Break into Health Tech: How Levels Hires

Whether you’re an employer or job seeker, the hiring process is hard. Shining a spotlight on this problem, we spoke to the Levels team to get their best advice for candidates hoping to stand out, level up, and land their dream health and fitness job.

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Roles at high-growth health and fitness companies are highly competitive. What can candidates do to stand out?

It’s important to have a passion for and curiosity about the particular focus of the company you’re applying to. Whatever the niche of the company is, you will likely be living and breathing it in both your work and the company culture, so it helps to be onboard with it.

Following on that, do your homework on that niche. A background and enthusiasm for health and fitness is necessary but not sufficient.

What does your company’s hiring process entail?

For recruiting, we lean heavily on our network, asking our investors and other supporters for introductions. We also try to pull from the Levels community when possible. And we do some traditional posting via LinkedIn and others as appropriate.

Which credentials matter when assessing applicants?

Except in obvious cases (like the Head of Legal should have a law degree, a trainer should be certified, etc), experience, curiosity, and cultural fit matter much, much more.

Succeeding at a startup or fast-growing company is challenging. How do you screen candidates for intangible skills?

We share a lot of documentation even before the first interview, which gives the candidate a chance to really see what our culture is like and, therefore, what attributes might be useful.

We write really thorough job descriptions and iterate them a lot to try to articulate those needs.

We also do multiple phone interviews with several team members, as well as a couple of technical challenges (one solving a problem; one teaching us something). However, we don’t waste time with clever puzzles or trivia questions.

Any additional advice about the hiring process you’d like to impart?

Go deep on the company you’re applying to. Even if you think their technology or product is amazing and life-changing, don’t skip the cultural side. Try to learn as much as you can about the company culture and really probe whether or not you think it fits you.