Help Scout

Help Scout is remote-first and distributed across more than 115 cities worldwide. Teams focus on building human-centered customer experiences and emphasize sustainable growth rather than hypergrowth.

Day-to-day collaboration mixes synchronous and asynchronous work. Slack is used for everyday communication (including custom emoji), Zoom for meetings, Asana for project tracking and onboarding checklists, and Slab serves as the internal wiki ('The Guide to the Galaxy').

Teams stay close to customers through rituals such as company-wide support rotations that place teammates in the Help Scout support queue, and teammates meet in person at annual global retreats.

New hires receive a laptop and basic equipment and are supported with funds for home-office setup or co‑working space and personal development. Onboarding pairs each new hire with an onboarding buddy and includes scheduled sessions with People Ops and leadership plus informal 'fika' chats to build connections; see Help Scout’s description of their remote hiring and onboarding practices for more detail: the hiring process write-up.

Help Scout publishes its diversity, equity, and inclusion work and metrics and runs programs to reduce bias and support employee resource groups: DEI at Help Scout.

Help Scout follows a candidate-first, multi-step remote hiring process designed to align with distributed work. The typical stages are a value-add video call with the hiring manager, a technical conversation with teammates, a brief logistics chat about salary and benefits, a paid take-home project, a final conversation (often with a leader or cross-functional partner), reference checks, and then an offer. Full details are documented in their hiring write-up: Help Scout’s remote hiring process.

Hiring teams usually include the recruiter, the hiring manager, two-to-three members of the hiring team, and someone from another team who will work closely with the new hire. Interviewers complete internal training, the company uses structured interview questions and scorecards, and the team prepares a shared hiring document to keep the process consistent.

Most candidates complete a relevant take-home project that is paid and designed to reflect the role. Help Scout asks candidates to spend no more than six hours on any project. Projects are assessed with scorecards and every candidate who submits a project receives written feedback.

Technical conversations focus on example-based questions rather than whiteboarding; engineering roles commonly include a take-home coding exercise. Submissions are sometimes anonymized during review to reduce bias. The logistics chat covers salary expectations, timeline, and benefits, and Help Scout shares salary ranges on job descriptions.

Reference checks typically request three references (preferably two former managers). Offers are often delivered over video, and after a hire the recruiter publishes a hiring summary to the company that includes funnel metrics and diversity data to support transparency.

The team uses tools such as Ashby (ATS), Zoom (interviews), Pitch (role decks), and Worldtimebuddy (scheduling across time zones) to run the remote hiring process.