Frontify is a close partner of our team at ACELR8.

ACELR8’s Talent Partners Cinzia Melograna and Gabriel Johnson have worked with Frontify to help them find new, experienced talent that shares and enriches their culture and values.

Frontify, with customers including some of the world’s biggest brands, is a brand management platform that empowers people to connect and build brands together, by making branding incredibly simple, accessible, and fun.

To be able to keep delivering the best possible experience for their clients, at every part of their journey, they are always searching for innovative, problem-solving talent that can help them make a difference.

To learn more about Frontify and what makes their company tick, Gabriel talked to Marc Oertle, Head of Engineering at Frontify.

Here’s how the conversation went.

What is your role?

As the Head of Engineering at Frontify, I’m mainly responsible for strategic topics such as Technology, our Technical Roadmap, and Team Strategy.

Until a few months ago, I was also heavily involved in the Hiring Process and how to scale and structure the team. While working closely with our Product Management Team, I have to ensure that we can fulfil our business needs by adding the right people to the Team so that we can always deliver high quality on time.

What attracted you to work with Frontify?

Staying curious and always striving for excellence while remaining human was always part of Frontify’s culture.

Since working in a fast-paced and ambitious environment always encourages me to thrive, Frontify was the perfect match for me.

Even though we were a pretty small team of around ten people at this time, it became clear that we wanted to grow to reach our goals. Therefore, I’m very proud to see that we’re now close to 300 people six years later.

Why do you think someone should join your Team?

We have interdisciplinary teams attached to a certain area of our product. These teams are working independently from each other as the responsibilities are clearly separated.

With these structures, we give these teams a lot of freedom to decide on what they want to work on and also how they want to collaborate with each other.

We keep these teams small to ensure that communication is easy, that everyone can participate in discussions and decisions, and have an impact.

Often, you’ll face a big, complex problem where you have to sit together with your Team to extract smaller chunks, assign tasks to people based on their strengths, and align on the next steps.

We believe in activating strengths, so we try to find ways that enable everyone to use their strengths as often as possible.

What is your ideal candidate?

We’re looking for passionate engineers who want to have a real impact.

We offer an environment where everyone can bring in new ideas and approaches, so if you’re never satisfied with the status quo and always striving for a better solution, the chance is high that you’ll thrive at Frontify.

Because of the growth, we’re in constant change, so it’s required to possess a growth mindset for staying positive for such things.

What’s the best-hidden perk of your job?

The freedom to decide how to do the job.

There are many ways to end up with the same result, and if you have the flexibility to decide on your own how to provide the result, you will find a solution where you can play out your strengths while having fun at the same time.

To provide such a working environment, 100% trust and strong leadership are crucial because if you’re not used to working in such a way, you’ll need some guidance to make the first steps.

Any advice to anyone in your industry?

We’re living in a fast-changing environment. Stay open and curious, use your strengths to learn new things you’re passionate about.

How would you describe working with ACELR8?

ACELR8 asked the right questions to understand what people were looking for and what makes our culture unique.

Furthermore, we established efficient processes to make communication easier and more transparent so that all relevant people understand where we are and how we proceed.

I also noticed during the ramp-up time that having an additional challenger with a different angle in the Review-Meetings is very useful to complete the picture of a candidate.

Why did you start working with ACELR8?

As we wanted to grow across all departments, it became clear that we didn’t have enough resources to focus on all the different open roles.

ACELR8 helped us by taking over specific job profiles for hiring while we had the opportunity also to let the in-house Talent Acquisition team grow at the same time.

What has the ACELR8 Team taught you about recruitment?

You can hire quickly and efficiently if all relevant stakeholders understand their responsibilities.

Regular exchanges are essential to understanding each other’s expectations and a shared understanding of the job profiles.

Thanks to this baseline, we met the hiring goals by bringing in the right candidates at the right time and also decreased time-to-hire significantly.

That was our conversation with Marc at Frontify, showing how ACELR8 can really help a company find the right talent with a seamless, versatile approach.

As an embedded recruitment service, we can better understand your culture, structure, and hiring needs.

Interested in joining Frontify? They are currently recruiting. You can find their careers page here.

Recently, our Talent Partner Aleksandra Kurzyńska, working with our client FRVR, interviewed two of their team members, Diana Salavisa (Senior Game Producer) and Kester Bishop, (Strategic Projects Lead). In those interviews, which you can find the links for here and here, Aleksandra learnt plenty about the culture and energy of FRVR.

With a lot of exciting growth, creative team members, and plenty of promise for the future, FRVR is excited about the direction they’re going in and looking forward to adding more talent to their company.

So what makes FRVR an exciting place to work? First off, their potential

1. The Sky’s the Limit

“FRVR provides the only single distribution platform that can publish games absolutely everywhere. We’re everywhere from Facebook, to Snapchat, to Samsung, to Discord — but no games company works without great games!

As a Business Development Manager in the Games Team, you will be at the forefront of our growth by finding, engaging, and onboarding the best games studios in the world. When the pandemic finally dies down, you will also be travelling to major gaming events to both promote FRVR, and to build a solid network of developers and studios.”

• Kester Bishop

As Kester describes above, there is a lot of potential for members of FRVR to make an impact not just within the company, but within the gaming community as a whole.

FRVR is currently hiring for a number of business development roles, and you can be one of their core employees in helping them make a massive difference in the gaming world.

This brings us to the next great benefit of working at FRVR, opportunities.

