My journey as the first recruiter in a startup — Nordigen's Kristiāna's story
“Here’s your PC, here’s a list of positions — now do your magic.”
Freedom and autonomy are some things millennials typically expect from their workplace. Even if they’re hired for a junior position, they want to do things their own way — to experiment, fail and eventually succeed. Another “buzz-phrase” that Gen Y seek is a meaningful job, meaning, that you want to see the impact of your work, understand how your input affects the big picture.
Freedom and meaningfulness are, without a doubt, two concepts that perfectly describe my job. Initially hired for a non-existent sales position, I later switched to an equally non-existent recruitment position (two times within the same company) and was asked to “do my magic” in order to achieve my goals. Basically, no set rules, no cemented procedures, just general guidelines, an exciting playground and my team’s support.
The problem was, that I wasn’t even sure if I had “my magic”. It took me a long time to read, learn and, finally, trust my inner gut-feeling.
How do I start?
As a passionate chef, I can compare the learning experience to baking. Let's imagine that I'm standing in the kitchen with some eggs, flour and milk. The chef asks me to bake a Red Velvet cake. I love baking, but I’ve never baked a Red Velvet. I have some ingredients, some experience in baking cakes, but where should I start?
I’d say the best way to start is by learning from the best in your field and applying this knowledge to a particular situation, in my case — recruitment.
Learning then needs to be enacted by experimentation, which is often less exciting than one thinks. Why? Because we often fail, look back and get frustrated that we’ve spent too much time and energy on things that didn’t work out or that we hadn't noticed something obvious or didn’t move fast enough.
Sometimes, you just wish there'd be someone more experienced around so that you wouldn’t have to go through this complex learning process and go through all those “best books every HR professional should read in 2019” lists. But that’s the cost you pay for your freedom and autonomy.
Experimentation then turns into adjustment. Once you feel you’re doing things the right way, you start adjusting them in order to create certain procedures to follow. You end up continuously adjusting those procedures because in an ever-changing start-up environment any procedure is ever-changing too. In my mind, it’s important to not stick to one “right procedure”, but constantly look for improvement.
The new hiring procedure.
It took me several months to develop our hiring procedure. Previously, we just invited a person for a coffee to get to know them better and then free-styled based on the position we were hiring this person for. But once you have several vacancies and hundreds of candidates, this approach just doesn't work.
My introductory period of learning-experimentation and adjustment helped me develop our company's first recruitment procedure.
Here are the steps:
- First I devised a method of tracking all candidates we had approached in the past and adding candidates that we were planning to approach according to vacant positions.
- Second, I fine-tuned our job-ads —their style, content and “character”. Do we want to sound like a crazy-cool band to attract crazy rock stars? Or do we want to be perceived as the typical reserved, polite and shy Latvians? The outcome is somewhere in between, especially considering our industry.
- Thirdly, I had to evaluate and decide on the best channels for posting our job ads (price per value, target audience, etc.).
- Fourthly, I've established an internal referral scheme for headhunting, making our internal and recommended candidates a top-priority.
- Then comes the interview process. Who should lead it? How many interviews do we need? What questions should be asked in each interview? What should our communication style be like? Do we care only about the professional skill set or are personal qualities and beliefs also important to us?
- And finally, the decision-making process. What are the red flags? Who has the final say?
Challenges? Yes, there are “a few”.
No role comes without its challenges. Here are some of the lessons I learned after my first interviews:
- As a recruiter, you must always remember your candidate's credentials — their seniority level, nationality, age, etc. Applicants who have previously been employed at established companies with clear-cut procedures, responsibilities and career opportunities require a completely different approach. In some cases, their employment history exceeds the term 'startup' itself. In such cases:
— Sell the idea, the atmosphere and the set of values of your startup, rather than a brand name, reputation and stability (let’s be honest, stability is not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a startup).
— Play on weaknesses that are typical for corporations — slow growth, bureaucracy, stagnation, etc.
- Present chaos as something appealing, basically, as a perfect ground for proactivity, change implementation and experimentation. This is particularly difficult as I myself like things to be in order. However, by explaining how many opportunities, this so-called regulated chaos creates, I learn to embrace it myself and simultaneously make myself a good example of overcoming the fears of an ever-changing environment.
- Some things that might seem obvious to you might not be that obvious to your candidates, say, your awesome team, the environment, fresh fruit in the office, health insurance (we get used to all those perks so easily!). I always sincerely tell my candidates why I enjoy working at Nordigen and am completely honest about things which can seem challenging.
- The culture fit is our most important criterion. Regardless of an applicant's professional skill set, if they won't be a good fit for the team and share our collective mindset, then we won't proceed. We value our values and need team-players who share them with us.
- And last, one of the most challenging aspects of my line of work is rejecting truly fantastic candidates — talented, qualified and simply inspiring professionals.
This is how I’ve grown within and with Nordigen.
As I already mentioned, I often share my “Nordigen experience” with our candidates. I tell them how I joined a small group of talented people with huge ambitions in a small office, nearly no procedures or order, how I took the risk and jumped into this adventure even though my work experience was poor (and not at all related to sales, where I worked before).
I tell job applicants about my first challenge of building and improving the lead generation process. How amazing this experience was and how I just realised that Sales was not something I was passionate about. How many changes two investment rounds had brought, how many opportunities these changes created. How I grasped the opportunity to grow our team, to become an in-house recruiter. How uncertain it all was!
We experimented — we wanted to see what’ll happen if I leave my position at Sales and focus solely on recruitment. What would happen after I was given two months to prove that we need an in-house recruiter at that particular stage? And how I'm still a recruiter and how since the start of this “project” we’ve doubled the size of our teams (Sales, Development, Data and Operations). How today it’s not a project anymore, but my everyday life and finally, how exciting it all is.
How did I manage to find people who can dance for hours at a party like some high-school kids?
I already mentioned some of the challenges I encounter at my job and, believe me, there are many more. There are days when I just want to work for a huge corporation in a big team with all the Heads, Chiefs, Directors of HR and silently do my job. BUT these are the exceptions, we all have our bad days, right? It becomes easier and easier to overcome all those difficulties when I see all the people I've recruited working happily together. Not only working but also partying, chatting, drinking coffee together, basically, enjoying being a part of Nordigen’s team.
At our Christmas party, instead of reciting poems or singing carols, each of us had to say one good thing about Nordigen and almost all of us said that they love our team. Isn’t that fulfilling? Fulfilling and, yes, challenging, because the bar is set high and I must find candidates who are no less awesome, which only highlights the importance of the culture-fit interview.
Thanks for reading,
Kristiāna Meldere
Head of Recruitment at Nordigen
P.S. Yes, we're still hiring! Don’t hesitate to reach out to info@nordigen.com, we'll be happy to hear from you!
