What you can expect when applying for a job at Archon

We know that searching for a job can be stressful: it’s hard to find openings, write up applications and put your best face forward and then not hear back at all.

Over the years we’ve built up a world-class team of smart, honest and fun people. In the process we’ve gone through our fair share of interviews and rejections. We consider a lot of applicants for every role, and we believe that all applicants should be treated with respect at every step of the process.

Here’s what you can expect when applying to work here.

For any job applicant

We’ll give you a timely answer

If you’re applying to an open job through the proper channels (not unsolicited applications), you can expect a reply within two weeks, whether or not we choose to offer you an interview.

For job applicants that have had an interview

We’ll consider you fairly

We strive to evaluate applicants based on what you can do, not who you know.  If an applicant has a personal connection to an employee or executive, that employee or executive will minimize their involvement in the hiring process, to try to avoid a conflict of interest from personal bias.

We’ll ask relevant questions

We emphasize practical tests for job-related and company-related skills, not brain teasers or shared interests.  You can always decline any question that you’re uncomfortable answering. In fact, questions about many sensitive (and irrelevant) topics such as your religion, sexual orientation or age are illegal under Ontario law, and we do not ask them.

Go ahead, ask us questions!

We recognize that the hiring process is a two-way street, and that you need to be able to make informed decisions.  We will make sure there’s time to answer questions you have about the job or the company in general, whether during the interview itself or in a follow-up email/call.

We’ll respect your time

We’ll treat your time with respect. While some jobs will require applicants to do practical tests or demonstrations, we do not expect you to do disproportionate amounts of work just to be considered for a job with us.  For take-home exercises (e.g. coding test), wherever possible we’ll set tight time restrictions to protect your time and to try to keep an even playing field (so that candidates who have more free time are not inadvertently favoured).

We’ll ask you for feedback

We believe that getting feedback from others is important, and we want to continue improving on how we treat job applicants. We’ll send you an optional survey after the interview process is completed, and the aggregated results and comments are reviewed by our CEO.

Go ahead, ask us for feedback!

And of course, if you interviewed with us and don’t get a job offer feel free to ask us why and we’ll try to give you some constructive feedback.

For applicants who get a job offer

We’ll give you a fair offer

We believe that job compensation should be fair to all, not just shrewd negotiators.  Your job offer compensation will be based on market data. It may not be the absolute highest you can get, but it will be competitive and fair.  More than once, we’ve gently told candidates that their salary expectations were too low, and that we’d pay them more than that!

We’ll give you time to decide

We do not make exploding job offers to pressure you into taking an offer on the spot. We want this to be a long term relationship and for this to be the right decision for you. You’ll get at least five days to decide whether or not to take a job offer.

We’ll give you time to unwind before starting

We know that you may want to take some time to transition from your previous job and to take some personal time between jobs.  Again, we believe in a long-term relationship, so we won’t pressure you to start immediately. Generally a start date within 4 weeks of a job offer will be OK, and for some jobs more than that may be fine too.

In summary…

While we can’t give everybody a job offer, we can give all applicants our courtesy. We hope that writing this out helps us maintain high standards and helps to encourage people who choose to apply to work at Archon.

We know that searching for a job can be stressful: it’s hard to find openings, write up applications and put your best face forward and then not hear back at all. Over the years we’ve built up a world-class team of smart,… Continue reading ‘What you can expect when applying for a job at Archon’

11 Comments

A look inside the mind of an Archon founder (and it’s not all KPIs!)

While interviewing for a manager position recently, we asked candidates to prioritize the following:

  • Achieving KPI targets (that’s “key performance indicators” like programming milestones or good ticket ratings)
  • Helping customers succeed
  • Influencing product development
  • Managing internal stakeholder relationships
  • Having predictable, stable processes
  • Having fun as a team

This sparked some really great conversations, and I wanted to share my own thoughts.  I’d encourage you to take a few minutes to think about your own ranking before reading on.

Insert quick break for contemplation

Done? OK, here’s how I think those six things should be prioritized: 

Continue reading A look inside the mind of an Archon founder (and it’s not all KPIs!)

