So you might be hearing or reading about Crossover – for work, and want to know about the process and what all you will have to go through to get work through them.

You might have thought sometimes to get some remote work and do away with your regular job. Your reasons might be one of the many, but you never take that decision.

This is mainly because you say to yourself “where is the remote work?”.

There are a lot of portals on the Internet which will give you an opportunity to work remotely. Some of the prominent ones that I know of are Upwork(formerly Elance and Odesk), Freelancer, Toptal and add to that list is Crossover, which I came to know of through Stackoverflow.com jobs.

Let’s go on over knowing what it is and how does their process work.

What is Crossover?

It is a website which is aimed at hiring talent for companies and if we go by their words they only select 1% of the candidates that apply to their website for jobs.
So what Crossover will ultimately do is, once you clear all the stages of the interview process, add you to their marketplace, where potential clients can handpick you for their work.

The Process (which filters out the 99%)

The Process from what I remember consists of the following:

1. Signing up and completing your profile.
2. Once you do that you will be presented with a multiple choice question test for which they will use some hiring platform. For me it was hackerrank
3. After clearing this comes the Project phase, here you have to create a working project.
4. Once this is approved you will have a technical interview.
5. Once all this is done you are on their market place.

Signing up and completing your profile

Signing up is pretty straight forward and you can use your linkedin account to fill in your profile.

The Test

The questions are there to test you knowledge of the basic concepts of the position that you have applied for. I had applied for a PHP Engineer position. So the questions were mainly related to PHP and the last two questions were programming questions.

I would say that the test will not be a problem for anyone having some relevant experience.

The Project

Once you clear the test you unlock the next round which is the Project round.
Here you will be given a few requirements and you will have to create a working application.
From the time you press the start button you will be given 3 days to complete you project. So If you are planning to apply to crossover keep this in mind that you will need to spare some time for this.

Now the project in itself isn’t difficult but the time-frame that you are given is challenging.
In 3 days of time, Apart from building a working application, you have to :

1. Write Unit Test cases.
2. Create a read-me which will explain how you will setup the project and what all has been used.
3. Create a video of the application that you have created.
4. Add some pretty slick features.

Although by reading you might be feeling that it seems to be simple, but I have heard from a few that they were not able to complete the task in 3 days and couldn’t proceed further in the process.

So somehow I managed to pull all that was asked for in the last minute and submitted the project files in the format and organized as was requested by them.

I had an issue with recording a video with their recommended tool on linux(Ubuntu) so I used another tool for recording(Record My Desktop) and sent them the project files again in an email as the submission on the website was not closed.
The good thing here was that I got a very prompt response from their team and they said that the files sent in the email will be sent to their technical team which checks the project.

The Technical Interview

After the project was accepted I got an email stating that I need to fix a meeting with an interviewer. For which I was redirected to an interface where I got to choose my preferred time slot from the slot available with the interviewer.

The skype call was started on the date and time selected by me. At the start of the interview I was asked to keep my webcam on while the interview was going on.

So it all started with an introduction regarding what kind of experience that I had in working etc. After that a few coding questions were asked and the interviewer wanted to see me doing them, so was asked to turn on screen sharing.

Once it was done a few general concepts of the PHP language were asked, the questions were really the basic ones. Once this was also done, I was asked about the project that I submitted, and questions related to it were asked like “How did you implement this X feature?”, “Have you considered this case while coding, if yes then please show where?” and so on.
This step is I guess to ensure that you have done the project on your own.

The duration of the interview was around 45-50 minutes

The Selection (Yay!)

If everything has gone well till now you get selected, which is confirmed through a welcome email. You will also receive a call from their HR person, who will ask if the payment terms are acceptable and if you are comfortable with a tool called WorkSmart to be installed on your system which will monitor your activity while you work.
You will also be asked to update your profile after you finish the call so that there is not information missing and the clients can find you.

What do I say:

So this was the complete hiring process at crossover.
Going by their tagline now I am the top 1% of freelancing talent in the world, which I definitely think I am not, but yes it feels good to say it to yourself (grin)
But this is just not it, now you have to get on to a project to start getting paid.

I will keep you posted about how things went forward with them in later posts, till then keep shining :).

Edit:
Here is the follow up post Crossover for work : After a few weeks