2. The Journey’s Yours to Plan

“Being a Game Producer at FRVR means you will own the responsibility of overseeing and nurturing the relationship between FRVR and Game Studios. Your main goal will be to facilitate all communications and interactions with Game Studios and make sure, that in the end, both parties are happy with the results.

You will also be an advisor and a coach that is constantly driving and guiding studios through FRVR processes and pipelines to make sure they deliver games with quality and on time.”

• Diana Salavisa

FRVR are also hiring for Game Producers and Developers — those in the company that would have the agency and potential to craft new relationships with major game developers, giving them the freedom to make a path of their own and the company’s journey.

This role will have you at the centre of the FRVR growth plan, an exciting opportunity that will allow you to cultivate unique relationships with highly influential studios and developers.

This brings us on to our next great benefit — Culture.

3. High Energy, High Potential

“FRVR genuinely cares about their employees and is constantly improving as a company, in order to provide a great experience to everyone who collaborates with it. From leadership and all the way down, I believe everyone understands that people come first and the company follows.

We are at a stage where there are very few limits on what we can do. Creativity and initiative are the commanding words, and if you have ‘out of the box’ ideas, and you think you can deliver on them, you’ll find the support you need.”

• Diana Salavisa

Working in a small yet rapidly developing team allows you to be a part of a constantly improving experience. As well, with a people-first approach, FRVR wants to make sure that you are happy, comfortable and excelling in your future role.

As for who will help you in this role, you can rely on Great Leadership

4. Here to Help Guide You

“We have an amazing Leadership, with terrific Leaders from very diverse backgrounds, who are the pillars of our company and who are examples to be followed, not only in providing a great work culture and environment, but also providing mentorship on how to lead a company moving forward.”

• Diana Salavisa

This company has a high potential for expansive growth, which can only come from a leadership team of high quality. At FRVR, you will get to work with some of the best in the business, collaborating and learning from unique experiences and opportunities from Day One.

5. Up for a Business Development Challenge

Naturally, with roles this exciting, there is certainly going to be some challenges ahead. For the business development manager role, Kester split it into three obstacles:

“1. Always Knowing the Market — In a role where you represent the entire organisation to the game development world, you need to not just be able to ‘speak games’, but lead all of FRVR to the places within the industry we should be focusing on. That means being on top of popular product trends, economic opportunities, and constantly being on the bleeding edge of relevant industry news. If you find yourself nodding along to stuff like Deconstructor of Fun articles saying “yup, I’ve been saying that for months”, this is you.

2. Balancing Product, Business, and People — The best partnerships will come from a scenario where the games studio makes amazing games, and the commercial structure of the deal works for both sides long term. Being able to confidently weigh both product-first and business-first components in these decisions will be key to success. That’s not the trick, though. The trick is to be able to use all of those solid foundations based on product and business and have it inform a decision you’re able to make based on the most important aspect of a studio: the people. You need to know what a great team looks like. You should be able to quickly discern and pass what you’re not looking for, and really come through for those you believe have the right stuff.

3. Building As We Go — We’re still at the stage of growth where we’re laying the rails from the train. This is amazing because of the potential to have such an impact on everyone FRVR touches — but it does come with its own difficulties. Creating structure, process, and best practice at speed is a serious challenge!”

6. Built for Those With Passion

With a quickly developing business, there has to be commitment and there has to be passion. But, alongside this, there must also be space for calmness and creativity. With the Games Development Role, Diana explains the ideal candidate as:

“Someone with Project Management experience, who already understands or comes from Gaming, Digital or Tech industries.

We are also looking for people with an analytical mindset, who can use data for effective stakeholder management.

In the context of covid, given our hybrid/remote setup, we value people who can easily communicate with teams that are spread in different countries and time zones — Also, our language is English and, therefore, it is essential that you are fluent.

Having worked as a Game producer in a Top Game Publisher, Studio or having previous experience in game development is for sure a plus!”

7. Forward-Thinking Work Culture for a Forward-Thinking Business

FRVR is open to the world of hybrid-remote working, ensuring that you can craft a style of working that suits you. Additionally, they are also building up a modern, creative office in Lisbon where you can meet and collaborate with the rest of the team.

As an international company, they embrace cultural diversity along with personal preferences. Whether you prefer working closely in the office or on your own path from home, FRVR can work to help craft that experience with you.

As you can see on their careers page, the FRVR team is internationally spread out in locations like Malta, Seville, London, Copenhagen, Bulgaria and China, with many of them meeting in the central office in Lisbon.

8. Be a Part of the Future

Along with helping to build the core foundations of this exciting company, you can also be a part of the new framework of the future of gaming. FRVR aims to move past conventional gaming frameworks and instead create a new vision that suits the modern world.

As Diana explains:

“FRVR is a game company focused on games beyond the app stores. Games are built and published on many platforms (including awesome Channel partners like Facebook and Samsung) and have millions of players enjoying and playing every day!

More than that, FRVR is opening new paths in the games industry and overcoming distribution obstacles that a few years ago would seem impossible! This requires a very sharp eye and vision in order to understand missing opportunities where our users currently are and where they will move next.

With that in mind, I am certain we will see in the future new worlds being discovered with FRVR leading the way. And that is a journey I definitely want to be part of.”

9. Great Perks and Benefits

FRVR wants to reward its employees with the benefits that they deserve.

One of their main focuses is on their relocation benefits, which can help you settle into your new city with plenty of assistance. Along with covering travel costs, they can also provide you with three months of accommodation, tax assistance and consultations, extra finance help and visa assistance.

