Great, awesome! Very interesting. And what are the recruitment lessons you learned?

Well, that's a great question. Actually, I don't even know where to start. We had many lessons in recruitment and not only in recruitment and you know when you start a business you essentially wear many hats and it's inevitable. And at some point I also acted as an HR manager, I was headhunting developers on LinkedIn, I was doing a lot of content creation, product management, client relations - you can name many things. So, in the beginning, when you're new to the business that you're running essentially, you don't really know what you're doing and you know you keep doing it and doing it and you fail and you learn and you fail and you learn and it actually might seem that you're going in circles. When in fact, you are making massive progress in your understanding and your practices. So, then I thought about recruitment and you know when you asked me to join the podcast today, I was really going through like my memories and what certain experiences and situations meant you know to me and the company. So, first of all, I can tell that there were situations where I felt a bit uncomfortable when hiring, because when the company grew - right now we have 50 people including our internal product teams, so when you grow a company, essentially you run into situations where you need to hire someone for a new function. And typically, that's a function that you are not an expert in. So, when you need to hire someone like that, none of us internally have the experience in the field and we can't. We can basically rely only on that single person that we are thinking to recruit and you base your decisions on simply a gut feeling, pure trust on someone that you barely know and I found this quite difficult psychologically and also you know uncomfortable I could say. That's probably one thing and I guess it applies to any company unless you, I guess, look for an external advisor or a company but as Corner Case Technologies in 6 years we never really had any external investments. So a lot of the work that we do -  we try to do using our internal resources or we just try and see that we succeed basically.

Yeah, but even if you have external help, still, it's you - who has to make the decision right? So could you share a specific example of of the hire you have in mind?

Yes, so a year ago, we decided that we would try to capture and assess more procurement projects because we were successful, we won. We had a price comparison tool for basically electricity ministry,  in energy ministry in Lithuania and we realized that actually, we could do more in this field we can actually look for more projects because they're very interesting. We can actually contribute to basically the local market more. You know we can show our expertise so we try to do it ourselves until we realize that you know the amount of time it takes really to do the assessment to pick and choose what actually works for us, it was really overwhelming. So we realized that we really need to find someone who is knowledgeable about the field and knows the legal side of things, because there are a lot of legal documents you have to read, etc. So we decided that we would look for a procurement specialist and when we start looking for someone new. We obviously do a lot of research on what are the typical skills that you need in that person to fill in that position. So we started that and we started getting quite a few applications which were somewhat unusual for us because in IT you really struggle to get a lot of attention from candidates as you probably know so that was tough and we found someone where we felt like - this is someone we can trust because that candidate demonstrated really great work ethic, which is very important and sometimes I think it's overlooked in the recruitment process and huge responsibility demonstrated in the previous company, very clear reasoning why this person is changing industry which also might appear as a red flag because Industries can differ so much that it can actually affect the performance of the candidate I think, so that was also a risk. But just sometimes you really can't explain sometimes you feel like you like that person and you just have this unexplainable trust and you just have to give it a try. So it felt uncomfortable because we couldn't really assess much, you know. We don't have a very kind of structured process in place on how to hire a procurement specialist, because that was the first hire and also it was very critical for that person to realize that they are coming to a company where they wouldn't find another procurement specialist in-house. Which also means if they had to look for advice you know, professional advice. It wouldn't be that role specific. It can be maybe project-specific or something like that. But, that person would basically be alone in that function, you know. Of course, there are other functions involved because we still work with IT projects, and procurement specialists work very closely with the tech team, and the sales team, but still, when we speak about procurement, that's the only person, so this is where you know probably some of the doubts or uncomfortable situations came from.

And how did it go?

Excellent! We were so happy with the hire, it's just a huge success because, not only that person is indeed really good at what they do, but also it's a great cultural fit, amazing energy and we're happy with the hire. Don't think that I mentioned before was transitioning to a different industry - meant also for that person relearning a lot about IT fields you know, understanding what different technologies are used for. Probably it was challenging for both sides, but it was still worth it.

Great. So it was basically that gut feeling which helped you to decide to hire that person?

Absolutely. I mean we are hiring people - they are specialists in one field or another but at the end of the day, it's a person who has also a character, maybe you know some values that they have, It can really be felt in daily interactions.

What about the failures, when listening to that gut feeling, you had?

Oh yeah, so probably maybe I'll tell a story about the highlight of the failures that we had, but again - when I think about failures, it's never just a failure. It's also the learning that follows. And for me failure really changed its meaning over the last five years I guess and I don't want to move away from the question but essentially it's now being celebrated and it's not that we are ashamed of this failure. We actually are proud that we did it because failing also shows that you are trying hard enough because if you're not failing in anything you're probably not really doing much.

