IT Crafts HR

ParkMan is a small scale start-up that developed a mobile app helping drivers to find a parking space and pay for it on the spot. In today’s episode, ParkMan’s HR manager Katriina Lahti tells Maks about the challenges the HR teams must face in small companies like ParkMan, as compared to big companies.  She enumerates the qualities of candidates that start-ups are looking for and shares her insights about the role of Employer Branding and EVP in the context of smaller companies. She also reveals what they do to attract talents and how they keep them engaged.

What challenges HR processes face while the company is growing? How hard is to help people find their dream jobs? Listen to our guest, Anna Engman from Detectify. Anna tells us about how she transformed her passion for teaching into a fruitful career in HR. Now, as the Head of People and Culture, she deals with employer branding, employer value proposition strategy, recruitment, and onboarding processes.  Listen to Anna sharing why she was attracted to her company and how her department supports employee development. Anna also reveals what kind of candidate’s attitude is the most valued in the process of candidate assessment, and what she wishes she had learned at university before starting her HR career.

Do you know what the talent acquisition is really about and how it supports strategic workforce planning? What role it plays in the whole project of sourcing candidates, putting them through the candidate journey and getting them onboarded? Listen to this episode and learn how is it to run recruitment processes both in start-ups and big companies, what skills are essential to operate on a global scale and what are the challenges you have to deal with.  Maks talks with Graham King, HR Director at Socrates Capital, who spent many years working as Global Talent Acquisition for such companies as Amplify and Thomson Reuters. Graham shares his experience on how to build technology and talent acquisition strategy, and reveals the challenges of putting together one global technology team, and talent acquisition function that could serve that team globally as well. On top of that he shows his insights on why is it crucial to communicate with recruitment partners and to develop partnership through using and sharing data and analytics. 

Bitpanda went from a fully in-office company to a fully remote in a matter of days – with a team of 180 people. Listen to Antonia Wolleswinkel's tips on how to preserve this new environment and ensure that your employees are still committed to the company's mission. Antonia also shares insights on how to increase the ratio of women joining the fintech company, and how the way of working in the scale-up environment can positively impact the workflow. On top of that, she shares why the Internal Communication Specialist role gets significance.

You can learn a lot about building a trustworthy company’s culture and managing remote teams from Basecamp – its founders have written several books on remote working. In this episode their Head of People Operations, Andrea LaRowe, gives insights on creating an employee handbook, staying connected when a company is remote, and maintaining high employee retention. Andrea also shares how they managed to encourage their team members to deliver feedback whenever any obstacle appears and how they hire skilled employees with a recruitment process focused on just interviews!

Time is important, and Toggl knows it well – their employees work from 19 different time zones! Listen to the podcast episode with Evelin Andrespok, where she shares the success story on how Toggl, a company from Tallinn, Estonia, became a worldwide company with more than 100 employees. She tells, as People Ops Manager, what impact on a company had a decision to become remote and what are the challenges of managing people today. Find out how the hiring process at Toggl looks like, and what is their key to high employee retention.

Learn how to maintain a global presence on the example of the Polyglot Group, a company with employees who work in 9 different timezones. In this podcast episode, Gerald Bot, Chief Client Officer, explains how a business can benefit from PEO and what a company that plans to become remote-friendly needs to know before making the step towards telecommuting. Listen about why you should not trust Google in terms of searching for information, and how to solve problems with the logistics of hiring, which include local taxes and employee benefits.

If you want to get to know about the importance of employer branding at different scales of a business and how to start implementing it well, listen to this podcast episode. Maks talks with Adrian Martinez, CMO & Co-founder of HR Embassy to find out what areas of employer branding are most frequently neglected by employers and how does that affect their success. Adrian also shares his insights on why contemporary recruiters need to have some marketing skills to run successful recruitment campaigns and why a career page can be a better place to direct traffic instead of job boards.

In this podcast episode, Maks talks with Julia Melymbrose, Head of People Operations at Animalz. Julia shares how they deal with communication and processes at a fully remote content marketing agency. She describes how they track the deliverables of the content team, what are the skills that the company looks for in a remote hire, and how to assess if a person will be right at a content-related position. Besides that, Julia touches upon a topic like setting up operations that help everyone stay in sync and maintaining a company's culture when growing rapidly and in a remote setup.

Maks has a conversation with Matus Horvath who is the Head of People Operations at Slido. Matus shares his knowledge about managing team communication at hybrid companies and tells how to create a flexible work culture based on trust. He reveals how they use their internal barometer at Slido to measure the sense of belonging and how to communicate your employer brand to attract more talent. Listen to the podcast to hear more about a recruitment process that allows finding engaged employees and what KPIs are worth tracking as well as to get to know if there is any kind of difference between remote and on-site workers.

Maks talks to Fareen Shaikh, Director of Talent at acework, about how to communicate the employer brand and how to make it more appealing to people who apply for an open position. She touches upon an interesting difference between sourcing for on-site and remote positions, and how to deal with too many applications. Based on her experience in nonprofit organizations in Berlin, she also gives advice to job seekers that are applying for remote work opportunities on how to prove they are fully ready for it during a screening process. Listen to a podcast and learn that even a small team can achieve a lot when the company is open to remote work.

Maks talks to Kaylie Boogaerts, People & Culture Manager at LaterPay, about how to manage a team that is spread across 10+ different countries. Based on her experience in building a remote culture at LaterPay, Kaylie shares her insights on how to keep people aligned and connected and how to avoid getting them socially detached. She will also tell you what does she enjoy the most about working in a remote team, how important is the hiring process to make sure your future employees are ready for it, and how at LaterPay they use Slack to conduct recruitment challenges. Listen to a podcast and find out how the perfect cooperation between IT and HR department should look like.