
Culture at Manifold
How Gender Neutral Job Descriptions, Remote Opportunities, and Empathy Help Manifold Thrive
Ever read a job description and felt discouraged from applying? Or received a salary offer that just felt unfair? There are a lot of companies that show gender bias in job descriptions and offer non-competitive salaries... without even realizing they're doing it.
That's why remote-reliant cloud-computing company Manifold goes to such great lengths to ensure that they eliminate implicit bias from each step of their hiring process and offer fair salaries on par with industry standards (which is hugely important in tackling the gender pay gap, given that women are much more likely to accept low or unfair salaries than men).
We sat down with Gary Poster, VP of Engineering at Manifold, to learn more about Manifold's commitment to eliminating gender bias, as well as their hiring process and work culture.
Spoiler alert, Gary emphasizes some of our top values like empathy, employee engagement, and product excellence to achieve a productive work environment.
Headquartered in Canada, Manifold is on a mission to help developers break free from the closed ecosystems of the cloud and into a more open, standards-based community of services and APIs. They offer awesome benefits like flexible working hours and $2,000 towards professional development to help their team thrive (and even give back to the communities they love)!
Read on to learn more about the culture at Manifold and what you can do to join their team!
1. What traits are you looking for in your next team member?
We have several positions open right now, including a Customer Success Lead, a couple of frontend engineers, and a backend engineer or two. Each of those have their own specifics, of course. More generally, for all of our positions, we look for empathy, good written and oral communication skills, and a growth mindset.
For the customer success position, a key characteristic we're looking for is experience supporting developers. For backend, we're looking for Go, and ideally GraphQL experience. For the frontend, React is the key, and if you happen to have experience with Stencil or d3 in addition, that would be amazing!
2. Why do women and underrepresented talent feel they can thrive at your company?
We have a number of key positions held by women. We think that when people identify with company leaders, they will feel that opportunities are real.
From a cultural perspective, we work hard to make Manifold an environment that helps everyone thrive. Emphasizing empathy helps with that. We also coach growth, feedback, collaboration, and excellence, and we have the people and programs to back it up. In particular, we have had a number of internal lunch-and-learns that supported some of these topics, ranging from inclusion to psychological safety. We have a group that chats in Slack and sometimes in meetings about inclusion in our culture. These have all led to small but welcoming changes, like many of us specifying our pronouns in our Slack profiles.
Most importantly, we believe that integrating diverse ideas and perspectives leads to the best teams and the best solutions. We want people to have different ideas, to feel that they are welcomed, to empathize with others, and to feel that they are included, aligned, and committed to the results. That's hard work, and it holds us all to a high standard, but we believe it's the best way forward for innovation.
3. What does the interview process at your company look like and how long does it usually take?
Our process is a screening call, a short questionnaire, a 3-4 hour homework project, and three interviews with potential peers. We wrap up with a call with our CEO and figuring out the nuts and bolts of getting you a contract. We can do it in a week, scheduling all three interviews in a single day, but it's more typical for candidates to want to find time in their own schedule, and do it over the span of two or three weeks.
The process typically goes like this.
We usually start with a phone call with your hiring manager or the person otherwise leading the search for your position--a "screen," but 30-45 minutes, to let you ask questions too. We often also try to set ballpark salary expectations in this call. When possible, we like using the Gitlab salary calculators (see their backend and frontend developer calculators, for instance) to set expectations in an open way that tries to reduce bias.
If you and Manifold both want to proceed after the call, we collect two things from you over the next several days. For one, we ask you to fill out a questionnaire, containing seven or eight questions about your experience. For the other, we typically ask you to do some kind of homework. For developers, this is a timed four hour project in Go or React. For the customer success position, we have a scenario for you to work through.
Once we have these two items, we share them with several people who would be your peers in the organization, and ask them for an evaluation. To again try to reduce bias, we generally evaluate our homework assignments and questionnaires anonymously--without names or resumes, and using gender-neutral pronouns. We only tell reviewers how many years of experience you have. We care a lot about both the questionnaire and the homework, and have decided that candidates are not a fit right now based on one or both of them.