To add to this, they also offer 23 holiday days along with a company non-communication week around Christmas and New Year’s (along with your birthday as a day off, which should be mandatory in all businesses).

They also have no working hours tracking software and a strong, enthusiastic focus on work-life balance for all their staff.

Along with these industry-leading benefits, the FRVR team also places a strong emphasis on work culture and enjoyment, ensuring that you have a say in how you help FRVR gets things done.

10. Roll Your Own Initiative

Many of the roles in FRVR rely on you to put on the captain’s hat and make the most of your experience to move the company forward, as Diana explains in relation to the Games Development Role:

“Game Studios relationships:

Game producers can either be focused on just one game, one Game Studio with several games or even work as a Producer on a group of games across several Studios. That means different communication and interactions with many different Studios. Each one will have their own way of thinking, processes and ways of working. The challenge will be to find the right tone of communication for each Studio and drive them to deliver their product in line with FRVR’s high standards.

Information is the key, and our Game Producers are the Key keepers:

In order to move forward with roadmaps and game launches, Game Producers need to put on the Captain hat and lead their way through FRVR internal teams and Game Studios. Several teams and Partners hold different (but relevant) pieces of information. The key is to not lose sight of anything, be able to put the pieces together in a digestible way to all relevant stakeholders and, ultimately, move game launches and new releases forward.”

You can find all of FRVR’s open job positions on their careers page.

We’ve only focused on two of their current positions, but there are plenty more on offer, both now and in the future. From video artists to talent acquisition, FRVR is looking for a variety of new hires.

If you don’t see the exact fit for you, you can also reach out to them offering your own unique skills and talents through their Connect Page. As with all great companies, FRVR isn’t looking to fill great roles, they’re looking to find great people.

A product manager at work (probably).

In 2020 when the pandemic hit, I, a recruiter with not so many years of experience (1 to be exact) started getting a lot of messages asking for job search help. As so many people’s lives were impacted by the layoffs, I wanted to help them as much as I could. I opened up my Calendly link to anyone on the internet so they could book a 30 mins call with me for free job search advice.

The LinkedIn post that started it all.

In the following month, I had almost one call with a jobseeker every single day. It turns out everyone faced the exact same challenge — everyone applied to way too many LinkedIn job ads and with little to no success ( here’s why it doesn’t work). And I only realized a few weeks ago that what I did was essentially user research, an important part of product work.

Working in the field of recruitment and HR, we always have a finger on the pulse of people trends in the startup business, and that includes countless horror stories of how startups can fail their employees. Needless to say the pandemic revealed even further their reluctance towards change. I heard stories of rampant sexism, racism, abuse, lying, belittlement, gaslighting, you name it. Many talented people were extremely hurt or burnt out and even forced out of jobs they used to love.

It shouldn’t have to be that way. These stories made me furious, and I thought to myself: if these are the companies that end up raising millions, then I can do it too, and do it much better.

I wanted to found my own startup.

Luckily, my CEO is a very down-to-earth and easygoing boss, and my manager was a very empathetic and supportive person too. They created a very open and safe space for me to be open in our 1-on-1 conversations. Don’t remember when exactly but I started telling them, “A few years into the future, I want to found my own startup.” Pretty sure I said this again and again and again in every single subsequent 1-on-1s whenever I was asked about my career plans.

In the meantime, I kept myself busy on the side. I built my own website to offer more focused and structured job search coaching on a weekly basis. I spoke at three different online career events in the course of a few months. I started writing the first edition of my newsletter. Whenever I had a chat with my CEO, I’d casually bring up these activities.

One day in August 2020, I finished a free coaching call with someone that booked me via my public Calendly. A few hours later I glanced at my phone and saw a Paypal notification: “You received €15 from [Person I just coached].”

People actually thought my advice was valuable! My efforts meant something! €15 was not a big amount but I was over the moon. I posted a screenshot on social media and my CEO reacted to it.

A few days later, my CEO brought this up in our conversation. “Really cool to see what you’re doing with coaching.” He said. “You know, we’ve been thinking about building our own product in the company and I’d like you to be involved.”

Our first product workshop, summer 2021.

A year and a bit later, my job title is now Product Manager. Of course, the change was not overnight. At first, I was asked to try and give feedback to our MVP. Then a few months later I negotiated for an informal quarter-time (10 hours per week) role working on the product. In January 2022, I finally signed a new full-time contract as Product Manager.

And trust me, the new role was extremely difficult at the start. I had no Head of Product above me telling me what to do. I had no in-house engineering or design teams. My schedule went from an extremely structured calendar with interviews and hiring manager meetings to a blank canvas that my busy recruiter brain was very uncomfortable with.

I also had no idea how to be a product manager at all and had to carve my own path. I found 10 product articles to read every day, started Udemy courses, spoke to 4 mentors, watched YouTube videos, read tons of Tweets from Lenny Rachitsky and Shreyas Doshi. I’ve dreaded going to work many times and even cried after video meetings. But 3 months later the hard work did pay off. I no longer feel flustered and know what’s coming up every single week for our product.

For those of you reading and are thinking about a career shift from one discipline to another, consider shifting within your current company before looking for a new job. I’ve coached 100+ jobseekers and seen the competition from the recruiter side, and job searching is very difficult — especially for career changers. Most Bootcamp graduates do not land their ideal jobs within 3 months (source: my partner went through a Bootcamp, my friend worked at another Bootcamp, I coached 5+ Bootcamp grads).

