With headcount doubling in the past year to 110 employees, Paris-based AI startup Photoroom has established itself as one of the fastest-growing companies in French tech.
The Y Combinator alum has built a platform powered by GenAI for photo editing, which is used by small businesses to help them create high-quality visuals for promotional materials. The company is one of the rare generative AI startups to have reached profitability, and was last valued at $500m when it raised a $43m Series B last year.
“We’ve always got jobs open,” says the company’s talent lead Reece Batchelor. “There’s never a point in time where we don’t.”
For now Photoroom has one physical office in Paris, with the rest of the team fully remote. But Batchelor says the company is increasing its headcount in the US, with a second office due to open in New York.
Most of the hiring is on the product and engineering side — but even with so many openings, securing a job at the Photoroom is no easy feat. Batchelor says the market for engineering roles is largely company-driven, and that hiring is currently “very competitive”.
Sifted asked Batchelor what’s in store for candidates hoping to join the Parisian startup. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Can you give an idea of how competitive the hiring process is for engineering roles at Photoroom?
The general theme across the recruiting world at the moment is that applications are high. It’s definitely a company-driven market. We get a lot of interest in our positions: for some roles, we’ve had hundreds of applications over a weekend. That’s particularly the case for less niche roles, like front-end engineers, and more junior roles. For applied scientists and research scientists, you don’t get that volume — that’s very much a candidate-driven market. Research scientists don’t need to be applying for jobs right now. They are the hottest talent in the market and everyone wants them.
That being said, we want to attract through applications but we also want to make sure we are sourcing people to reach out to candidates who don’t necessarily know the Photoroom brand. We do some sourcing for every single role to make sure we get a diversity of pipeline.
What’s the recruitment process like? How many rounds of interview can candidates expect?
There’s four stages: an initial screen with the talent team, a technical interview with a hiring manager, a home assignment followed by a deep dive, and then a final interview followed by a meet-the-founders interview.
We call the final round the “values interviews”. We’ll ask scenario-based questions related to some of Photoroom’s values, so they are really about self-reflection. For example, one of our values is candid feedback, so the question might be: ‘Tell me about one time you received feedback and how you adapted based on that.’
For this final stage, we bring every candidate to Paris. We’ll pay for their travel, tell them to come up the night before so they feel fresh the next morning. Then they’ll spend pretty much half to a full day in the office doing the last interviews and spending time with the team. It’s an intense day but they’ll walk away 100% certain whether it’s the right environment for them or not.
Typically, we want to have two or three people for those final stages. It’s an investment from the company but it’s worthwhile: it means we make the right hiring decision, and the candidate makes the right decision as well. If you make the wrong hire, the cost of that is much greater.
What do you look for in candidates’ CVs? Are there any qualifications, courses or universities you particularly appreciate?
For engineering roles we don’t look at a specific educational background, we don’t look for people who have graduated from top universities, we don’t need a specific degree. Qualifications and education are not important to us. We focus on real-world experience, especially because we are mostly hiring senior people at the moment.
The things that are important to ask are around the impact someone’s had, the work they’ve done and how it relates to what we do. We want people that are independent and proactive. We give our employees tons of ownership of their work, and with that comes the expectation that they can be autonomous. So there will be specific questions hiring managers will ask to get a sense of whether the person has a bias to action: are they someone who spots problems and sorts them autonomously, or do they rely on other people in their team?
It partly comes down to what environments you’ve worked in before. In a big company, you’ve got lots of different resources and an entire team available to you, whereas in startups you’ve got to wear many different hats. But more importantly, it’s about the candidate’s motivations: if they tell us their previous role was really unstructured and they didn’t like that environment, that they prefer somewhere where all the work is predefined, it’s probably not the right fit either.
Does this mean you prioritise candidates with startup and scaleup experience? Or do you consider applicants who have come from big companies too?
Typically we do hire people who have come from a startup or a scaleup. That’s not to say we disregard everyone who has worked in a big corporation, but we would need to get a good understanding of whether they can handle ambiguity, how they value bureaucracy and why they want to join a startup now. There are big differences between the two environments and given where we are in the company, the gap can be too big to make the switch.
You mentioned a home assignment. What’s that about? What are you testing exactly with it?
This is a technical task we give candidates to test their problem-solving skills. It’s generally a real-world problem focused on the work they’d do in the company, for example a challenge we’ve seen in the past that is relevant to the role.
It’s not only about testing their technical skills, but also the thought process behind it. The task is time-constrained, typically for three hours. We want to test them on one of our values: ‘ship fast to learn’. We’re not expecting them to build a complete, perfect app, but we want to see if they can build a minimum viable product (MVP), if they can prioritise and if they can think about the different tradeoffs.
Once the task comes back we book a deep-dive interview for them to present their work, talk about the tradeoffs and explain what they would have considered if they had more time. So it’s really all about prioritisation. Some people are perfectionist and work slower, focusing on the wrong things that aren’t necessarily going to have the highest impact. We really want to test for that.
You’re a freshly-hired engineer at Photoroom. What does your first week and first few months look like?
At a minimum we bring every new joiner to Paris for the first week. Before you join, the manager will create a plan mapping out what your first 30, 60 and 90 days look like, and during that first week, you’ll sit down with your manager to look over the plan and make any changes based on your feedback. The idea is that by the end of the week, you should be very clear on what you need to deliver in those first three months. The first month, you’ll get a weekly check-in to make sure you’re progressing and getting the support that you need.
Something quite unique to Photoroom is we do a week-one project. On your first day your manager will sit you down and assign you a project you’re expected to deliver by the end of the first week. The reason for that is we really want to integrate you in Photoroom’s ‘ship fast and learn’ mentality.
We also assign you a buddy from outside of your team to build a connection with and help with your onboarding journey. And we also have a €1,000 learning and development budget you can use, on top of a virtual company card for every employee, which can be used to buy any equipment you need to set yourself up.
Are there any books, courses, podcasts or anything else you would recommend to candidates to help them prepare for interviews?
One book I would recommend is Who by Geoff Smart and Randy Street. It’s a book typically recommended to founders by VCs, especially in the early stages, to help build their hiring practices. It’s a great book to read if you want to understand what founders care about and what things they’re typically going to assess.
It’ll definitely help candidates who want to get into the startup world and set them up for success — especially for interviews where you’re talking about values and ways of working. A lot of the structure of these interviews will be based on that book.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/how-to-get-a-job-at-photoroom/