Exactly.

So having this mindset really helps. So yeah, looking back in the last several years, probably a lot of IT companies have experienced a very exhaustive and limiting market in IT recruitment. And I believe that a lot of companies felt it because there was so much cheap money pumped into the system and, of course, in Covid times a lot of companies started digitalization processes, and no surprise it made a massive impact on IT talent availability. So, we did a lot of experimentation. We tried hiring abroad, finding some contractors, growing talent internally and we're still doing all those experimentations and but we also feel like we found our way of doing it that works for us the best. So basically at that time, a year ago, last summer we felt so much pressure to hire, and also our HR department felt a lot of pressure. We had exact numbers that we needed to hit because, in our business that was critical, you know it's a very two-sided business - you have to grow talent and also your client base - if one of them is kind of lagging behind, it's really a huge risk for the company. So we decided that we would look for developers in Ukraine in the summer of 2021. So, looking back now it really seems like a blind game that we tried to play because first of all Ukraine was a really unfamiliar market for us. However, it was known that it's so rich in IT talent because, it's just such a popular kind of field to go after you know at Uni and they graduate, they're very hardworking people. So there's this you know, kind of perception that we have about Ukraine and it's not wrong. It's really rich in IT Talent. However, it's also the destination that a lot of countries are looking at you know so you're competing with large companies from the US, from I don't know like many other countries and huge companies with massive budgets. So that was one thing or maybe a misconception that we had. Another one was that we had to find a recruiter who would look for talent in Ukraine and that was probably the biggest challenge we ran into because we were looking but not a lot of people were kind of coming back to us and the ones that were they either really struggled with English or it's just you know after the first interview you felt like it's not going to work and we essentially also were feeling a lot of time pressure so we had to act fast and we essentially decided to choose one person who appeared to be the best from the candidates we had. Her English was actually really good. She worked in recruitment for years and in HR function in general. However, she was coming from the construction industry. And we were not sure how much of the impact that would make because at the end of the day, it's the recruitment but what role does the industry play in this sense? And what we learned it was a massive, massive role because the recruitment process is just quite different I would say and after you know to jump to the end of the story, basically after five or six months of trying to recruit someone in Ukraine we didn't hire a single person.

After six months?

After six months of recruitment. I'm not saying that we didn't have candidates. However, we didn't end up hiring anyone so you can imagine how frustrating that was for us. And of course, I have to explain why it was like that. Well first of all our recruitment process was quite lengthy and that was really the worst timing because when you're very selective, you actually also want a lot from the candidate but the quality was always our number one priority because in a business like ours we cannot afford to have underperforming individuals whose skills and experience doesn't reach the level we are looking for. So it has to be really someone that can demonstrate, if not the skills that they've developed already, but at least that they have the potential and interest in that. And in Ukraine we had I guess maybe 8 candidates that we were really interested in and ready to hire. However those candidates basically were so overwhelmed by the number of offers that they were getting at that time that sometimes you know they would come across as a bit arrogant but I guess it's also kind of in the environment like that, you're also as a developer trying to really like choose the best option because you have so many to choose from. So all these things together really led us to realize that this is not the best place or at least not how we were doing it and this is not going to work. Another thing to mention is that at that time we didn't have a physical office and a year ago obviously it was very common to work from home. But I guess for people, it's also proof that you're a legit company if you have a physical location in that country or at least that they can go to that place if they wanted or you know, just for simple things like meet up with the HR person or maybe collect the laptop or things like that. So that's just something that also came across as a kind of frequent feedback from candidates. So to sum up you know, hiring in a market you don't really know well, also when you have to find a recruiter it's tough. And also in difficult times when you don't have an office, there can be a huge huge challenge.

And why do you think that the failure was hiring that specific recruiter? What did you notice? What were your expectations and what did you get?

Well, it's difficult to say, you can't only judge always by the result that they produce you know?

Right? Because there are so many other elements.

Because if you look at the numbers, she didn't hire anyone and we could be you know very blind and say "Oh, she was maybe not qualified" and I believe that there are a lot of companies or people that would think this way. However, I really saw that she was generally trying you know, she was working a lot. She was really showing her efforts. But also at the same time, she was very frustrated and maybe the support that she was getting from our team sometimes wasn't enough because at the end of the day it felt like sometimes individual departments might be trying to achieve different things which is an issue in probably not aligning the teams really because everyone understands that we need to hire. But the IT team, our tech team would always be looking to hire the best people because essentially they would be the ones working with them directly so we don't want to hire someone for a mid or senior role when they have to tell them how things are working or you know like really feel like they're teaching them. Although they are supposed to know these things already. So it's kind of like they are trying to you know to put the bark quite high and then the recruiter is trying to simplify the recruitment process by maybe suggesting things like let's keep the task, maybe we don't have to do it if it's a very senior people, which also kind of created a huge you know discussion and at the end of the day we did change the process and then we did another test round for recruitment and at the end of the day we decided to pivot with our strategy and go for a different way of hiring.