Here’s what you can use as a plan instead:

• Think very, very clearly about what you really want to do. I didn’t do this enough, but speak to people who work in your ideal job to understand what that job actually looks like beyond buzzwords.
• Put out some feelers in your current company. If they have an open attitude towards their employees’ careers, share with them your plan. It doesn’t have to be detailed, simply “I’m interested in X and want to pursue X in 3–5 years”.
• Your company doesn’t have to have this role yet. ACELR8 didn’t even have anything closely related to product, but it was forming at the back of the strategy.

Filling a position from an internal move is also hugely beneficial for the company: someone like you already knows the company inside out, has built solid work relationships with important stakeholders, and it saves lots of money and time that would have otherwise been spent on hiring from the outside.

I’m not the only one who made a change within ACELR8. My colleague Aidos went from a client-side Talent Partner to being our in-house Recruiter, Angela became our first Talent Manager building learning and development programs, and Ludo moved to sales and became our first Business Development Lead.

If we can do it, you can do it too! Your dream job could be much closer than you think.

Originally published at https://annienxli.medium.com on March 9, 2022.

This has been one of the most tumultuous years in hiring. From resignations, to record hires, to remote and hybrid working, we’ve all found ourselves with a new perspective from this time last year. Now, 2022 is here and things are still heating up.

So how can you make a feasible hiring plan for 2022?

To learn more, I sat down with Michael Varley, ACELR8’s CEO, and asked him for his thoughts on hiring trends in 2022. This is something we do often, providing Honest Founder interviews to help you get a better insight into our company and the world of hiring as a whole.

From this interview, we also developed a list of action plans that every company can use to improve their hiring plan for 2022 and beyond.

As an embedded recruitment service, ACELR8 gets to see the ins and outs of a wide variety of companies in a range of sizes and locations. From onsite startups to fully remote corporations, they have a wealth of insights. With this wealth of information, the first question that I asked Michael was:

Are things going to be the same in recruitment in 2022 as in 2021?

“To give you my honest opinion, I think it’ll get even more heated up. During COVID, companies had to stop hiring for six or seven months. When that happened, it created a pretty big hiring backlog. Adding to that, companies also made a knee-jerk reaction in firing entire teams and laying off whole departments. Now, they’re playing catchup trying to find the talent they lost again.

In general, just a six-month break in hiring can lead to a backlog that can take years to recover from.”

What can businesses do to avoid falling behind in their hiring process in 2022?

“Retention is going to be the big buzzword. You’ve gotten your desired people in. Now, ask yourself — are you ready to retain them? It’s tough.”

Is remote hiring and working going to take over completely?

“Just from a qualitative point, looking around the market, you can see some companies actually wanted to go back to the office very early on. We’ve had a few clients come in and they are very committed to getting people back in the office. It’s a bit of an assumption that everybody wants to work remotely.

I think this movement has been largely driven by the engineering community and similar sectors. But, from a technical point of view, it’s much easier for these employees to work remotely.

I don’t think it’s correct to say remote work is the new way to do it. I do think though that there’ll be increased flexibility. In general, I think it’s going to be a highly fragmented market on this, where companies are going to be doing different things to retain talent.”

Do you think companies should look at a global talent pool now rather than a local one?

“Absolutely. For me, it feels like there’s an apathy in European countries at the moment from a talent perspective. The capitalist side of me says that companies will start harnessing different talent pools because this way they can get more for their money.

If you look at it in a global sense, there’s a lot of people who want jobs, are keen to work, and have the skills. So, what I’d say to Western talent, to Europeans, is to make sure you upskill on your skills; because there’s going to be a lot more competition for your dinner.

I think you can see the trends and the infrastructure starting to be built around this. For example, we at ACELR8 wouldn’t have been able to hire half the people in our team without a more global mindset. It’s something we’re still developing, but it’s at the centre of our hiring approach.”

What do many companies overlook when it comes to hiring planning?

“My personal learning is that reactive hiring is quite a dangerous thing. I think it’s often best to try and look inside the company: what talents do you have, what goals are they likely to reach. But, more importantly, having a plan for the next two years is vital. In that plan, companies need to really maximise internal talent as much as possible.

This is most important with startups. I’ve seen it happen quite often where they’ll hire someone and then realise that they only needed them for six months.

Just focus on the question: when is your current team not capable of getting you to the next level?”

What is your biggest learning experience from 2021?

“Our big challenge for Q4 was to improve onboarding. To really improve that onboarding experience, we wanted people to be ready for the job with well-planned one, three, and six months goals. This is something that we didn’t focus on enough before, and it really stopped us from maximising the potential of our team. This is also our big challenge for next year — improve retention by improving our onboarding experience.”

How do companies deal with the change in dynamic between candidate and employer?

“Overall, the power dynamic between employer and employee has changed so much. I think over the next year that’s going to be so apparent, especially when it comes to hiring. Salary is no longer the main motivator — it’s quality of life, it’s culture, and it’s diversity.

This is where I really think Employer Value Proposition (EVP) has to shine. I think every company does have a story, but I think they’re going to have to really build out their story to be able to keep talent engaged.

Sometimes if we don’t talk about why we’re doing what we’re doing, the business as a whole can get a bit mired.

Talented people want purpose in their work. People really want to learn and grow. Offering learning opportunities and interesting challenges are going to become an even bigger thing. If you give people learning opportunities, they’re going to become better partners for the business.“

What is the most important aspect of a hiring plan?

“It’s a factor of things. Budget is of course an important one. Cash flow is vital to all businesses and when it comes to revenue-generating positions it’s important to factor in the cost and benefit of salaries and time spent on hiring.