If we decide to proceed after the review, we schedule three hour-long interviews, each with you and two people from Manifold, for a total of six people. You'll typically have a chance to meet people who have jobs like yours, as well as jobs adjacent to yours. Interviewers will have seen your resume, questionnaire, and homework. Conversations will be about all of them, as well as your own questions.
If we all want to proceed, we're in the home stretch! We'll figure out the details about your salary and contract, have you chat with our CEO, and hope to have you signing a contract quickly!
4. What's a hot tip about your interview process that PowerToFly members can know?
I'll give three. First, come to all your calls with questions! They help us both evaluate one another better.
Second, the questionnaire is just as important to reviewers as the homework. You don't need to write a novel or overthink it, but we're looking at your culture fit, your interests and passion, and your ability to communicate in writing. Four or five sentences per answer is a good middle ground, in our experience.
Lastly, if you are a developer, when you are doing your homework, write a good PR, as if you were communicating with peers on your team. Make it concise, clear, and friendly. Quickly summarize what you've done, why, and the key points you have questions about.
5. Can you relay an encouraging anecdote about someone who was hired by your company who may have thought it was a long shot, or they applied multiple times?
A few months back, one person took our junior-level React homework assignment and didn't do quite well enough. After we told them, rather than stop the process, they decided to take two weeks and dig deep into React with self-study and practice, and then take our advanced React homework. They did well in the advanced homework, we were impressed during our interviews, and we hired them. We no longer have two available tests, but in our screening calls we do sometimes explore the possibility of people studying React for a week or two before taking our homework, if that's interesting to them.
6. What do you love most about working at your company?
We all care about growing ourselves, our culture, and our product's excellence, and I think it shows. Even within a distributed team, we care about each other. We bring our full selves to the team, and put in the extra touches inside and out that come from pride, passion, and empathy for our peers and our customers.
7. What is your favorite thing about PowerToFly and why is it valuable to your organization?
It targets a group we're highly interested in: gender diverse candidates who want remote technology jobs. Also, the people running it seem to be really nice!
We're a pretty small company, but we've gotten several hires through PowerToFly, including key positions. We also really appreciate PowerToFly's active approach to outreach, beyond simply being a job board.
8. What can other recruiters do to be more successful when looking for diverse talent?
I'm confident that there's more to be done, but based on our own experiences, there have been a few things that have worked well for us.
When we are hiring, we use products, companies and recruiters that help us target diverse candidates--like PowerToFly! We have had a lot of success from simple searches and requests. Showing up is a good start.
Happy employees bring in their own network to candidate searches, and happy employees from underrepresented groups have helped bring in more diverse talent.
We care about our job descriptions and work to make them gender neutral with tools like textio.
As I mentioned before, to try to avoid bias, we evaluate our homework assignments and questionnaires anonymously--without names or resumes, and using gender-neutral pronouns--and clarify that process to candidates.
We use tools like GitLab's salary calculators (backend and frontend) to try and have a fair baseline price, reducing bias and increasing transparency.
During the hiring process, we collect feedback privately before sharing it with one another to try and prevent groupthink.
9. What do you think that candidates find most appealing about the opportunities at your company?
Many folks like the idea of helping developers create faster and more powerfully. Our product's story--an independent marketplace of developer tools that can build win-win relationships between customers, providers, and platforms--can really excite people.
We've pointed out a number of our blog posts about our remote culture to prospective candidates that have resonated.
Also, working remotely on a strong, distributed team is something that appeals to many people who want to have more freedom in where they live, and commute less.
Finally, we are using newer technology like Go, React, Kubernetes, and web components. And we're operating with leading operational and organizational practices, such as those from the DevOps movement. Some candidates are excited to use and learn these tools and skills.
