Who are Berlin tech companies looking to hire in 2018?

Thursday night in Berlin, -15°C and 4 brave tech professionals discussing who they’d like to work with in 2018.

The four characters mentioned are Mohannad Ali (VP Engineering at HelloFresh), Stefan Pirpamer (Talent Acquisition Manager at Signavio), Dean Hudson (Director of Software Engineering at Contentful) and Pedro Oliveira (co-founder of Landing.jobs).

The event was powered by Landing Festival and hosted by ThePlaceBerlin. All went lovely despite the cold and we’re grateful to all the tech ninjas who faced the Beast from the East in order to share an after-work aperitif with us.

Full house @ The Place

So here are some key takeaways from this encounter.

Key takeaways for tech candidates:

• Signal-Noise ratio in tech recruitment is hard to manage. There are lots of applications but few top talents. So make sure to shout your talent out.
• Apparently, recruiters abide by the “You say no if you don’t know” rule. So make sure that people will only “Yes” and “Wow” when confronted with your CV and cover letter.
• Tech companies often pair candidates to work on a short project with their in-house developers during the recruitment process.
• Senior positions and product management positions are the most difficult to fill in.
• Tech companies are continuously looking for ways to enrich their recruitment funnel and ensure diversity.

Key takeaways for tech recruiters and companies:

• The 3 crucial elements that will keep a tech professional at the mothership are 1/Understanding personal impact 2/ Fair renumeration 3/ Challenges and colleagues to learn from.
• The leverage gets higher with every employee. Meaning every employee should be a step up in terms of background and capabilities (for a respective position)
• Culture should be embedded in the DNA of a company. Example — Amazon has an internal slang code and what of the most common expressions is #biasforaction.
• It’s easier to hire EU talent to come to Berlin compared to talent from other German cities.

Key takeaway for why Berlin is one of Europe’s hottest hubs

• Low costs, high buying power
• Good social conditions
• Healthy work-life balance
• Not the typical 9H00–18H00 working scene
• No one stares at you, you can be as crazy and wild as you wish
• Berghain ;)