My Second Year at Glovo: Scaling Our Talent Acquisition to Unicorn Level

By Matias Huvelle, Global Director of Talent Acquisition at Glovo

One year ago I was living an amazing life in my beloved Argentina, working as People (HR), Legal & Public Policy Director (longest job title I ever had :) ) for LATAM at Glovo.

We were cracking our sales model worldwide, our user acquisition was booming, our retention was healthy, and we were on a clear path to profitability through smart and lean operations. However, there was an important threat to our dream: we were failing to recruit top tech talent. Without an amazing Tech team, nothing in our plan would have scaled at the level we needed it to.

So, while I was focusing on strategizing for the next few years in Glovo LATAM, I received a call from our Global VP of People Adanya and our CEO Oscar Pierre with an offer to relocate myself and my family to our HQ in Barcelona to lead our Talent Acquisition team globally.

Although there is still a lot to do, in the past year we were able to grow our Tech team with +400 Software Engineers, BI/Data, and Product Managers.

This wasn’t an easy feat. It was the result of many mistakes, adjustments, and learnings, but also thanks to the collaborative work of amazing people. Here, I want to share what I consider to have been the key elements of our strategy to accomplish what we have achieved, and also what’s still left to do:

1. Build the Recruiting Machine: Recruiting has been evolving to become a highly tech-enabled and digital function. At Glovo we are currently processing +1500 candidates a week just for Engineering, Product, and Data roles. All these candidates go through our funnel — CV screening, multiple interviews, coding & architecture tests, and panel interviews. The activity level and quantity of recruiting decisions every day are huge. For this, we work a lot to provide our Recruiters and Hiring Managers with the tools and data insights to be as efficient as possible. These include:

• Agile Recruitment methodology: We set short weekly sprints. The goal of the weekly sprint is not to fill the roles in one go, but to constantly align with the Hiring Managers. This involves checking our status, reviewing priorities, identifying blockers and issues, and clearing action points to unblock. We also have our stand-up meetings where we go through the data, KPIs, and share best practices to continuously improve each sprint. Agility is a lot about iteration, and we love to iterate.
• Data-informed decisions: Don’t get me wrong. We believe that sometimes experience and intuition can push us to take a different turn from what the data is suggesting. But in general, we rely on data and we always check it before making decisions. In the first few months, we decided to rebuild our dashboards to focus on our “Recruiting Machine”’s health: Activity Levels (both in prospecting and in weekly interviews per stage) and conversion rates per step. Our dashboards are instantly available. At any time, both Hiring Managers and Recruiters can access them and check status, evolution, deviation from goals, etc. And with time we have been producing more data to ensure efficiency

• “A” Team: Our ambition is to build the best Tech Hub in South Europe. So, we need the best-in-class Leaders, recruiters, sourcers, and coordinators. We currently have an amazing team, with high performers and a lot of potential. I now spend most of my time figuring out how to keep them challenged, motivated, and continuously learning rather than checking on their delivery. This is the ideal place where leaders should always aim to be.

2. Aspirational Positioning as an Employer: The first hire I made in my new role was our Global Employer Branding Specialist. Since marketing was something I enjoyed during my MBA, I knew we needed to have someone with strong marketing skills to build and run our Employer Branding department, partner with our Marketing, Public Affairs, and Public Relations teams.

Our “product” is amazing. Glovo is a very unique company, with a strong non-vanilla culture and a strong commitment to being the best job of our employees’ life.

The challenge was to increase our brand awareness and make sure we were communicating our differentiators, to enhance the competitive advantage of our corporate brand and reputation.

So we built Glovo’s employer brand and worked around our EVP. We launched a new career site and rebranded our Linkedin Site. We started to showcase our amazing employees’ stories in our Life@Glovo Ecosystem. We organized events and ran tons of targeted campaigns.

Through all these efforts, we are starting to attract and convert enough great candidates, so we never have to compromise our hiring standards.

3. Hiring as a “collaborative process”: Hiring the best talent is not only a “recruitment” responsibility but a holistic team approach. This was the easiest part, and actually, most of what we needed was already there. Starting from our CEO, VPs, Engineering Directors, an already established “Interview Committee” (we will soon share more about this amazing committee!), a lot of people were seriously involved in making this work.

There was one concept that was very clear to all of us: the Hiring Manager is at the center of recruitment. The rest are collaborators.

What took us some months to get done was aligning everyone on what areas of collaboration we required from each person/team. Again, the iterative process, the continuous feedback, and strong relationships among team members helped us get better and better.

4. Boosting the Candidate Experience: this is definitely last but not least! I truly believe the candidate experience is at the heart of our recruiting strategy. We implemented an NPS tool to gather valuable insights from our candidates about their experience. With this data, we worked hard to transform our candidate journey into a great learning experience.

So far, this is what we have done. I am fully aware we are still far from what we can do, so what’s next?

As we are used to at Glovo, when we reach our peak, we go for a higher mountain. Our new mountain is “hiring the most talented people at scale, by ensuring our processes and technology are well designed to attract the best candidates (talented, committed and diverse!), increase our recruitment productivity, while offering the best experience to our Managers”.

Lets deep dive into what are next steps for each statement, starting from the last to the beginning of the sentence:

“offer the best experience to our Managers”: We are launching our new Hiring Manager satisfaction Survey globally: as aforementioned, HMs are the center of recruitment. And we have been pushing them hard on sourcing, interviewing, and improving our processes. But how satisfied are they with our service? Are we helping them not only by bringing candidates but also by advising and training them properly, to make the best hiring decisions for Glovo?

“increase recruitment productivity”: We have a strong ATS configuration that supports our process, we are integrated with main sourcing platforms like Linkedin Talent Solutions, Stack Overflow, Indeed, etc.. But our next step here is to increase the automation of administrative tasks, by incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning to drive efficiency in our mission of hiring great talent. I just don’t see another way, and I hope to share great learnings in the coming months.

“well designed to attract the best candidates (talented, committed and diverse!)”:

I am super proud of what we have achieved with our Employer Branding efforts. We are currently one of the best-rated companies on Glassdoor and we are attracting great talent. But how can we keep making sure we’re hiring the most talented, committed, and diverse pool of candidates?

1. Improve interviewing capabilities: We can’t compromise our hiring standards, and for this, we need to be sure our interviewers are completely equipped to identify a great fit and differentiate the ones that are not raising the bar. So a lot more to come in training and equipping our interviewers!
2. From NPS to NHS: A concept I recently heard about on a webinar is NHS (Net Hiring Score), and I loved it because it is a very simple way to measure the fit between a new hire and a job! Similar to NPS, here we ask, after the trial period of the candidate ends, “On a scale from 0–10, how much of a fit is this new hire for the job?”.

And when it comes to diversity, I am so keen and happy to partner with our new Global Head of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. This is such a big topic for us. I think we have so much to do, but I am convinced that Glovo will be one of the most diverse and inclusive companies in Europe.

So in Talent Acquisition, our next stage is to increase our diversity sourcing, reduce bias along our recruitment process, and build true inclusion through our hires.

And to finish, I definitely need to continue improving as a leader and as a colleague. But with the constant and constructive feedback from my team, boss, and colleagues, I hope I can bring a better version of myself every day!