10. What are the top skills/character traits that make you so successful in your work?
We strive, and I personally strive, for empathy, a growth mindset, excellent communication, openness and transparency, the pursuit of excellence, and a lean/Agile/DevOps mindset. I often summarize all this as trying to balance alignment and autonomy while pursuing growth. I wrote a blog post about the principles I try to follow and grow, if you'd like to read more!
Engineering Teams Are Growing At CallRail! Join Them!
💎 Are CallRail's engineering teams the right fit for you? Watch the video to the end to find out!
📼 Engineering teams at CallRail encourage collaboration, communication, and empathy. Ayana Reddick, Senior Software Engineer at CallRail, shares what they are looking for in candidates and tells you why you’ll thrive there.
📼Engineering teams want candidates who have a growth mindset, love to learn, and are really good at communication. They also value team members who are excited about solving problems and working collaboratively. If you think you have what it takes, don't hesitate to apply.
📼At CallRail, engineering teams use Ruby on Rails for their backend, Angular on their frontend, and PostgreSQL for persistent data. They also use Jira for creating and tracking tickets, GitHub for their version control, and AWS for many cloud tools. Get familiar with these resources if you want to join them!
Engineering Teams And Diversity - Company’s Culture
CallRail seeks to hire from underrepresented groups. They pride themselves in selecting from a pool of very diverse candidates. They value the work that people do over their resumes. They encourage people to take their authentic selves to work. And they strive to create a supportive and welcoming environment. For this, they have Employee Resource Groups, that give voice to, provide safe spaces for, and educate the company at large. Some of their ERGs include the Rainbow Coalition, Black and Brown, Women Circle, and more.
🧑💼 Are you interested in joining CallRail? They have open positions! To learn more, click here.
Get to Know Ayana Reddick
If you are interested in a career at CallRail, you can connect with Ayana on LinkedIn. Don’t forget to mention this video!
More About CallRail
CallRail is here to bring complete visibility to the marketers who rely on quality inbound leads to measure success. Their customers live in a results-driven world, and giving them a clear view of their digital marketing efforts is the priority for CallRail. They see the opportunities in surfacing and connecting data from calls, forms, and beyond—helping their customers get to better outcomes.
Careers in Web Development: Which One's For You?
We all have our favorite websites– the ones we frequent, bookmark, and recommend to others. You might even enjoy some website features so much that you’ve found yourself wondering why they aren’t more popular. Or maybe you’ve experienced times where you were frustrated with a website and wished you could add features or even design your own!
If you’ve ever found yourself intrigued at the prospect of designing and developing your own websites, then a career as a web developer might be just for you!
As a web developer you would be responsible for coding, designing, optimizing, and maintaining websites. Today, there are over 1.7 billion websites in the world and, in turn, the demand for web developers is on the rise. In order to figure out what kind of web development work best suits you let’s start with an introduction to the three main roles in web development that you can choose from.
The Three Types of Web Development Jobs
Front-End Web Development: The Creative Side
Think of front-end development as the décor of a house. The color scheme, furniture, manicured lawns, and overall aesthetic. In terms of a website, front-end development is laser-focused on the appearance of a website and its presentation on different devices. If you’re considering a role in front-end development, it’s important to learn programming languages such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These three languages go hand-in-hand. HTML allows you to create user interface elements, CSS helps you with stylistic elements, and JavaScript allows you to incorporate online tools and connect your website to back-end functions.
In addition to programming skills, front-end developers need to be detail oriented, creative, willing to keep up with the latest trends in web development, cyber security conscious, and geared toward user-friendly designs. The median salary for a front-end developer can reach well into the $90,000 to $100,000 range.
Back-End Web Development: The Logical Counterpart
While a house can be beautifully decorated, it’s incomplete without a solid foundation and efficient infrastructure. Similarly, a well-designed website depends on logical and functional code to power the features of that website. Back-end web development is code-heavy and focused on the specifics of how a website works. If you enjoy the analytical challenge of creating the behind-the-scenes code that powers a website, then back-end development is for you.
