We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kat Stam a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Kat, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
Two years ago, I stumbled into this business. I was just closing my tech startup, in which I served as a CTO. A friend of mine came to me with a problem – she needed to hire a CTO for their 12-person company but had no idea how to interview and evaluate for this position. The next case was similar. The org of an acquaintance had a job opening for a devOPS person and their team had no devOPS experience. I crafted the interview questions and tasks for that role, then trained the team on how to interview following this structure. When I was a tech candidate, I usually had bad luck with who my interviewers were. They were trying to catch me out and created a stressful environment. This was not a pleasant experience to say the least. Then, when I switched places and came to the other side of the table as an interviewer, I struggled a lot too. It was difficult to prepare for the interviews, to be both fair and supportive and to reject candidates. But with time and practice I gained a lot of experience to become great at conducting interviews. It took 6 years in total.
Kat, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
AssessDev helps recruitment agencies and teams who are hiring conduct the first tech assessment of their tech candidates. Think of it as an English test – you would speak to me for 3-5 minutes to check how my conduct of English is. It takes a bit longer to evaluate tech skills but the concept is the same. It is like a native English speaker evaluating someone else.
We at AssessDev plug in the interview process – we sit in between the initial HR/recruiter screen and the meeting with the tech team.
Here are the ares in which we help.
– conducting the tech assessments + writing up the evaluation + candidate feedback
– crafting the interview questions and practical tasks
– designing a simple and short tech interview process
– training the in-house tech employees to becoming great interviewers
Have you ever had to pivot?
I have done a pivot of my professional career 5 times in my life, and I love every single one of them.
Each time I do something new, I gain valuable skills which I use to my benefit in the future.
I started as a software engineer. Then I transitioned into a Machine Learning engineer. This was fun but it was 10 years ago so the paid work available at that time was not the most exciting one. So I moved towards data science – still working with data but not training models. Instead I learned how to gather and prepare data to draw valuable insights from them.
At that time I started reading a lot about climate change and what we can do to protect the environment. I ended up co-founding two climateTech startups – one to fight wildfires with tech (crazy, right?), and the other one concentrating on more than one environmental protection problems. I was in charge of all tech back then. Startup life is super difficult so I stepped out of it 2 years ago, when my friend asked me to interview a CTO on her behalf.
This led to me creating my tech assessment business which I run alongside with my co-founder. It is a social business as we deliver the best candidate experience tech assessments while helping companies hire the right talent that sticks and does wonders for their business.
In the meantime, all that time, I have been reading a ton of fantasy books. Sometimes sci-fi ones too.
So now I am turning my free time hobby into another career opportunity. I have finished writing my first fantasy novel and I am in the process of finishing its second edit and looking for an agent to represent my work.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://assess.dev/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katstam_writes/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kat-stam/
- Other: www.katstam.com