While interviewing for a manager position recently, we asked candidates to prioritize the following: Achieving KPI targets (that’s “key performance indicators” like programming milestones or good ticket ratings) Helping customers succeed Influencing product development Managing internal stakeholder relationships Having predictable,… Continue reading ‘A look inside the mind of an Archon founder (and it’s not all KPIs!)’

Leave a comment

Setting the table: volunteering at Eva’s Taste Matters

[This post was republished from our inFlow blog.]

Twice a year, our whole inFlow team spends a day together volunteering our time for a local non-profit organization.

This autumn, we helped Eva’s set up for their fundraising dinner, Taste Matters. Eva’s is a shelter for homeless youth in Toronto, where it’s estimated that 2000 teens are homeless each night. Eva’s also offers several job training programs and transitional housing to help youth move toward independence.

An estimated 77.5 percent of youth indicated a main reason for leaving home was an inability to get along with their parents. Eva’s programs teach youth the necessary skills for communicating and resolving conflicts with family members. Wherever possible, Eva’s tries to help facilitate reconnecting homeless youth with their families.  

In addition to the government funding they receive, Eva’s needs to hold several fundraising events each year to cover the many initiatives they run.

That’s how we found ourselves in the kitchen of the Liberty Grand, polishing silverware and glassware for their Taste Matters fundraising gala.

There were quite a few forks to wash, so we have to confess that we drifted into puns for a while. It was good tines (that’s not a typo!), and after a few minutes we were functioning like a well-oiled machine.

“I’d love to pick up those forks, but I don’t have my forklift license” – Andrew Stiver, inFlow Support, Pun Pro, and Fork Polisher.

Another major task was setting plates, napkins, and glasses so that each station had what it needed to serve food and drinks to gala attendees. A few of us learned the ‘hot water in a bucket’ trick for polishing clean glassware: just hold a glass over piping hot water, wait until it fogs up, and then polish it until it shines. All we really needed was towels, a bucket of water, and some elbow grease.

It sounds like the work paid off because Taste Matters raised $129,371 for Eva’s, which is something we’re delighted to toast to.

Faith Feingold from Eva’s described their work and its community benefits perfectly when she said, “when you help young people experiencing homelessness transition to independent, self-sufficient and healthy lives, you help build a stronger community that will help all of us.”

We’re grateful to have Eva’s in our community and to contribute to the work they do in realizing that vision.

[This post was republished from our inFlow blog.] Twice a year, our whole inFlow team spends a day together volunteering our time for a local non-profit organization. This autumn, we helped Eva’s set up for their fundraising dinner, Taste Matters.… Continue reading ‘Setting the table: volunteering at Eva’s Taste Matters’

Leave a comment

Reclaiming the backyard: volunteering with Fred Victor

[This post was republished from our inFlow blog]

With a few volunteer days under our belts, it was only appropriate that this one would require the most logistical coordination yet! It was a great opportunity to rise to the challenge.

We had reached out to Fred Victor, a local non-profit that focuses on homelessness, poverty, and mental health in the Toronto area. Fred Victor offers several services: a Friends Restaurant that serves hot meals, a social enterprise catering service, as well as short term and long term housing. That’s how we found ourselves at one of their long term housing locations, digging dirt, pulling weeds and flipping burgers (amongst other things).

The staff at Fred Victor helped us put together a plan to revitalize the community backyard at one of their sites. The yard was overgrown with weeds and the lawn chairs had worn out at the seats. By the end of the day, we shared our progress with the tenants by inviting them to have a picnic with burgers made on a brand new barbecue.

In preparation for the revitalization, our team divided into groups to gather supplies: we did grocery runs; picked up plants and soil; bought a picnic table and gardening tools; and also visited IKEA for some outdoor benches.

Despite our best efforts at coordinating supplies, we still had to deal with a few extra hurdles. We had a shelving unit missing all its hardware, empty propane tanks, and no oil to season the barbecue grates with (I don’t barbecue! Feel free to laugh at my expense — I did).

Enter Siobhan, normally Customer Support Champion, but on this day, Hero of the Missing Supplies. She drove around collecting all the parts we needed and spent a long time exchanging items at Canadian Tire. She was on constant standby as we added more and more items to her list. The joke is she now lives at Canadian Tire, where we are fairly certain she knows all the staff.

