The Frontend Clan's First Large-Scale Hiring: Our Recruiting Boost Experience

This year, a new Frontend Clan launched at KakaoBank, and its first official task was to run a company-wide Recruiting Boost for frontend developers. Rather than the existing team-by-team ad hoc hiring, this was the first large-scale hiring effort in which recruiting standards and operations were unified around the clan.

KakaoBank operates as a matrix organization combining purpose organizations and functional organizations (clans). Together with the Server, Mobile, and Core Banking clans, the Frontend Clan worked out its technical direction and hiring criteria, responding to growing frontend demand driven by service expansion and an increasing number of new projects.

For the Recruiting Boost, the HR team handled overall scheduling and operations, while the clan closely designed the criteria for each stage of the process. During preparation, TFs (task forces) were formed for each stage—resume screening, take-home assignment, and interview—to establish the following standards.

• Resume screening: Reviewed essential experience based on the JD, but applied different item weightings by team
• Take-home assignment: Created a new pool of assignments and excluded assignments that could easily be solved with AI to preserve discriminating power
• Interview: Built consistent interview scenarios and question sets to ensure evaluation consistency

For the take-home assignment stage, instead of each team creating separate assignments as in the past, clan members from three teams were combined into a single assignment TF. As a result, consistency, fairness, and maintenance efficiency all improved, and the evaluation criteria were also refined in more detail. Evaluation centered mainly on completeness, code style, and UX quality, with meeting the requirements clearly set as the baseline.

Interviews proceeded in the order of pre-screening video interview > first-round working-level interview > second-round executive interview, and the article covered the first-round working-level interview in detail. The first-round interview ran for about 90 minutes, in the order of icebreaking, questions about the take-home assignment, technical questions on topics like networking, JavaScript, and CSS, and finally a check on career background and culture fit. In particular, it was emphasized that answers received better evaluations when candidates explained things conversationally, blending in real experience and problem-solving examples rather than simply listing definitions.

After the hiring process ended, improvement points were organized through a KPT retrospective and anonymous feedback. There were some regrets that the schedule was tight and grading time was short, but the TF-based operation, the collaborative experience, and the actual application of common evaluation criteria were noted as major achievements.

Noah, Owen, and Aiden, who joined through the Recruiting Boost, said the assignments were challenging yet well-structured, and that the interview atmosphere was comfortable and considerate. Building on this experience, the Frontend Clan stated that it will continue experimenting with better hiring methods and collaboration structures going forward.