Interviewing at SWS 🎨

Our people are at the core of the success of Simply Wall St and we are constantly looking for diverse skills to help progress us even further.

Ensuring a great candidate experience is a top priority for us, starting from your application right through to onboarding. If you have any questions or feedback please reach out directly to your Talent Acquisition partner so we can improve this.

What we look for

1. Technical Craft: We will ask you questions around what your experience might be or what traits you have to learn your craft.

2. Strategic thinking & leadership: Ability to lead to answers for an increasingly large problem and product areas. Ability to own and contribute to the team and business strategy/vision. Ability to create alignment and enthusiasm for an idea: such as selling a vision to a team or the entire business.

3. User Science & Empathy: Mastering all user science tools to better understand investors and fit products to their needs and behaviours.

4. Communication: Clear written and oral communication to any audience within and without the business. Helping information flow across the business and helping people staying up to date with key business metrics, product changes and decisions.

5. Teamwork & Collaboration: Facilitating meetings and workshops. Helping to get things done within and across teams.

6. Impact & Quality: Driving results for the business and delivering value to customers without too many bugs and issues. Creating elegant and simple solutions to complex problems and avoid technical and product debt.

7. Interest in our mission & vision: A deeper understanding of why you want to work for us and why this role specifically.

8. Growth mindset and problem solver: Like most scaling startups, there are a lot of new problems to be solved so it is important for us to hire people who have the ability to solve problems and continuously test, learn.

Interview Process

We understand that interviewing can be time-consuming and we appreciate your time throughout the process. The below process might change slightly for some roles depending on the department or seniority of the role (e.g. include more people or an additional challenge to prepare).

Phase 1: Phone/video call to get more context

• With Talent Acquisition (30min)

• & with the Manger/teammate (45 mins)

This is an opportunity for you to find out more about Simply Wall St: our product, teams and current problems we are solving. We are also eager to find out about you: what drives you, what excites you and how your experience and skills could add to our team.

Phase 2: Challenge (5 hours)

A take-home assessment that will give you a snapshot of what it is like to do the role at SWS. This also ensures that we are more data driven in our approach to hiring.

Phase 3: Deep Dive (90 mins)

This interview will be a longer deep dive into the challenge you submitted and your drives/motivations. We will ask some behavioural questions in this interview also.

Phase 4: Meet the Team or Leadership (60 mins)

This final interview is all about meeting some people you will work closely with or a leadership interview. This is also an opportunity for you to get a glimpse of what it will be like to work with the team and for you to ask any remaining questions you have.

How do I prepare for the interviews?

The Talent team will provide you with all the info and resources you need to prepare ahead of time. All stages of the selection processes dig progressively deeper into your experience, your mindset and approach to working and your practical skillset. Some general pointers to help you stand out:

• Do your research on us! Even during an initial chat, we want to see that you've had a look into who we are, what we do and how we do it – this could be browsing our website, resources and blog, googling press releases or articles about us in the news etc. A lot of questions you typically might have you'll find answered by doing basic due diligence, and asking informed (and tough) questions from stage one will set you apart.

• Know what you want. We assess your motivation and ambition just as much as your experience and skills, so be prepared to answer not just what makes you a fit but also why you're interested in joining us and what you want to learn in the role that you don't know now. We're a small, fast-growing team and work together closely so if you demonstrate clearly that you know what you want then you will give us the confidence that you're motivated. If your answer is "I apply for this job because I want a job", then Simply Wall St is probably not for you.

• Read the job description. We write job descriptions to do two things: One, to give you a positive and realistic preview of what the role will look like, and two, tell you exactly what requirements we will be looking for. We do not needlessly bloat them with nice-to-haves or empty bullet points like "be a team player" (who doesn't think that of themselves?). The best preparation you can do is to:

  • Before applying: reflect on whether the day-to-day of the role will be for you 3, 6, 12 months down the line and which of these requirements you do vs don't meet;

  • Before interviewing: think of 1-2 behavioural questions based on the role requirements — "Tell me about a time when", "How have you done X in your previous role" etc. See if you can answer them for yourself and where your gaps are.

  • Read our values. Our values are not just writing on the wall. They define how we make decisions, how we collaborate with each other and how we conduct ourselves with customers and other stakeholders. When you familiarise yourself with our values, reflect on which ones you identify with more vs struggle with. None of us will ever perfectly live all our values but they're our north star in terms of conduct, and part of how we evaluate our performance.