By the end of the day we had well-maintained flower beds with newly planted flowers and pots of tomatoes and herbs share amongst the tenants. The once-overgrown playground became a weed-free space for the kids and some new summer toys. A brand-new barbeque (with propane!), a newly assembled picnic table and benches were the final touches to help bring the community together in the summer. The festively decorated backyard became a great place to to enjoy a delicious spread of salads and burgers on a Friday afternoon.

We met first-hand the people who will benefit from the new space, including one of the tenants who spent the whole day working alongside us and sharing his experiences. The local families joined us for our barbecue, and their kids made full use of the new outdoor toys. One boy in particular challenged everyone to a match of ladderball. It was funny when he declared himself the winner every time, regardless of the outcome!

Perhaps most appreciated by the tenants was a row of working computers that some of our team set up with donated monitors, keyboards and mice. It took a few extra trips back and forth to wrangle the necessary cables and monitors for things to work smoothly, but it was well worth it. For many people that live there, the lone computer in the community room was their only way to contact family and friends or job search. Now there are three workstations and a laptop to use!

Everything came together in the end, minus one factory defective shelf. I was impressed by how everyone on our team rose to the occasion as there was a need to fill.

It turned out to be a great day of working together and improvising. After all, what’s a team building day if everything goes smoothly?

[This post was republished from our inFlow blog] With a few volunteer days under our belts, it was only appropriate that this one would require the most logistical coordination yet! It was a great opportunity to rise to the challenge.… Continue reading ‘Reclaiming the backyard: volunteering with Fred Victor’

Leave a comment

a green oasis in the city: volunteering at evergreen

archon-cn-tower

85% of Canadians live in cities and that’s true for all of us at Archon Systems. On Friday September 30th, our team met up at Evergreen Brickworks, a beautiful oasis of nature in Toronto. Since 1991, Evergreen, a national not-for-profit has been working to create sustainable urban development and connecting cities with the natural environment.

Our host, Isaac, told us about initiatives that Evergreen is working on to uncover local rivers and create more green space in Toronto. He also led us on a tour around the site and gave us some history of the former quarry that was used and abandoned, and has since been naturalized. Today it is a lush green space open for the public to enjoy.

archon-on-the-move

Along the way, Isaac gave us tips for surviving in the wild (you know, in the event of a zombie outbreak). He pointed out some plants we can eat, others to help with pain, and still others we can chew if we’re getting thirsty.

So, in the event of a walking-dead style disaster, contact the inFlow support team and we’ll help you out!

One of Evergreen’s areas of program focus is on children, and the role that playing outside in green spaces can have on a child’s physical and mental health. Our tasks for the day centred around the toddler garden and the children’s court onsite.

Part of our team got their workout on by hauling sand from far off regions of the park where they’d disappear on long treks, but we weren’t worried since they had Isaac’s survival training under their belts.

Another group worked on weaving willow branches into the willow dome fort in the children’s area. It was such a cool all-natural hangout spot that we’re trying to work out how we can create one in the office! Some of the branches were quite high up, so it comes in handy to have a 6’6” designer on the team.

in-the-childrens-court

Lastly we got to work slinging dirt to mulch the children’s court. The game became: how fast can a software team shovel mulch into two wheelbarrows? And, to skeptical onlookers, “is it about how much gets in the wheelbarrow? Or how much misses and falls on the ground?”

The record was 22 seconds, and it all eventually got where it needed to go!

It was an awesome day spent outside. I know I felt the positive benefits of being active, breathing fresh air, being surrounded by greenery, and enjoying the company of great people. I think the kids who use the space will too.

group-shot

 

Links

Evergreen’s Focus on Children:
https://www.evergreen.ca/news-media/media-kit/backgrounder-evergreen/children/

Nature Play in the Children’s Garden:
https://www.evergreen.ca/whats-on/event-details/9491/

85% of Canadians live in cities and that’s true for all of us at Archon Systems. On Friday September 30th, our team met up at Evergreen Brickworks, a beautiful oasis of nature in Toronto. Since 1991, Evergreen, a national not-for-profit… Continue reading ‘a green oasis in the city: volunteering at evergreen’

Leave a comment