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What to expect if you apply for a job at Substrakt

We’ve written this guide for people who are thinking about applying (or have already applied) for a job at Substrakt.

If you have any questions about anything in this guide please just ask us, contact Laura (our HR & Office Manager) on work@substrakt.com.

Our job ads

We always publish the salary on offer for each role and whether or not flexible working (part-time hours, compressed hours, remote, etc) is available (for the vast majority of our roles it is). We do this so that you know upfront whether the role will give you the salary and work-life balance you want, without you needing to ask.

In the job description we provide information about the types of skills and activities the job involves. We want you to apply if you have these skills or similar ones. We also know that nobody is perfect, so if you can do most of the things on our list of job activities and skills, but you’re not sure whether you match one or two of them, you should still apply as you might still be a great candidate for the role!

We aren’t interested in ‘culture fit’ but we are clear about what our values are, if those things are important to you too then apply!

Applying

We try to make the application process as straightforward as possible. Usually we will want some information about your skills and experience and why you think you’re a good candidate for the role. For most roles we also ask you to share your thoughts in response to a short question or for examples of your work, these might be things like links to your work online, or copies of your work that you can email to us.

How we assess your application

We anonymise all applications before assessing them. This means hiding any information which might indicate your gender, age (as much as we can), ethnicity, where you were educated or socio-economic background.

We assess all candidates against the same criteria, and we assess applications in batches so that everyone’s application is compared fairly against others. The same people who assess the applications are on the interview panel.

Skills-based assessments

For some roles we will ask candidates to complete a (short) technical task before inviting anyone to interview.

This is designed to assess essential technical skills and shouldn’t take longer than 1 hour to complete. We keep the tech skills task short because we know that people have busy lives and applying for jobs is time consuming. Equally we know that people work at different speeds so if the tech task takes you a little longer or you have to stop before you have time to finish, that’s ok. We’ll just ask you to tell us how long you spent on whatever you are able to send us.

Your interview

If we invite you to interview we will share the questions we will ask you in advance so you know what to expect. We try to share the questions with you at least 1 week before the day of your interview. We do this so that you have time to think about your answers and hopefully this will help you to feel more at ease in the interview so you can put your best foot forward.

We will also tell you who will be in the interview, the interview panel is usually made up of whoever would manage you, plus then a diverse range of other people who work at Substrakt – there are usually 3 people on the interview panel from Substrakt.

Our interviews usually last 45 minutes and at the moment all of our interviews are conducted over Zoom. We always offer a selection of different times for interviews. There is no dress code for these interviews, please just wear whatever you feel comfortable in.

For most of our jobs we conduct two rounds of interviews.

Job offers and feedback

If you are successful we will let you know via a phone call and then follow up with an email confirmation. We will send a contract of employment via Adobe Sign for you to review, sign and return. If you have any questions at any stage please do not hesitate to ask them, we welcome questions even after the offer has been made.

We will provide feedback to everyone that we interview, we know that it takes a lot of time and energy to interview for a new job and we want to respect that – whether or not you are successful.

We provide feedback to you within 2 weeks of the interview.

We cannot provide feedback to everyone that applies, for some vacancies we receive over 100 applications and simply don’t have the resources to reply to every one individually.

We hope that this information is useful, we will continue to update this post based on any feedback or changes to our processes. If you have any feedback, suggestions, or questions please contact Laura on work@substrakt.com