The story of creating the Marvel Duel game or how to create your start-up culture from day one.

When people ask me when and how you build your company culture, I tell them “You start now and on everything you do”.
The more accurate answer is probably: “You and your team have already started building your culture – it is everything that you do and everything that you don’t do.”

Culture is everywhere. Whether you like it or not, whether you put attention to it or not. It is forming as we speak, it is a living thing, it will grow with your company. You should own it, direct it and nurture it.

“For individuals, character is destiny. For organizations, culture is destiny. “

— Tony Hsieh

I would like to share with you one aspect of owning your culture and this is how we use our hiring process at Torii to build our culture.

A lot has been said and written on how the people you hire affect your company’s culture. But what about how you hire them? What message do you give candidates before they join. How you hire is not less important than who you hire. Do you value your candidates’ time? Do you treat them with respect even when you are sure they are not a good fit? Are you honest and transparent with them? Every step in your hiring process shows your culture and affects it. It starts from your career page and your first contact with a potential candidate, whether it is over phone, email or social media.

How do you start conveying your company culture to candidates before they join?

At Torii we are makers. We are software engineers and product designers because it allows us to MAKE and CREATE. From ideas to reality. We build products we want to be proud of, something we can show off to our friends and families. We are proud of our products because they help people and companies solve their day-to-day problems, because they are built elegantly and with good software design or because they have appealing UI – intuitive and easy to use. And sometimes we are proud of what we’ve built just because it is fun and put a smile on people’s faces. We want to give this message to our candidates while testing their technical skills.

We believe that a home exercise is a better way to test a candidate’s skill than CS whiteboard questions. We use the home exercise both to test the candidate’s skills as well as to send a message about our culture. We ask the candidate to build a working app, something fun they can show off to their friends and family as something they have built.

The home exercise task we gave our candidates was building a Marvel Super Heroes duel where the player chooses between two random Marvel characters and needs to pick one (think Tinder for super heroes). After 5 rounds the Hall of Fame of the winners is displayed.

Why this task? We were looking for full stack engineers and we wanted to give them something to CREATE. The goal was to give the candidate a chance to show us what they know using their own tools and languages at their own pace without us holding a stopwatch behind their back watching their cold sweat. We also estimate the task to take no longer than 5 hours to complete. We tested for working app, clean code, testing and UI. All guidelines and criteria were given to the candidates in advance.

Beyond testing technical skills, the home task is followed by an on-site review. This part is no less important than the coding task itself. The review gives us more interaction time with the candidate and a chance for both parties to feel how it is like working together — design review, discussing tradeoffs and future features, code review, pair-programming and more. Eventually a developer joining your company is more than just another developer, he/she is another foundation of your company’s culture.

A similar task was given to the Product Designer candidate. We evaluated him on different aspects while giving him free room to go crazy with his ideas. The results of the design session were fun while giving a lot of room for discussion on UI, UX, features, complexity and feasibility.

MAKE, CREATE and Ship it!

Following this exercise we hired a full stack engineer and a product designer!

Writing code and showing mockups is only half the game, shipping it is what counts. Therefore on the first week of their work, our newly hired engineer and product designer worked together to finalize the product and ship it. They gave a nice face-lift to the UI, fixed some bugs and launched it.

We used our hiring process to convey the message of making and shipping to our candidates even before they have joined. We encourage you to think how you can send the right messages to your candidates on your company’s culture even before they join during the hiring process.

Enjoy Marvel Duel here: https://marvelduel.com/

Want to build our culture and products? Join us https://jobs.jointorii.co/

All Marvel characters and the distinctive likeness(es) thereof are Trademarks & Copyright © 1941–2017 Marvel Characters, Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.