But really, I think the biggest issue is actually having the resources to hire. It’s easy to have a hiring plan, but many don’t actually know how to model it mathematically.

Let’s say for example you want to hire 10 people.

For 10 people, it’s about 15 interviews per position — so that’s 150 interviews overall.

But, that’s not including the sourcing of the candidates that you have to do to get those interviews. Then, you need to find the people in your company who actually have the time to host 150 interviews.

Remember, the entire time that people are interviewing, they’re not actually working on what they were hired to do.

Also, you can’t have your best talent present in every interview. It’s no good having your engineering managers doing your first interviews when they’re paid that much per hour and for a completely different task. So for me, that’s the big challenge — allocation.

You can have all the dreams in the world, but if you haven’t got the resources to do it, your employees are going to crash and that’s where the burnout comes.”

This is where ACELR8 can come in. As an embedded recruitment service, we can plug into your company and be the resource you use to hire your much-needed talent. This allows all your other employees to focus on their own tasks and departments, moving your company forward.

With this advice, you and your company can create a thorough hiring plan that focuses on the short, medium and long-term aims of your business. From finding out why you’re hiring to attracting the right people, it will all fall in line after using these action points.

Looking to improve your remote hiring strategy? Check out our in-depth playbook to learn more about the best ways of hiring your ideal candidates remotely. Or, take a look at our embedded service and let our expert Talent Partners hire your dream talent for you.

Like our hiring approach? Then work for us. We’re always on the lookout for new and exciting talent to help us hire better.

Customer Spotlight Interview | Clue

Clue is a close partner of our team at ACELR8. In our time working with them, we have hired 8 new members of their team.

ACELR8’s Talent Partner Marián Ruiz has worked with Clue to help them find new, experienced talent that shares their culture and values. Clue is a period-tracking app, a trusted menstrual health resource, and a thought leader in femtech.

By combining science and technology, they are actively changing the way people learn, access, and talk about menstrual and reproductive health around the world.

To learn more about Clue and what makes their company tick, Marián talked to Greg Ryzhov, CTO of Clue.

Here’s how their conversation went:

Marián: Greg, what is your role at Clue?

“I am Chief Technology Officer. At Clue I’m not only responsible for the Engineering Department, but also look after our Data and Customer Support teams.

It’s a great opportunity because as a product-driven company, which addresses consumer needs directly, the collaboration between Customer Support and Engineering, informed by Data, is incredibly important.”

Marián: What attracted you to work with Clue in the first place?

“The process at Clue stood out from other interview processes because I felt it focused on the right thing. Clue already knew what they actually wanted to get from this position and how they wanted this person to fit into the company culture. Their questions and the whole process really emphasized this well.

The other thing during the process is that the topic, femtech, was still quite new to me. So, I started to do a lot of research and reading and I realised that there is an endless opportunity to learn and to actually impact people’s lives.

I also connected personally to the topic as I have a teenage daughter, who was having her menarche — so I was familiar with challenges like how you communicate, how you ensure she has the right information about it, not just hearsay from her friends or questionable internet resources. And that I think applies to a lot of people around the world, so that really caught my interest.

And from a technical point of view: it’s a direct-to-consumer product. It’s mobile-only. You have more than 12 million monthly active users. It’s a high-loaded and highly demanded product. So for an Engineer, or anyone who likes to work in the Product area, this is an incredibly attractive company.”

Marián: Do you have any favourite memory of your work at Clue so far?

“This is an interesting one. In this Covid-19, online-first environment, generating memories can be a really challenging thing. But I would definitely go with my first summer offsite with the team. It was really nice to finally see and interact with people in person after months of online-only meetings.”

Marián: How do you think the pandemic has changed your working habits?

“There’s been way less interaction on the personal level and less personal topics. It’s challenging as it requires you to always remember to check in about people’s moods, what’s happening in their lives, and have some conversations other than just work-related topics.

The approach to meetings has also changed. It demands more experience in facilitating — making sure that the discussions go straight to the point, letting people speak up but not over each other.

And maybe, the good thing is that now you might have a bit more time to really focus, and you have more control of this time. You can log off Zoom, set yourself as “do not disturb”, or set a block in your calendar to actually focus on something important.”

Marián: How would you describe Clue in 3 words?

“I’d say: honest, caring, and kind.”

Marián: If Clue could be a colour, which one would it be?

“Definitely not pink! But some warm colour.”

Marián: We are currently hiring many people! Why do you think a person should join Clue’s team?

“One thing that I mention to candidates when I interview them is fairness. There are a lot of processes and frameworks in place that ensure fairness on multiple levels. Also, in whatever we do, we always try to find a fair solution. Of course, it’s not always possible, but we try really hard, for example, with our salary structure.

The second thing is that in order to maintain and guarantee this fairness, we are always learning and adjusting. So, when we see a challenge, we address it in a timely manner, for example.

Third, this is a big learning opportunity. You can learn a lot about the domain itself as we have really professional and knowledgeable people on our Science Team, with diverse medical backgrounds, so the information that we receive in our weekly Home Meetings is always incredibly insightful from a scientific point of view.

Last but not least, the product itself. As I already mentioned, you have access to 12+ million people. You can run interesting product experiments and learn from the huge number of users. It’s an incredible opportunity for Engineering, Product, or Design folks.”

Marián: What are the key traits an ideal candidate should have in your opinion?

“Personality-wise: kindness and empathy. From a business perspective, I’m looking for solution-oriented people who seek fast, pragmatic solutions in an optimistic manner. Focusing on finding the good solution, and treating problems as challenges and not as a reason to complain.