Since this role is more code-heavy, it’s important that you learn numerous programming languages and understand algorithms and data structures. Some languages that are essential to back-end development are Ruby, Python, SQL, and JavaScript. Back-end developers also ensure that users can successfully retrieve and access data. This requires creating and using APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) which act as messengers that relay data related requests. Additionally, developing the code for the inner workings of a website also requires back-end developers to be conscious of the user interface features designed by front-end developers and to internally mitigate potential security risks. Due to the increased technical aspect of this position, back-end developers normally earn higher salaries than front-end developers. The average median salary for this role is around $118,000 per year.
Full-Stack Web Development: A Little Bit of Everything
A full-stack developer is essentially the Jack (or Jill)-of-all-trades in web development. Full-stack developers need to be knowledgeable about both front-end and back-end roles. This does not necessarily imply that you would need to be an expert in both roles, but you should fully understand the different applications and synergies they each imply. In order to work in this position, you will need to know the programming languages used by front-end and back-end developers. In addition to these languages, full-stack developers also specialize in databases, storage, HTTP, REST, and web architecture.
Full-stack developers are often required to act as liaisons between front-end and back-end developers. Full-stack developers need to be both problem solvers and great communicators. The end goal for a full-stack developer is to ensure that the user’s experience is seamless, both on the front-end and on the back-end. In return, you can expect to earn a median salary of $100,000 – $115,000 a year for this role.
Taking the Next Step
Web development is both in-demand and lucrative! All three roles described above contribute to specific aspects of web development and the scope of each one can be customized to the industries and positions you feel best suit you. Regardless of which role you choose, all of them need a foundation in programming.
To gain the programming skills needed in each role, you can enroll in courses or learn independently. Coding bootcamps are a great way to boost your skillset quickly and efficiently.
Click here for some of our highly rated programming bootcamp options! Make sure to check out the discounts available to PowerToFly members.
Ashlee Bobb on Taking Advantage of Nike’s Financial Literacy Program
Below is an article originally published in April 2022 on Nike’s LinkedIn. Visit Nike's company page on PowerToFly to see their open positions and learn more.
“In my early twenties, I wasn’t the best at saving money. So, when I got the job at Nike and found out a financial coach was offered to me — for free! — I thought, ‘It’s time to be an adult. I should use this service to help me learn how to buy stock, tell me what I’m doing right with my money and where I can improve.’”
That’s Ashlee Bobb, Nike Media and Influencer Relations Manager, on the free, unlimited access to financial coaching offered to every U.S. Nike employee through EY Navigate™. EY coaches are trained on Nike’s benefits and programs, so Ashlee was able to work with her coach on a budget and savings plan utilizing Nike’s 401k match and Employee Stock Purchase Plan – all in one 45-minute session. She left the meeting feeling confident about what her next paycheck would look like and how her money would work for her.
“The EY coaches are really willing to come on the journey with you,” Bobb says, adding that hers was willing to work with the fact that, hey, she’s not going to give up take out, but still wants to save for the future. “The cool thing is I can see how this financial guidance could help me down the road when I decide to get married, buy a house, have a kid. Every Nike employee should take advantage.”
Sound like the kind of company you want to be a part of? Check out our open roles on jobs.nike.com3 Ways to Lead with Purpose: Insight from Light & Wonder’s Erika Morrison
Erika Morrison is a naturally passionate and encouraging leader. From leading her family in giving back to their community, to coaching adolescents in track and cheer, to managing her team at Light & Wonder during the pandemic, her experience is rich with lessons to share with up-and-coming leaders.
“I believe in motivation, positivity, inspiring, finding the good in everything, everybody,” she says. In addition to 30+ years in the tech field, Erika is a wife, a mother of two, an avid exercise lover, and has even been a small-business owner.
We sat down with Erika to hear about the experiences that have led her to her current role as a Software Engineering Manager at Light & Wonder, as well as three practical ways to lead with purpose.
