PODCAST
Startup Recruitment Failures
NOVEMBER 16, 2022

Episode 19: Dealing with a know-it-all

Turing College is the first Lithuanian company backed by Y Combinator, at the moment having students from 20 countries. In this episode, Benas Šidlauskas, Co-Founder and Chief Business Development Officer shares how Turing College developed and encountered a few tricky hiring failures, and talks about the importance of in-depth screening and having insightful data about the candidate.
Benas Sidlauskas, Co-Founder and Chief Business Development Officer at Turing College

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Transcript

INDRE
Hello. Welcome to the podcast of Startup Recruitment Failures, I'm Indre, Founder and CEO of jobRely, we are building a LinkedIn automation platform for outbound recruitment and today my guest is Benas Sidlauskas, Co-Founder and Chief Business Development Officer at Turing college. This is the first Lithuanian company backed by Y Combinator in winter of 2021. Benas, could you please introduce yourself and your company?
BENAS
Hi Indre. So thank you for inviting me and before presenting myself I would like to give a shout out to you. You were one of the first people actually to introduce me to the local startup ecosystem seven years ago and I remember my first self-employed job was filmmaking and I remember how you were organizing startup grind events back in Vilnius tech park and I filmed Trafi and Oberlo founders interviews at the time and actually from there my interest in startups grew, so thank you.
INDRE
Oh, very glad to hear. I am also very happy that you helped me with the startup grind events and very glad that this even inspired you to create such a great company.
BENAS
Yes, I was in a freshman year of my studies back then. So, also I will present a bit about what we are doing. So, Turing College is a coding school with a talent marketplace. As you already mentioned back by Y combinator. We admit top 10% of the students and teach them relevant skills and match with career opportunities. So Turing College just recently entered the third year of its existence but our core team has been working already for 7 years and we have been working on different types of educational ventures from teaching computer science courses by Harvard CS50 in high schools to building MVP products for startups and enterprises. Just a few weeks ago actually we had our seventh birthday celebration and we were joking that we are letting our seven year old child to the first grade of school.
INDRE
Okay, that's nice and well, I guess you have quite a few recruitment failure stories. Could you share a few with us?
BENAS
Sure, no problem. So maybe I will start sharing with the lessons we learned working with companies and later I will also share the personal hiring insights about growing a team without letting in people with negative work ethics. So I will start with the companies. So working with companies and referring our students for them, we understood that the best way to help companies is of course saving their time and providing enough of insightful data about them. So what we noticed that majority of company recruiters who are looking for new hires are spending time on LinkedIn because it's the most popular tool for that. But the problem is that the average time spent on resume is only around 6 to 10 seconds and it's not possible to make a right decision in such a short period of time and usually recruiters are stuck just in a bad candidate loop and this leads to just burning company money with the wrong hires afterward and, well there are very significant parts why that is so, specifically talking about Linkedin. So one is that candidates tend to write whatever they like, experience especially and recruiters in bigger companies are only looking to the keywords like years of experience. We noticed that while working with our partner companies and most of the time we had to educate companies that it's not always the years written on LinkedIn that matter. It's usually the relevant practical skills and experience that person has and can deliver from day one and number two is that candidates tend to share certificates with no practical knowledge like speaking about alternative platforms like coursera, AdX or others and you can get a nice looking certificate and put it on LinkedIn from mentioned platforms but might still stuck with only the most basic knowledge which you can't use practically. Another thing is that recruiters and tech leads can't see the portfolio of projects that the candidate has done, I'm speaking now specifically about the tech roles. There is no data about the candidates like learning consistency, working consistency, meeting deadlines. Also I think that this is very important from the soft skills perspective. What we also saw and understand that more than 80% of companies admit that soft skills are crucial for deciding if the candidate is a match for them and that is where Turing College comes in. We have created now a smart resume which is that we have systemized student performance data from 6 to 12 months of learning to a single resume. That provides in-depth insights on student potential to do the actual job and does succeed in the company. Plus we're always making sure to talk to companies about their needs and making iterations to make the course and the resume better.
INDRE
Nice. This is really interesting I think it's very awesome and your students, are they entry level people, just graduated their universities or schools or people changing the profession?
BENAS
Most of the people are already changing their careers and the majority of people that we have at the moment they are already having bachelor degrees or masters and just looking for kind of shift in their careers. And I'm quite surprised that  now just recently we updated geography of our students. We have at the moment students from 20 different countries.