And so you mentioned that maybe the issue was that the recruiter was from a different industry and that the recruitment process is different in comparison like one is in construction, another one is in the IT sector. So what differences do you see? What was your recruiter saying about this?

So basically, the key difference is that the task that you have to perform has to be industry specific. So recruiters obviously are not the ones that kind of work on the task or they're just kind of like this sourcing person who brings the candidates and then it's our job to really assess that person. So I guess a lot of things came, maybe being from a different industry, having different expectations because the talent market is different in construction versus how it is in IT, and when I mentioned the lengthy process typically you know when we have the initial call with the recruiter and the candidate. Another step is to try to convince them to do a test task or at least to demonstrate how they would do think to show some work that they've done, maybe something you know that we could review and see how would they go about different situations in development. So this is very important to us because I think the worst thing that can happen is really like bad hire when you hire someone who's maybe not that good and then you really try to make something out of it and maybe it was a bad day for that person and then they basically you realize oh actually, now we spent this much time on trying to figure out how this person would perform in reality and actually it's not performing well and the task you know was supposed to be the red flag but we didn't look at it. So I guess. It's really the market conditions. It was very different from construction. So her expectations maybe were that it wouldn't be that difficult and another thing is that it's a different process because you know the task that I mentioned and also then the review of a task and this discussion that they have after, going through the task and kind of like discussing why they went about this task this way or another way that also demonstrates how you did it because you can also ask someone else to do your test that so you can't just rely on that. It's really, it's just a different thing.

Yeah, well how I see it is, in the other industries, recruitment is more of a selection process, right? So you post the job ad, maybe you contact the candidates directly, but still, you are selecting, so this is the main focus here. When it comes to the IT sector, it's pure head-hunting, so you are selling your company, your job opening, you're convincing that you are the best option a candidate could choose. So it's a totally different story. You have to be a salesperson first and just then a recruiter who is capable to select the best candidate out of the possible candidacies. So also the process itself when it comes to the construction. You can post the job ad or you can send the email when it comes to IT specialists or managers searching it's usually Linkedin and it's a very hectic work, very active approach to attracting candidates. So you need to follow up, to follow up again to offer to have a very short call just to present the company. So I believe it's a very different way of approaching and engaging candidates.

Yeah, absolutely and you've wrapped it up very nicely, and you mentioned that it's really selling the company which I couldn't agree more, and in fact, she was for certain roles, she was doing the same job - headhunting. Specifically for the project managers but looking back I think it was a combination of many things and that was the result of it. But at the end of the day, we don't regret it, it was kind of like an experiment we ran. It was a lot of new learning and we're happy we did it.

Yeah, and also I think that IT itself - it's a very fast-moving industry and people are making all the decisions like very fast at everything, right? So when it comes to recruitment, you have to act very fast. You found the candidate, you gave a task - a candidate performed the task and then you make the decision, because it's two weeks and the candidate is gone, because the other company reacted faster, right? So it's really numbers and time games. So it's really challenging. So what is the solution you found after that? What were the steps you took afterwards?

