Okay, that's nice and well, I guess you have quite a few recruitment failure stories. Could you share a few with us?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

And from what kind of the fields usually people tend to change their career into IT?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

Okay, you also mentioned that you had some personal experience with the recruitment failure too.

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.

Okay, okay, this is not nice and why do you think this happened?

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

Okay, and why do you think that manager or senior person did not say anything earlier, why did they wait until the very deadline?

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.

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.