Seeing Potential in Others
Erika has always been fascinated by the world of technology. Growing up, she loved cassette tapes, DVD players, phones, and whatever other gadgets she could get her hands on. When her dad brought home a PC Junior, it didn’t take long before she started programming on it. She designed her own trivia game, using what she learned in her middle school programming classes. “I was typing the questions in and programming the answers. I had a blast writing it and showing it to my family. I remember I wanted to show everyone what I made. That was my first real desire to get into programming.”
Erika followed that instinct into college where she majored in Business Administration and minored in Computer Science. The kickstart to her tech career came when she landed a computer operating job while still in school. She comments, “I was originally applying for a secretarial position at this company. But someone looked at my studies and experience and saw potential in me. I didn't think I was ready for that because I was still so young, I was still in school.”
Erika went on to work as a programmer analyst and software engineer for multiple major Casino based companies. During this time, she even started and ran a local event-planning business, which fine-tuned her skills in successful customer service.
Then, someone saw potential in Erika again. A former coworker reached out and offered her a leadership position with the company that would become Light & Wonder. Erika took on the role of Software Engineering Manager and says “it’s been opportunity after opportunity ever since.”
Managing Through the Pandemic
Erika believes that the best way to lead a team is to really get to know its members. “A lot of leading is knowing the people on your team,” she explains. “Know what each person needs — What may work for one person may not work for someone else. We have to take a little bit of who they are into consideration when attempting to motivate, to coach, to inspire because we're not all motivated by the same things.”
Prior to the pandemic, Erika and her team worked together in the office, which gave her the opportunity to do so. Once the pandemic hit, however, she had to pivot to incorporating virtual meetings to be able to generate that intimacy. She organizes bi-monthly check-ins with her team members where she intentionally asks for their individual preferences on communication and feedback.
“I have one-on-ones with each of my staff every two weeks. We go over the issues that they've had and then any questions or concerns or anything that they want to chat about. Sometimes it's business and sometimes it's personal. But, I feel like taking that extra time out just to have those conversations is extremely important.”
She also cohosts weekly remote Friday cocktail hours to cultivate her team’s relationships and check in on their mental health. “During the Friday cocktail hours, we would relax, ask some questions, or play some games. And it was nice to have that interaction again and connect with the team. It also allowed me to check in on everyone's mental health and make sure that if there was anything that we could do, we were here.”
Inspired to Encourage the Team
Erika is inspired by the example of her past and current mentors and their vision for her professional trajectory. She acknowledges that it was thanks to key people who saw her potential that she has been able to have these experiences. Erika’s own personal drive and passion for encouraging and uplifting others have led her to love her leadership position.
As a manager, Erika seeks the highest level of respect and excellence for her customers, while creating an encouraging work environment for her team. “I want to make sure that my team has everything that they need in order to succeed and get their jobs done the way they want to. I want them to have the level of success that they want.”
Erika ensures that her team members feel their significant contribution to the company and how they are serving with purpose. “We need to feel like we are part of something significant,” she says. “That’s my goal as a leader and for my team.”
3 Ways to Lead with Purpose:
Drawing from her experiences as a tech leader, business owner, coach, and community volunteer, she gives us three practical ways to lead with purpose in whatever context.
- Understand the “why”. “It’s extremely important to know the why of your company. Once you understand it from the company’s perspective, you can communicate it clearly to the team. And once you get that down, you’re able to help build a strong path for them to follow so that both “why’s” are in alignment. Knowing the why of your individual team members allows you to better manage, assist, and build a relationship with them.”
- Build consistency. “I think it’s very important that we are consistent and don't deviate from the why and the task at hand. Building consistency with others motivates and inspires people to give their best, even when we don’t feel like it. When dealing with a change or a huge transition, it’s extremely important to stick to the why’s, the steps we’re taking, and the right attitude."
- Remain positive. “You have to find positivity in everything because no matter what, it could always be worse. We can always find the negative things, but there are also always positive things. As a leader, I need to be empathetic, kind, and encouraging no matter what. It’s extremely important that I’m positive and involve my team members in the process.”
Follow this link for more information about Light & Wonder and their current openings!