Now, as we are growing incredibly fast, there are specific requests to get people with specific experience who can support us with this growth, but in general, I think there are very nice learning opportunities within the team. For example, there are employees who started in the content side and became engineers. There are many other examples of people who actually find their place at Clue and get the feeling that they belong to it.”

Marián What is the best part of Clue’s culture as a company?

“I might be repeating myself, but it’s care. And I think it works on so many levels: care for the employees, for the customers, for each other. It’s the centrepiece of Clue’s company culture.”

Marián: How has the work with ACELR8 been so far?

“Great! I think results speak for themselves, right?

I think of how fast you onboarded to the company with almost no handover, you jumped straight into it and started closing positions. Also, flexibility, because when we needed to increase the number of Talent Partners working with us, you managed to solve this really quickly.

I also think this model of having embedded Talent Partners actually works really well, plus having a company in the background that can provide partners with their needed resources is a great value-added. It’s very different to working with freelancers, who work on their own. Again, having a company in the background really helps.”

That was our conversation with Greg at Clue, showing how ACELR8 can really help a company find the right talent with a seamless, versatile approach. As an embedded recruitment service, we can better understand your culture, structure, and hiring needs.

Interested in joining Clue? They are currently recruiting. You can find their careers page here.

Customer Spotlight — Hiring With Clue was originally published in How to ACELR8 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How ACELR8 and Checkly have worked together to find the best talent in an open, engaging company.

Checkly has been a close client of ours this year. In that time, our Talent Partner Denise Chan has worked with them to create a new hiring structure and technical testing insight. To learn more about Checkly and what makes their company tick, Denise talked to Daniel Paulus, Director of Engineering over at Checkly. Here’s how their conversation went:

Denise: What attracted you to work with Checkly?

What attracted me was the slogan — “It’s very delightful”.

If you are a developer and you try to use the product, you instantly get the idea, and you can see the value.

The other thing, of course, was the founders. They had successful companies before and I have very high confidence that they know what they’re doing.

Denise: What is it that you love about your job?

Engineers always enjoy doing Greenfield projects, because there’s so much freedom.

When I joined the startup, it was basically just four people plus the founding team.

We were scaling up from four engineers to three teams of engineers. This makes it something like a Greenfield project, but with engineering benefits. This is what I love right now — I have a lot of influence and impact in the future, especially in engineering.

Denise: What roles are you hiring for?

We’re looking for Senior Backend Developers, with preferably Software as a Service experience.

Also, we’re open to hiring another mid-level to junior developer as the third hire to complete our backend team. We’re also looking for a Site Reliability Engineer.

Denise: What is your ideal candidate?

Ideally, we would want to hire someone who has done node.js work mostly. But we are open to also looking at other ecosystems. Very senior with software as a service, cloud-native, backend development, and node.js would be a huge plus. But, if you have done something else, then that’s also fine.

Denise: Favourite memory at Checkly?

I’ll give you two:

The first was when we hired a software engineering intern. I was excited to see that she got to deploy her first production code on the fourth day with the company. We invest a lot of energy into having a great onboarding process and to see someone who’s really junior being successful in such a short time was really great.

Secondly, it’s the in-person meetings. We are a remote company, which means everybody works from home or a co-working space. But, twice a year, we have a retreat where all Checkly employees get together from all around the world.

We meet for a week in person, just to socialise and to get to know each other. That’s one of my favourite memories so far.

Denise: What is the best part about the culture at Checkly?

Our great feedback culture, which is important to me. You can see this reflected in the company culture.

In the company, it’s very easy to make it possible for engineers to focus on one thing. There’s no insane time pressure on anything, and people get to focus their time on the important things.

Denise: What’s the best-hidden perk of your job?

I think the best-hidden perk would probably be that, if you’re a developer yourself, it’s pretty rewarding to work on a tool targeted at making developers’ lives easier. Also, we use Checkly internally for our monitoring and testing. We use our product, and I think this is probably the coolest perk to get.

Denise: Describe Checkly in just three words

Delightfully Active Monitoring.

Denise: How would you describe working with ACELR8?

The work was very collaborative. You at ACLER8 have a network of recruiters, and they have a lot of experience.

We can discuss how we can improve our process, leveraging the knowledge that you bring into the company. This was something that I really, really enjoyed,

The same goes for building a shared understanding of the roles that we are looking for. The active communication, discussing the details, looking at candidate profiles together and seeing what works and what doesn’t, that was good.

Mainly though, I was really happy with how you organised everything. All this coordination of candidates, it was taken care of so well. It was really making my life a lot easier. It’s the combination of organising a small pipeline and doing it very accurately with good quality.

I never had to complain once. Secondly, actively working on figuring out what are the right candidate profiles from day one — that was really helpful for me.

That was our conversation with Daniel at Checkly, showing how ACELR8 can really help a company push forward to find the right hires in a fast, efficient fashion. As an embedded recruitment service, we can better understand your culture, structure, and hiring needs.

Interested in joining Checkly? They are currently recruiting. You can find their careers page here.

Customer Spotlight — Hiring With Checkly was originally published in How to ACELR8 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

***

Leadership style is not linear. When an organisation grows, leaders grow with it. Could you tell us more about your leadership style and how it fits with building a bottom-up organisation?

When I look back at it, I think it’s about the way “we”, not “I”, built ACELR8.

The founding members shaped how we operate so that it’s an integral part of our working DNA to this day.

