Benchling: VP of Engineering

Summary Takeaways

“We had a different process for the first 6 months of the search but realized we were doing a terrible job because we were letting the team, who were junior and had never worked with a great VPE, do a lot of the assessment. Huge mistake. Our exec recruitment process is completely different now where we know someone is a finalist before they meet the team they are managing, and even then it's a "meet and greet."

In hindsight, I think we lucked into an exceptionally strong recruiter, people leader, and business thinker with Amit. I donʼt need Amit to be the most technical person in the company. I'd encourage any B2B CEO to heavily assess business thinking, which I've observed is weaker in many engineering leaders. I've attached some of the questions I use for every exec search these days. In particular, if a leader (in any role) can't crisply explain the product/go to market of their current company, or I know more than they do from studying it for 30 minutes, that's usually a red flag.

All my best executive hires have grilled me about the business. I felt like I was working at a shitty company coming out of those meetings. I almost wonder if I could hire execs just based on the rigor of questions they ask. I think it is indicative of hiring people who were a stretch at the time and we really had to grow into. Junior candidates try to sell themselves too much and aren't putting the magnifying glass up to the business, which is a turn off for me” - Saji (Cofounder and CEO @ Benchling)

Interview Questions

Topic 1: Set up a scalable EPD organization and process foundations

• Tell me about a large overhaul/restructure of how your team was organized that you've done.
• Tell me about a time when the roadmap processing wasn't working and you had to fix it.
• Tell me about a time when one of your teams wasn't investing enough in infrastructure
• Tell me about a time when your team didn't agree with a process change you wanted to make.

Topic 2: Motivate and develop technical leaders and engineers

• Tell me about an improvement around career growth that you spearheaded at one of your previous companies.
• Have you ever managed a young but talented team before? How did you adjust your style for that situation?
• Have you ever managed a team that felt like the company wasn't valuing their growth enough? How did you handle that situation?
• Tell me about a time when you had to develop a first-time manager.
• Tell me about a time when you lost the trust of a team member and had to gain it back.

Topic 3: Level up the executive team

• When in your career have you felt most accomplished?
• What do you believe accounts for your success?
• What has been your biggest professional challenge or failure? What came of it?
• Is there an area of opportunity youʼd like to address in your next role? How would you approach that development?
• What would you do differently if you were CEO of your previous company?

Topic 4: Create an EPD hiring engine

• Have you ever had to hire without much help from recruiting? How did you go about doing that?
• Tell me about a time when your team wasn't assessing technical skills well and you had to fix it.

Topic 5: Guide engineers who are setting technical direction

• Describe the architecture/high-level breakdown of your current product. How does that translate to your engineering processes, particularly around things like release cycles, testing, tooling? What are some focuses/non-focuses?‍
• Main “technical” question we're asking, checking for depth of understanding‍
• Tell me about a major decision about technology choice/platform that your team recently made that you played a role in guiding.
• What about one where you stepped back?
• Tell me about a time when a team was sacrificing product quality for shipping speed too much and you had to get them to improve this balance.
• Tell me about a disagreement about coding/technical best practices that you had to resolve.

Interview Scoring

All interviewers fill out the STAR framework for each question and rate the response. Here are the guiding questions to help them assess the candidateʼs response.

• Do they seem perceptive/observant about the context around the situation?
• Are they able to boil down the situation to an exact task (goal)?
• Is the action that they took in line with what we'd want them to do in that situation at Benchling?
• Can they link their actions to clear positive (and sometimes negative) results?

Sample Template: STAR Rubric for Sample Question

Question:

Tell me about a time when members of your team disagreed on a process change you wanted to make. What was the disagreement? Why was it happening? What did you do? What was the ultimate outcome?

Response

• Situation: [Describe the situation]
• Task: [Describe the task at hand]
• Action: [Describe the action they took]
• Response: [Describe the outcome]

Scoring

• Perceptiveness about situation: 1, 2, 3, 4
• Boils situation down to the task: 1, 2, 3, 4
• Action aligns with what Benchling wants: 1, 2, 3, 4
• Link results to actions: 1, 2, 3, 4
• Clear communication: 1, 2, 3, 4
• Relevance to question: 1, 2, 3, 4
• Overall: 1, 2, 3, 4

Interview Process

The interview was processed included the following:

• 1 hour coffee with Saji (co-founder/CEO) | this was more sell focused
• 2.5 hours with Ashu (co-founder) | Product demo; covering questions above
• 5.0 hours on site to meet key people
• 1.5 hours with Engineering Managers on topic 1 (scalable engineering) and topic 2 motivating engineers)
• 1.5 hours with Engineering Managers + Josh on topic 5 (guiding engineers) and new problems at Benchling
• 1.0 hour with two engineering folks on topic 5 (guiding engineers)
• 1.0 hour with Saji focusing on how to level up the company as whole
• Debrief as a group to decide if they want to move forward
• 1 hour with board member + dinner with Saji and Ashu (more sell focused)

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