Get Hired at Revelry: Why Your Community Contributions Matter

Are you interested in working at Revelry? I’ll tell you exactly how to get our attention and get hired at Revelry.

We look for three things. We want a cover letter that shows that you’ve done your research and are applying with intention. We want a résumé. That’s just par for the course. But third, and perhaps most importantly, we want to see your community contribution.

Get hired, step one: Submit a cover letter.

The best cover letter will show that you’ve read up on us a little bit and you know how we roll. Do you know what you’re getting into? Can you describe how you see yourself contributing at Revelry?

It’s technically optional, but a cover letter is a good way of demonstrating that we are a good fit for each other. Your cover letter does not need to be long. Some of the best cover letters I’ve read were three thoughtful sentences long.

Get hired, step two: Send a Résumé.

We do read your résumé, but we do not fixate on it. We’re mostly looking for three things: length of experience, “toolbox”, and portfolio.

Experience

Your résumé will document your experience. But we hire people with all levels of experience, so we aren’t looking to disqualify people.

We are looking to match you up with the right role for where you are right now.

Toolbox

And so when I say”toolbox,” I mean two things:

• If you are familiar with the technology and techniques that we use, great.
• If you aren’t familiar with our favorite tools, but you’ve used a lot of other tools, that’s great too.

If you’ve always used only one set of tools, I wonder whether you’ll be happy here. We have to use a lot of different approaches, languages, and frameworks from project to project. If you’d rather just do the one thing forever, our environment might not be the best fit for you.

Portfolio

Your portfolio shows that you can work with other people, you are curious, and you can get things done.

For us, the best projects to display in your portfolio have real clients, do interesting things, and are “shipped.” If you are new to the industry and you don’t have a portfolio yet, don’t worry. You don’t need a million projects in your portfolio. One or two things will do it.

Aside: your work is valuable, even if you are just starting out. You’ll get a lot of bad advice encouraging you to give away work for free in order to build your portfolio. Don’t. If someone is asking for your work, then it is valuable enough for you to get paid. If you really are having trouble finding paid projects, focus on your community contributions instead.

Get hired, the most important step: Your community contribution.

We ask everyone who applies here to submit a community contribution. We want to hire teammates who care about the space they are working in. So, what space are you working in, and how have you made contributions to it? There are many ways to define a community, and many ways to add value to it.

A community contribution may be participation in an open source project. And all kinds of contributions count, in addition to contributing to the core codebase. Writing documentation counts. Fixing typos counts. Considerate and thorough bug reports count.

But also, organizing a local meetup counts. And so does writing a thoughtful essay or tutorial video.

Anything you do to make our industry and the world around us better counts as a community contribution.

We know that finding time for open source contributions can be a challenge due to work, school, or family demands. Why do we ask for this? We want to see your skills at work somehow.

Most companies ask you to do multiple rounds of interviews. For developers, this usually means hours and hours of solving unrealistic problems on whiteboards and writing code that will never be used. Instead, we do one technical interview and we ask for a community contribution. That way, instead of going to waste, your effort is actually makes things better. In the end, this is a smaller time commitment than a multiple round interview process.

And you don’t have to do something special just for us. If you already have made contributions, you need only to point us to what you’ve already done.

In Summary

To recap, here’s what gets our attention:

• A cover letter that shows genuine interest.
• A résumé that shows you are curious.
• A contribution to open source or our community.

We hope this process is as easy as possible while still showing off what you can do.

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career culture Revelry team