Lessons and tips on hiring our top talent leaders: how we’ve decreased our time to hire and brought diversity at SumUp
Pandemic times, volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous business environment. Whether and how companies will emerge from this downturn will also depend on the preparedness and ability of their leaders to understand their potential choices and make decisions.
When this scenario comes into the hiring process to bring those leaders, here at SumUp, we are not only looking for these skills mentioned above, but also someone who will bring us to the next level and have a real cultural and diverse add to our company.
I mean, finding these talents takes a lot of effort. It requires not only hard work, but strategy, analysis, different tactics and experiments.
This year I’ve had the privilege and opportunity of directly hiring a lot of leaders to our company even during a difficult pandemic time.
Most of these leaders came from diverse groups.
Also, we were able to decrease the time to fill these positions from 8 to 2 months in a scenario that people are not willing to make bold career moves due to this period of uncertainties. .
So, here is a summary of what I’d like to share and what I’ve learnt in these past few months to achieve these results:
But what comes first?
First of all, it’s important to say that these experiments were only possible to be built, tested and implemented due to our current Talent Acquisition organisation, that allows us to think strategically and put in place what we say here is having “brain over muscles”.
Part of them you can find in Paula Fonsecas’s article and other ones I will quickly mention here:
- Global teams setup organised by: business needs and complexity;
- Sourcing teams, recruiters, candidate experience coordinators organised by technical domain,
- An amazing employer branding team supporting all the squads above;
- Focus on TA data to drive results;
- Constant improvement of our process and applicant tracking system;
So, how do we do it as a team?
Finding and attracting our top talents
- Sourcing and Talent expertise; knowing what we want, where they are and how to approach them. Here at SumUp we have a clear context about internal and external changes and how it affects our processes. For example, in 2020 we made a very important shift of our business model from card readers provider (single product) to become a multiproduct company. That means a search of talents with new and different skills to meet new business needs and prepare the company for growth. It helps us to plan our sourcing and attraction strategy and share with the stakeholders involved.
- Looking further : D&I. Knowing how to find them and what attracts them. Having a specialized sourcing process we constantly develop ways to find candidates from diverse groups. For example, we rely on trying to and finding new booleans searches on sourcing tools, exploring through data mining in our own network and softwares to improve our searches.
- Sharing important information — and what matters — knowing what they want to know. The job description — even if well written — is not enough to attract our top talents. Also, they’re used to regular and constant approaches from other well known companies and of course they will just think of a career move if they’re fully engaged. To be genuine in our pitch to the candidate, nothing better than telling our story: each company has a unique one and has its own “wow factors”, work practices and routines, values, social vibes and people.
“I joined Sumup in September 2020 and what first attracted me was the details contained in the job description, including the company’s culture & values. I made some searches to get more information about the company and the opinion of clients and employees to check the company’s reputation and, to my surprise, I only read very good things about the company, confirming an inclusive, transparent, and collaborative culture.
Since the first contact from the recruiter and during all the interviews, I received all relevant information about the technical requirements, the expectations for the position, details about the company’s businesses and the values, with full transparency and candor. It is impressive the way I was treated throughout the hiring process and how people are committed with its culture, this is really important and relevant for Sumup.
The onboarding process was even better and I felt myself very welcome, even in this pandemic moment and in a remote environment.
All these made me “fall in love” about this company and now that I’m here, I can assure that SumUp is really different, special and, by far, the best place I’ve ever worked.” Paula Marques, head of Compliance & Regulatory Latam
In summary, we have to put ourselves in the candidates shoes: to rely on the important facts that matter to each candidate and adapt all the elements we have in our company storytelling. Then make sure that there is credibility in what we are telling them;
Using data, methodologies, experiments to drive our results
- Analytics: what paths and decisions can we make? We like to constantly share and discuss with other team members and stakeholders about our TA strategies. And of course if the strategy is not working, we will commit to change directions based on data and hypothesis;
- Employer branding data: Our EB team is constantly testing templates and approaches: AB testing, creating better ways of communication to each group of candidates, tracking our campaigns and launching new ways of telling our unique story to the external community;
- Methodologies for stakeholder management and decision making: to have all interviewers involved since the kick off of a new position, it is possible to avoid bias and wrong assessment by creating a standard process to assess important skills for leaders, peers and team.
Partnering with the organisation;
- As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, at SumUp we prioritize our hiring team alignment: not only during the kick off but also through the whole process. One example is our candidate debriefing meeting that we use a structured session to give all sumuppers involved the same power of decision and speech;
- Referrals program: It is proven: a very attractive Bring a Friend program and having the sumuppers knowing profiles that fit with us, it’s one of the best sources we can have to hire new talents — and at a fast pace!
Finally, this post is just focused on sharing our experiences and lessons learned from our environment, in the current scenario.
This is a compilation of what worked very well for us during this year — some of them are still in early stages. And independently of each stage, these practices are in constant experiment, change and improvement.
It’s how we say here at SumUp: the only thing that does not change is change itself.