Yeah, so as you said it's a race. So, you know what we decided to do after is to really kind of embrace our I guess what we specialize in as a company. And as a tech company, we work with Python in the backend, and to be honest, there aren't that many companies that specifically work with Python so we started looking into our local community you know, and really engaging with the people in the community exchanging ideas you know, we also attend the conferences, Python, for example in Lithuania, we were a keystone speaker, sponsor. So we really try to be part of that community so that they can see us more. Because before we even like at this point we don't really spend massive budgets on marketing or advertising where you know we're everywhere flashy and everyone knows us. You know. We received more interest you know we started receiving applications slowly but steadily it was still a change and another thing that we started doing was, we started organizing internship programs that were directed to people looking to transition to IT. So we basically designed a program which allows not only you know, learn practical things but also learn from our projects and do a lot of you know, practical tasks and it was really kind of scary in the beginning because we had this internal, I don't know maybe thinking that when you have a bunch of juniors like it's going to be very difficult to add them to the team because our team is not, you know, 500 people and that was probably something that we were doubting about, but we had to try it because that's also our thinking you have to run an experiment and see how it goes you know? So, we did the first round last year, at the end of a year and it was a really fast project. We had two weeks to kick off the thing, we brought everyone together from the frontend team and we sat down and we laid down the timelines, how our schedule would look like, what we need to teach you to know how many people we're expecting to hire at the end of it because you know you have to really think about the team composition in our team. You can't just have you know a team of juniors working on a project. It's not going to work. So it's really like calculating the proportions, the time that the seniors would need to allocate to those juniors you know because they need a lot of guidance and someone helping them, someone you know, paying spending their time and advising. So, yeah, we did the first round with it was quite a lot of interested people actually, we had maybe sixty - seventy people that responded but we were looking to have 8 people in the group because we wanted to keep it small, but, very attentive and we also wanted them to get a lot of attention because if it's a large group sometimes people feel very uncomfortable asking questions. You know how it works - if it's 50 people or 100 you feel like "oh, I don't want to ask, maybe it's a stupid question". It's just a different environment. And what we created was very intimate, like very small. Everyone kind of knew each other quite well you know after the program and then we ended up recruiting, hiring, sorry, four of them.

Okay, awesome. Awesome. How to keep yourself and your team strong and keep on going and trying new things? What is the secret?

I think the secret is that you have to be strong inside and what I mean by that is that we do have certain things as part of our culture at Corner Case and If we nurture the values that we have they are going to grow into something bigger and people will start talking about it, you know that it's not just something that we have on our website as our values but that's really something that is happening here and something that is driving us forward. So what we started doing is really like paying a lot of attention to what we care about and what our values are, being very vocal about it internally, and telling the team, "this is how we do things at Corner Case". These are the values that we follow and we live by those values. And it just felt different because people started also recommending their friends and look you know the number one value is growth and by growth, we not only mean company growing in numbers. But it also means individual growth your professional growth. Even your personal growth - so that attracts a lot of people because we then want to be part of it because it's not just going to work and writing some code and then getting paid for it. It's actually something more meaningful and if you can resonate with those values and if you also have those values as a person I think that's something that attracts people more and that's something that kind of also helps us grow and attract like-minded people not just any people.

Yeah, I totally agree, and when you mentioned that you have many Python developers - so most companies have these types of programming languages and their programmers in their teams. But it's not the whole team, right? So to have like-minded people and to talk about all the particular issues you're facing, it's something very valuable I believe so it's not only the project but it's also the people you're working day to day and you can share your thoughts and you can grow and learn from each other, great.

Absolutely. And I think it's very important to when we hire and I remember you know the shift I made in the year interviews that I was running was really trying to get to know that person on the personal level. So really understand who is this person. What are their soft skills? What do they do after work? Do you know what they care about? What values do they have maybe in their families or as an individual? So I think that really makes a huge difference because not only it manage your expectation as a hiring manager from that person but also at the end of the day you work with people so it's not just doing the work - it's much more than that because if you connect on the personal level I feel like you can do much more than you would otherwise and another thing was that I also started doing and my focus then creating a new job description or talking to a person the first time, I really pay a lot of attention to expectation management because there are a lot of companies that only highlight the best you know that they have and the best that they can show oh we are the number one company and X, Y, Z and they're very proud of it and that's fine. But I think it's very important to bring up also the challenges that the person will be encountering and so that on the first day and all the days following they know exactly what they decided to join to you know? So it's not like, on a fifth day, "Oh I didn't know that you have this, oh I didn't know that I would have to deal with this crap" or something you know. So it's really kind of drawing this realistic picture of the expectation and also giving a prospect or of where it can lead because there are so many unknowns you can't really promise everything or you don't know how things might turn you know in in the future. But you say look we are a growing organism as a company. There might be a lot of opportunities I can't tell you right now we don't have a five-year plan structure this is where you can move. You know so, it's really like so flexible but kind of having a very clear picture of who we are as people not only as professionals and who you are. It's really something that I guess changed the game in recruitment.

Awesome! Awesome! Great. So to sum up, maybe you could summarize what would be the key advice for other recruiters or startup founders when facing the challenges of attracting talented people.

Yeah, so I think every company is very unique and they need to find their own way that is working for them the best. So my advice would be not to be afraid to experiment and try. I really do believe that having a safe environment to fail is the right environment because this way you really encourage people to do things and only by doing you learn so that would be the, yeah, by doing and failing you learn exactly, so that would be my I guess key advice don't try to play safe all the time.

Great, great! Thank you Egle, thank you so much for your time and sharing your stories.

Thank you, Thank you for having me.

And thank you for all the listeners. For more podcast please visit http://jobrely.com.