INDRE
Oh, wow! Nice,this is interesting. Do you see any differences between each of the country or in terms of students and also employers hiring them?
BENAS
So you know if we speak about more of a junior people, companies tend to have more of a hybrid working environment for the juniors, not fully remote. So, I would say that now we're focusing on kind of localizing the market. So for example, we have more people coming from Estonia or Latvia, or Finland, or Germany and we are also kind of focusing also on understanding what kind of companies would like to talk to us and have kind of hiring partnership afterwards and regarding the people itself, I would say it varies from, for example, what is the level of their English, how they're communicating or speaking and also the motivation is sometimes just different. For example, we had 15 Nigerian students from Nigeria and we were really surprised how cool of a motivation they have, so a majority of the Nigerian students that finished Turing College now they have whether relocated or working remotely in Lithuanian companies.
INDRE
Wow! This is really awesome and when it comes to companies themselves, to hire a person who is most probably overqualified especially if they're changing the career into another profession. Do you see any changes in the attitude during the past few years, are the companies more willingly hiring them or what is the situation in the market?
BENAS
I would say that in general companies are more and more focusing on the practical knowledge that the person has but not a diploma or the certificate. So I would say that we're quite happy of the companies that we work with and we see that they're really open to actually collaborate also with making improvements also in the curriculum that we have, for example, maybe there is let's say Cyber security company and they have maybe some specific stack that we're not having in the course and they just providing it with the kind of vision to have students coming to their company as a future employees. So I would say I'm really happy and I do see that there is a shift in the companies to actually be open for coding schools like Turing College.
INDRE
Oh, this is the best if companies could be involved and to help creating curriculum, it's really one of the best things that could happen but still I'm thinking, if you hire a junior, there is such a perception that it's not like as when the person is older, like 35 years old and they would be willing to occupy junior level position. Most of the hiring managers might be afraid that the person won't be so willing to learn, and maybe not so open for new experiences, have you noticed that?
BENAS
I would say that this is kind of mutual thing that we're doing with the companies. We just kind of have also to educate and convince at the beginning that those kind of specialists that are coming, also like as I mentioned we are making those smart resumes and we're kind of tracking their motivation and willingness to get the new experience within the learning phase. So I would say that this is kind of more of a mutual thing that we have to do, I do agree that some companies are kind of afraid but this is why we're here, we're trying to also not trying but making this progress to convince companies that when you can actually see the performance and have that data on the table, you can be more assured that the person will be a good match for you.
INDRE
And from what kind of the fields usually people tend to change their career into IT?
BENAS
Maybe I'll take our example, what we have now at the moment, so now we specialize in data. So our main courses that we're proud of are data science and data analytics. So we do see the tendency that more and more people for example from sales, marketing, financial analysts that are working or have daily seeing of different types of data that they have to work with, those kind of people are mostly interested in kind of upscaling and changing their careers in data analytics and data science, so sales, marketing and finance.
INDRE
Okay, okay, and what is the conversion rate of students who finished your courses? How many of them in percentage do find the job during the first two months after they finish?
BENAS
I can brag about the percentage we have now, how many people did get hired after the studies at Turing College, so we still have the 100 percent. But that comes because, couple of things, one is that we have harsh admissions. So as I mentioned only 10% of most motivated people are getting into Turing College. And also the studies are intense I mean you still have to dedicate at least 15 to 20 hours a week to be able to finish Turing College.
INDRE
And do you follow up companies and students, how many out of those who found job, stayed at their job for at least a year?
BENAS
We do kind of talk with our alumni and I would say that we have cases when people change their careers but I would say that we don't have enough of data that I could kind of communicate about now.
INDRE
Okay, you also mentioned that you had some personal experience with the recruitment failure too.
BENAS
Yes, yes, I did, we did as a team. So maybe as I mentioned we also had recruitment failures and most of the time we made those fails was because we saw those fancy LinkedIn profiles of a candidate with lots of experience in it and also we needed the specialist fast and we couldn't evaluate whether the person is actually good and fits us. And the only source of truth is if you know anyone who worked with that person before but if you don't then that's a problem or just like a kind of a bet and I will share one of the story, how in the beginning of Turing College, we hired a senior, who we thought would create one department strategy. It was very early days of Turing College and we left that person for a few months without any supervision because we trusted him, we knew that the person is more senior than us the founders. And when it was time to launch one particular part of the project, one week before we saw that nothing was ready properly and we tried to encourage that employee to deliver the result but in the end, one day before the launch that person made the decision to resign.
