Working at Ibuildings
We like to believe that we have great positions for developers. Our size allows us to work with a wide range of technologies, and on a large variety of projects. This often means that we have to challenge our developers with hard, complex problems. Solving the functional requirements of a project is one thing, but making sure that it still works when 11 million people visit the site on a single day is another!

We've recently conducted an employee satisfaction survey (we like to keep tabs on how happy our people are) and some of the interesting things that came out of it were the following:

My work offers me enough challenges:	4.07
I have grown professionally	4.21
The people I work with are motivated	4.00

This is the average from a score from 1 to 5, so I'm very proud of results like this. Maybe it has to do with the fact that many of our developers do not regard their work as 'just a job'. They are motivated and eager to build cool stuff. Of course we also have people that just see it as their day job, but a larger than average part of our developers are the type of developer that go 'WOOHAA!' whenever they solve something complex.

We find it important that our developers learn while they work at Ibuildings. On the one hand this is done by giving them interesting projects, but we also have things like monthly meetings to share knowledge or learn something new, we’ve initiated competence management to grow people's skills, and we ask people to share their knowledge within and outside of the company, for example on techPortal.

Some stories from our developers can be found on the Meet Ibuildings page. If you rather hear it first hand from them, they usually hang out on irc (you're welcome to drop by on the #ibuildings channel on Freenode), at usergroup meetings or conferences.

The Recruitment Process
I already mentioned that working at Ibuildings is challenging, and the challenge starts as soon as you indicate to us that you would consider working for us. With a few deviations depending on the country where you apply for a job (the order of items might be different, for example), our general process looks like this:

1. Screening your CV. There are several things we look for in a developer. Though experience is important, there are many other things we pay attention to, such as software engineering skills (development is more than just coding), experience with various different types of projects and team sizes.

2. A self evaluation. If we like your CV, then we'll ask you to fill out a self evaluation. This gives you the ability to tell us how much experience you have with certain topics and how you would rate your own skills. We use this to prepare our interviewers for the job interview, and we look for particular patterns and try to see how a candidate sees him/herself and how open they are about their skills.

3. A coding test. We have a small assignment that we ask people to write. It's designed such that it does not take much time to complete, yet it gives us insight into how people think and how they tackle certain problems. We know some people don’t like to take coding tests, but with 10 years of recruiting experience, it works for us and it works well. We’re not asking people to work for free (everyone makes the same test), it’s really to see a developer in action.

4. An interview with an Ibuildings manager. In this interview we'll go over your CV, parts of your self evaluation and see if we have a match. The interview is two-way. We allow you to ask as many questions as you want to, in order for you to get a good feeling about who we are and what we have to offer. At the same time, we get to know you and talk about your ambitions, what you look for in a career and of course the typical things that get asked during a job interview.

5. An interview with one or two software engineers. In this part of the process you will be interviewed by your potential future co-workers. They will not only figure out your technical skills, they will also identify the areas where we might need to train you (we can't expect everybody to know everything, of course), and see if they would like to have you on their team.

6. Reference check. If you have references, we may check up on them (with your permission) to see what others think of you. This does not necessarily have to be a former employer; if you've done community work or built open source applications, those are interesting references as well.

7. If we believe in you, and you believe in us, then we offer you a job.

This might seem like an intense process, and it is. We think a working relationship deserves a thorough process like this. Even if to you it's just a job, it will take up a large part of your day. Some careers last longer than some personal relationships, and we want our working relationship to grow, so we invest in it right from the start. That does mean we require a similar investment from our candidates.

Interested to work with us?
If the above didn't scare you away, and you're willing to work for one of the largest PHP service companies (sorry, I do like to brag about it ), go to our careers page for details on all our job offers, or, if you have any questions, I always make time to answer questions about Ibuildings, so just post a comment below, or drop me an email at ivo at ibuildings dot com.

Oh, we don't like recruitment agencies very much. If you'd like to work for us, send us your CV directly.