ACELR8 is a bootstrapped company, and this is a result of leading with having resourcefulness in mind. Building such a culture was unintentional, but listening to our customers and team made me realise that ACELR8 has a bank of knowledge and information. Failures evolved into learnings, and until this day coming back to being resourceful helps me gain a deeper perspective into what we’re building and how we’re building the company.

ACELR8 is growing so fast, and we’re introducing more structures — how do you continue building bottom-up culture?

Honestly, I was a bit of anti-manager culture, and I thought that managers could be redundant. But while growing the team, I see the value that a good manager can bring and in the end, it’s about picking the right people who are often not so willing to be managers and do not see it as their only career goal. These managers instead care about mentoring other people and want to help them achieve their growth goals. I’d call it the “Reluctant” manager; they just have to do it. I am not into people who want to be managers just for the title and power. We as a leadership team need to be building such cultures together.

How is resourcefulness related to the bottom-up culture?

I think the key to bottom-up culture is to listen and act on people’s ideas. Of course, you cannot work on all of the ideas immediately, even though there’s excitement. The most important thing is to always listen.

Resourcefulness is a powerful value for me personally, and both resourcefulness and bottom-up culture go hand in hand; you have to achieve the best outcomes with what you have.

Company cultures evolve and changes over time. What’s the most significant difference that you noticed at ACELR8?

That is a good question. Three years ago, we’d host quarterly All Hands where the team would sit in the circle, share ideas, discuss learnings and give each other feedback. It would last for 3–4 hours. This was a practice that brought us closer together but is not a scalable activity.

Therefore, the most significant change and challenge are to balance the needs of our team. Define what needs to be bottom-up and what needs to be decided quickly top-down. For example, in the past, we ran company-wide projects based on conversations — no standardised action plan was needed. Now, before we make decisions that affect everyone, we run surveys to ‘measure the temperature’ plus have candid conversations. This method allows for a frictionless change backed by quality conversations coupled with data.

How do you see remote/hybrid would impact people’s culture?

The pandemic threw a real challenge that we can look at as an opportunity. In the past, people were tied to the factory lines, then to offices, and now some industries are transitioning to hybrid or fully remote work setups. It is such a big opportunity to attract diverse talent, level up company cultures and prove that there are ways of building strong communities across borders through digital means. A shift to hybrid/remote work mode is an opportunity, and the companies that will fail to adopt it will likely stay behind.

To give trust and freedom makes a logical and a business sense.

Since we work with a lot of forwards thinking companies, it would be silly to not make this shift. It is important that everyone in the company learns how such more mode makes them feel and what impact it has on work-life balance. We have to keep experimenting to get hybrid/remote right. Let’s be honest; we’re changing habits. We have to unlearn and learn what the ‘normal’ is.

What do you look for when you hire?

I believe that anyone can become successful in the recruitment industry. Whether I am hiring for Talent Partners or marketing, sales, finance or HR, I will always use my intuition. I’m aware that this can lead to bias, but as a whole, we will always remain curious and work with people from all walks of life.

From my background as a recruiter for companies of various sizes, I have observed and compartmentalised a lot. However, I strongly believe in two main drivers for growth: trajectory and energy.

A trajectory is all about progression and growth, both professionally and personally. It could mean a promotion but also mean self-reflection.

I also take context into all of my hiring decisions. For example, one candidate could come from a working-class family yet have been the first to attend a mid-level university. In contrast, another candidate could be very privileged and the fourth in their family to attend Cambridge. The most important thing for me is to look at the context of the journey. The context of the journey has a grave impact on the trajectory, and that is what matters to me when hiring.

In terms of energy, the passionate candidates that genuinely care about what they do are the ones that I really get excited about. In addition, they question the industry, always looking at it from different perspectives.

This hunger for growth is what will fuel ACELR8 and the recruitment industry as a whole.

ACELR8 is on an upwards trajectory, and the stakes are getting higher, but it’s essential to acknowledge that everyone can make mistakes, learn from them and change their context.

I’m learning every day — leading ACELR8 is the most expensive university I will ever attend if you calculate mistakes I made along the way.

But I’m excited to see what the future holds, and I’m very grateful for this opportunity and the journey ahead of us.

Why should someone join ACELR8?

It is an opportunity to accelerate your learning curve and launch your career. One year with ACELR8 equals two years of working as an in-house recruiter. What is more, we’re realistic, and we know that not everyone will be here for the next ten years, but everyone who is with us deserves to grow.

Recruiting is a service that lacks innovation because the majority still sees it as headhunting, poor Linkedin messaging, CV scrapping and trying to fill the position at any cost.

We’re the first company to offer embedded recruiting in Berlin. That’s why we’re responsible for leading a movement and challenging the recruiting industry.

What do you want to achieve with building ACELR8?

My goal is to build the Talent Firm of the future, and we sometimes say “no one loves their recruitment agency” and that’s a shame! We want to change that for all stakeholders; candidates, clients and recruiters. First, we have to rebrand the recruiting industry and set a new standard in hiring. Then ACELR8 will become a one-stop-shop or a recruiting ecosystem that helps our customers and even competitors hire talent better.

Internally I want to create a learning culture that grows beyond me. One that ensures we stay ahead of the market trends to define wants next in recruiting space. This inspiration stems from creative companies, such as Pixar; Pixar makes great movies, fosters creative culture, and defines high standards while being 34 years old. When growing startups, we tend to think short term and don’t question if what we’re building is sustainable long term. Learning is a vast aspect of long-term thinking because it fosters trust and creates change.

What makes you excited about work?