INDRE
Okay, okay, this is not nice and why do you think this happened?
BENAS
I would say that one thing is that we were focused on the kind of experience that we see just from the abstract perspective and we were I would say not doing enough of screening so I would say that lessons were learned and now when we are hiring a new employee before making the final decision, we are doing a very in-depth screening, so I will be more accurate, so 2 out of 3 founders need to confirm that the person is the right fit and during the few interview stages, we do ask various questions and check how a person reacts and how the person would act in real case scenarios and I think a good example is how Jeff Bezos once said, he said I'd rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.
INDRE
Yeah, of course, but sometimes it's not so easy, if you're a small company and you don't have many candidates to choose from and in this case, do you see that you have changed something that the strategy would have been prepared on time?
BENAS
As I mentioned we do make a more kind of in-depth interviews and we do include more people from the team. For example, as I mentioned 2 out of 3 founders need to confirm if the person is right, also, we're including all the department people who might work with that person and see maybe from the different perspective than myself or any other Co-Founder can see.
INDRE
But well it's like that particular situation, when you saw that a few months passed and still not everything is done and you're not ready to launch. Did you try to help that senior person in order to get more prepared, maybe some information was lacking or how did you deal with that situation when you noticed that not everything is going accordingly you have planned?
BENAS
I would say that it was quite a funny situation because as I mentioned a week before the launch we were in our first workation. So the whole team was in that one place. So,  I would say that when we noticed that the entire team we jumped on that case and everyone tried to help I mean from the designers to developers, everyone was on alert but like just the person. we didn't see the trait before confirming the person to get into Turing College. We didn't see that person just cannot handle stress and that's why in the end, the person resigned.
INDRE
Okay, and why do you think that manager or senior person did not say anything earlier, why did they wait until the very deadline?
BENAS
You know it's just my subjective opinion, but I do think that person was thinking about himself as a very knowing everything person and he just thought, 3 years ago we were 22-23 year olds, and the person was 30+ and I think that was also a bad trait from the person that he thought that we're just young guys who don't understand anything and he will do his own way. So I think that that's also a very bad trait to have, even when you're getting into any sorts of startups you just need to communicate a lot, because the communication is key, but that was not the case.
INDRE
Okay, but this is a pretty tricky situation if you sense that a senior person who joined your team is not giving any respect to Co-Founders and it is a little bit strange attitude.
BENAS
I do agree but when there was the beginning and the screening before confirming the person we didn't see that trait and I think that one mistake from our side was that we were in a very hurry and also we didn't have enough of experience. So I think these two things were that could be implied here.
INDRE
Okay, yeah, well these things really happen that you don't have enough time to check everything, plus sometimes you cannot check everything right? Only time shows whether there is a match or not. Was it very hurtful, how did you solve that situation, because anyways you had to launch, right?
BENAS
I will say in a joke form - there were a lot of all nighters. I remember we founders on the day of launch, we didn't have a lot of sleep but we did it, and still we did it and I remember there was a festival happening and I said to my Co-Founders, we need to kind of go to the festival and think of a new person who can join us and they said, are you crazy, to go to party now? And I would say that weekend on that festival was a game changer for us. We have been talking to each other like 3 of us in a big indian tippie, like a tipy tent and we've been speaking just 3 of us for like 15 hours straight so  I would say that those effects after that festival can still be as a feeling to other team members even until this day.
INDRE
Okay, yeah, this is important, not to feel disappointed or see it as a huge failure but to find the solution for that. Great. Thank you Benas, and what would be your key insight for other startup founders or hiring managers working in startups, in terms of recruitment?

BENAS
I think couple of things. So one is that you need to kind of take people from different departments and see from different angles, about the candidate that you're hiring, also try not to be in a hurry, especially if in startups, most common thing is that everything is changing 360 degrees every month especially in early stages. There's always that hurry feeling that you need to kind of hire as fast as possible because you will just burn. So I would say that even though if you have that kind of feeling just stop for one second and think whether that person who you're hiring won't make it burn faster.
INDRE
Okay, great. Great. Thank you Benas so much for your time and sharing your story and insights, for more podcasts please visit jobrely.com


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