how are you able to get those people? Is it conferences? Is it job postings? Is it just network? I mean, how do you find these? So let's take an example. Okay, we have like a dependency management. Now I need someone for dependency management or for angular and now I'm starting looking on top talents in this space. So I'm looking in different places. So I'm looking on large conferences and then in these large conferences I go over the speakers and I'm not ending on the speakers because I don't want someone who can speak about developing angular app.

What I want is someone who understands the internal of angular. Yeah. So I'm looking into the talks and at least people who are talking about angular internals, looking on the original team of course, looking on big open source in this space of dependencies or angular of you and see which open source they have. Again, not open source they are like boilerplate for building in angular platform but an open source they help like I don't know to improve performance on the angular compiler for example. So I'm looking into specific open sources and then if it's like a big open source like the angular itself, there are a lot of contributors for angular.

Then I'm going into the specific commits into the specific conclusions and see which parts like if you did the contributions to the docs of angular. Okay, that's cool for you but might not be what I'm looking for. Right. So I'm looking about which commits you are doing what exactly you did in the angular repositories and which parts did you touch. So this is how I kind of filter these people out. You end up with a very short list of your skills. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You know, 10 people in the world. Right. Maybe 20 if you get lucky. Right. Then I'm trying to get one of these 10 people into my team.

These are the 10 most people and then when reached out to them, I don't write like a generic message. It's a very, very specific to each one of them. It's very specific to each one of them. I love it. Telling about I saw that you did this specific contribution, disconnect to our product in this case. So I think this can be interesting for you to work because similar to what you did. So they feel and it's not coming from like you know HR. Right. It's coming from developers to developers, talking about technical stuff even on the the field message about really, really new ones code or contribution or something like this.

So, so at least I get like the initial response most of the time because it's a very personal and it's working. Of course this this method is not for scale. Okay. This method is good for building the dream team. And then it can and that's what you're doing. You're doing your dream team. Yes. Yes. I say that for my experience I'm working as a developer for like 20 years now. Yeah. And I think that this few people are doing work like same as like 100 other developers. Yeah. So I think this method really prove itself to be very, very powerful. Have you been able to pull this off at any other company like hiring these caliber people before?

No, not that method. It's also a combination about like so when you talk to these people how do you convince them to join people and advantages that we have at beat is that we build a platform for developers. We build a very, very technical platform that's going to very deep technology. So most of this this top talents are not looking like you cannot buy them. Okay. Let's say you have a lot of money. Yeah. We can not really compete on the salary and compensation against like giant companies. Sure. But you don't really win on the budget in order to win them. You need to show them that they will be challenged with real technology challenges.

Yeah. That they will do impact on other developers because what they're really looking for is impact and improve and optimize developer workflows. And they are looking to work with other people like them on the same level. So once you bring their first one or two, it's much easier to bring the other one because okay, in my team you will work with this top talent. So you know you will have some people to learn from and you won't be like because they don't really want to be the smartest in the room. Right. They want to have people to learn from. This is how they get so far.

So now I can offer this as a big advantage. See who is in my team. And you can be part of this team. It's very, very powerful. Forget the world. Listen to come. Yeah, yeah, I love it. So last five minutes here, I want to ask like what's been kind of your like how have you gotten to where you're at in your career? Like what are some traits that you have that you feel like have really paid off in your career? So first I really like to work on platform. I worked on kind of platform frameworks all the time, kind of a little bit of DevOps also because I see the developers or software.

It's like a multiply on each industry. Okay. With good software, you can do like a work that thousand people cannot do without a proper software. So any developer is a multiplier. And if I multiply the developers work, I'm the multiplier of the multipliers. So I was always looking to work on like a low level stuff for developers, platform stuff. Because this requires to be able to go into technical stuff without being afraid, going into complicated stuff. And this is also something I require from anyone in the team. Like if you tell me, okay, there is a bug in I don't know in Webpack or some bundler or a binary in TypeScript.

Yeah. Most developers will tell you, okay, this is a bug on TypeScript. Good luck. I cannot solve this. I'm not even going into trying. And in my team, okay, there is a bug in Webpack. Okay, let's open Webpack code. Let's fix it. Let's make a payout to Webpack. Let's be proud to use lean to TypeScript. Whatever tool, it's all written by developers, right? Like human developers, maybe not for long, but at least now, by human developers. So we can do the same. Let's go into it. Let's jump into it and not be afraid. So I was always going into how stuff works and not like what not only what they can do, but also how they do it, how they work, how they connect, maybe even build my own kind of similar solution to problem solved by big tools just to better understand how it can be solved.

Okay, I love that. I love that. And what else from a soft skills perspective, what else do you think you do well? I think that I have a good combination of technical knowledge with good communication skills. So I'm doing debating for like 10 years now, professional debating, so really good on communicating. What should be done? Why should we do this? And to reason why do it in one way and not another way? I'm also giving a very high priority in my schedule to my people, so they know that they will get an answer for me anytime really soon. I'm always prioritized like not letting them be stuck, which is I think really important for any manager to make sure like as a manager, as a leader, you need to make sure that you people, you follow as are successful.

My job is to make them successful. If they are successful, I am successful in my job as a leader. So I'm trying to also do like a self example. So I'm not afraid of writing code myself. I'm writing a lot of code and put myself high standards around like I don't test coverage, code quality, and I'm asking for feedback. I always very open to get feedbacks. And I'm trying to communicate that feedbacks, even bad feedbacks for me. It's really something you can do. Feel free to tell me. I will not be angry at you if you will say that I'm a dumb. I mean, that's a big skill though.

That's a big skill. All right. Last question is we wrap up here. And again, it was a pleasure chatting with you as always. Hey, on my podcast, guidance cuts with 2.0, I say, if you could go back in time and tell your younger self career advice, what would it be? Wow, that's a great question. What would the tell my young self? I don't have something in particular. Yeah. I think I would do most of the stuff the same way. Everybody keeps saying that. Yes, yes. It's out. I skipped a lot of companies who did a big exit. Yeah. Maybe I would. Stay put. Maybe just stay put.

But yeah, that's fine. I think I would just tell myself, go, go. Find your way. And don't be afraid to try new things. Don't be afraid to search new places to be. You know, it's always a new adventure, adventure to find and have a new job or a new role. So yeah. I love that. That's awesome. Well, thank you so much, man. I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Awesome. Hey, you did it. You listened to an entire episode. And I am very grateful. You know why? There's a lot of podcasts out there. There's a lot of episodes. And I myself rarely finish an entire episode.

So I appreciate you so, so much for listening. Quick reminder, please rate and review this podcast in the app store. I want this to be discoverable to others and the only way that happens is if you take the time right now and rate and review it, please like right now, unless you're driving it, then don't do it. So thank you again. If you need to reach out to me at T-Dasting on all social media handles. And I hope you have a fantastic day.