I still get dopamine when we start working with a new client. Beyond that, I get excited when I have impactful conversations with the team and see how learning from each other helps achieve our goals. It is easy to be dragged into daily challenges, but to zoom out, hear and plan the future gets me excited about the future of ACELR8.

I met a CEO/Founder another day, and he told me that I can get way too much in the daily business and advised me to zoom out and see the bigger picture. He is impressed by what we achieved and is excited about the future of ACELR8. This conversation made me very proud and gave me a fresh breath of air.

My significant learning is that I need someone else to believe in our vision.

What is your vision for ACELR8?

I want to build a company where we guide people to challenge and believe in themselves — building a company that creates harmony through anarchy. We should never be defeatists and realise it’s our turn to innovate the future of work.

***

Think that recruiting is broken? Then help us fix it. Join Michael in his quest to build a future-proof recruiting infrastructure. Check our careers page and apply for one of the open positions.

The Honest Founder: Michael Varley on leadership, the importance of anarchy and bottom-up cultures was originally published in How to ACELR8 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Last month our Senior Talent Partner Emily Marmoy-Haynes shared how happy she is being able to power the hiring process at our client Artsy, which made us reflect on how far we’ve come as a business by treating our customers as partners. But this interview blog is not about the success of ACELR8, it’s about what makes Artsy a great place to work at.

Before we dive deeper into the topic here’s the excerpt of our conversation with Emily:

After this conversation, Emily took matters into her own hands and sat down with Artsy’s own Executive VP Product & Engineering Sam Rozenberg to show everyone why Artsy should be the next step in your career.

***

Building the future art marketplace

Emily: Hi Sam, what is your role at Artsy?

I’m an Executive Vice President Product & Engineering.

Emily: What attracted you to join Artsy and why do you still love working here?

Sam: I was attracted to join because of the combination of:

1. The mission of the company and the business opportunity. The ability to use technology to open up access to art, especially after seeing that success at Spotify and connecting artists to their audience. Doing that as the marketplace is very important and as a business model, works best as everyone is incentivised and aligned. When the collectors, partners, and galleries etc. are happy, the artist is paid more whereas traditionally you see in a lot of companies, that what is best for the user is not always best for the company.
2. Artsy is made up of an amazing group of people who are doing it in the right way — positively, humility, and lack of ego
3. There is a huge complexity to the art world, instead of building something for millions of users, there are so many dynamics between galleries, different types of collectors, and artists for example. The market is so opaque and complex so it is rewarding to tackle that challenge as a company.

Same reasons why I still love working at Artsy but I would add, that it is also working! When I joined, it was a fun challenge with a 50/50 chance of success, and now we have demonstrated our track record and proven success!

Emily: As you well know, Artsy is growing the PDDE team in Berlin. Why do you think someone should join Artsy?

Sam: Artsy is still at a size where anyone joining can have a transformative impact on the art world.

We are a leader in the space and doing so well, but are still small enough that an analyst, engineer, designer, product manager joining us now can look back and say “I was key to transforming this”.

For instance, at Spotify I was part of the music recommendation team building transformative features, it is so rewarding to look back and know that you contributed to this effect. Artsy is even smaller than Spotify was at that time so anyone joining us can create a real impact for our collectors and partners.

Emily: What is your favourite memory at Artsy?

Sam: I have lots of great memories but the most salient one is from my first 2–3 weeks at Artsy. I absolutely loved the interview process, I met a lot of nice people and came in with very high expectations of the company and people. I was almost thinking is it too good to be true?

I spent time in the first few weeks having a lot of coffees and lunches with the team and I saw that niceness and empathy is actually the baseline at Artsy.

It was not that I met a few nice people in the interview process, it is actually how everyone behaves day to day. This left a lasting impact that I had joined an amazing team! Want to experience how amazing the team is? Listen to our weekly WAYAHDYGH engineering podcast to get to know the people behind Artsy.

Emily: What is your favourite book?

Sam: It’s a tough one! I have been reading a lot of French literature recently. The Mystery of the Yellow Room (in French Le mystère de la Chambre Jaune) is a mystery novel written by French author Gaston Leroux. I felt inspired after watching Lupin on Netflix to reread the book. I had read it before as a kid, but I couldn’t put it down when I read it again recently!

Emily: How did the pandemic change your working habits?

Sam: I moved to Bolder, Colorado out of New York to be closer to nature and to have more space with my family. I also used to enjoy commuting to the office, it was a 30–40 minute walk, or sometimes cycle, through Soho and the East Village. The time commuting was really important to switch on and off for work and time to prepare for the day whereas now that instant disconnect is much harder when you are at home.

Emily: How would you describe Artsy in 3 words?

Sam: Just 3 words, that is tough! Artsy is kind, ambitious, and transformative.

Emily: Sam, finally, how would you describe working with ACELR8?

Sam: Working with you and the ACELR8 team has been a great experience. First and foremost, the team has delivered results and helped us build an outstanding engineering team in Berlin. Just as importantly, the team did it with a level of kindness, care and empathy that I’ve never experienced with any external team. This strong value alignment with the Artsy team has been key to our successful collaboration. ACELR8 is setting the bar very high for the team we’re trying to build in house.

***

Interested in joining Artsy? Take a look at their most recent job postings.

Getting ready for an interview and have the nervous jitters? We have your back! Here’s what you can do:

• Research the career page of your potential employer
• Practice your pitch
• Read this post to make your next interview a positive experience

Customer spotlight: hiring with Artsy was originally published in How to ACELR8 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.