Facebook: These are the kinds of people we want to hire

pulse

June 23, 2017 11:02 AM

Jeff Reynar is a director of engineering and New York site lead at Facebook. He interviews between 50 and 100 people annually for various technical roles.

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Jeff Reynar is a director of engineering and New York site lead at Facebook. He interviews between 50 and 100 people annually for various technical roles. Since Facebook regularly lands near the top of lists of the best companies to work for, we asked Jeff what it took to land a job at the massive social network. Following is a transcript of the video.

JEFF REYNAR: We're looking for people who are bold, who are willing to try and tackle difficult problems that customers face, or solve particularly gnarly technical challenges that allow us to build new things and do so by taking some risks.

We're looking for people who are focused on having impact, which is sort of another way of saying that people should prioritize things really well, and focus on solving big problems rather than little ones because the sooner we solve some of the big problems, the more we can build on those results.

We've hired people from all manner of different backgrounds. It's well known that Zuck dropped out of collegeand started Facebook, and we hired a number of people who haven't finished college, but we've also hired people who have Ph.D.s in computer science and other disciplines. And we've hired people who are self-taught softwareengineers, and people who've spent lots of time in academia.

And what we're looking to do in New York is to ultimately hire a diverse workforce that's really reflective of the level of diversity that exists in New York City as a whole. We think this is really important because not only is it the right thing to do, but it also allows us to build products for almost everyone by bringing a diverse set of perspectives to the teams who are building these products for people.

And we want people who want to move fast. And that doesn't mean being reckless, but it means being biased toward action and getting going on a solution rather than spending a lot of time talking about it upfront.

And, people who have those traits are often the ones who do the best in the interview process, as well as do the best once they get to Facebook as well.

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