Setting up a hiring strategy for scale - with Daniel & Robert @ready2order

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Product Bakery. As usual, I'm sitting here in front of my desk with Christian and in the line we have Robert O'Donoghue and Daniel Ibrahim. Today with the focus on hiring for a product organization. We talked about setting up and changing an existing hiring process to a quicker way and a better way to evaluate candidates as well as defining a clear hiring strategy to make sure that you get the right people at the right time. What was your key takeaway, Alex? As one of my most favorite topics when we talk about hiring is definitely the topic on how to use different formats, different interview formats, case studies or take-home exercises. So I'm happy we managed to cover that, but I don't want to take too much away up front. So let's get started. Hi, Daniel. Hi, Robert. It's nice having you. Hello. Hello, everyone. Thank you very much for having us. Nice being here. Great. As always, I would like to quickly introduce you to our audience and I would like to start with you, Daniel, because you started your career actually at Ready-to-Order as an entrepreneur in residence and you moved your way up to executive assistant, head of product. And these days you are the director of product at Ready-to-Order leading everything related to product management strategy and the success of the company. It's very nice having you. Thanks having us. And Robert, coming to you, you started your career actually as a sales, which is pretty interesting because these days you are a recruiter and you sidetracked into recruitment and worked for bigger companies such as Heiss or Workday, as well as Zendesk and Deliveroo. And obviously these days as talent acquisition lead at Ready-to-Order. Yes. Yes. Thank you very much again. Thanks for having us. I'm delighted to be here. Yeah. I don't think anyone really grows up wanting to be a recruiter. So I think most people find their way into it. So yeah, I started in sales, as you said, and found my way through one way or another into recruitment, but I absolutely love it. How is it at Ready-to-Order? Is this Ready-to-Order thing like a theme? So are you saying in the morning, I'm ready for standup or ready for coffee or something like that? That's an interesting one though that you bring up, because from a marketing perspective, you always hear about companies coming up with their names and the best ones are always the verbs. It's I need to Uber a cab or I need to halo something. I think that's definitely a podcast theme that we are following, but okay. To be ready to be serious, Daniel, you are there since more than five years. And I would be curious to learn from you, how has recruiting product manager and product designers changed over the last couple of years at Ready-to-Order? Yeah, sure. So maybe to give you a quick run through from where we started, I started working at Ready-to-Order, like you said, already 2016. So almost five years ago as one of the first full-time employees. And back then we were like around 10 employees maximum, half of them were part-time students, and there was no structure and also no process at all in the company. We had a sales department, a customer service team, and the founders were doing all the engineering topics and also all around hiring. Now we have more than 100 employees working not only from Vienna, as we are working fully remotely since March, 2020. So basically since COVID hit, I think every one of us, we are a B2B SaaS company. And to give you some context, what we are actually doing with this crazy name, some small companies often do not have sufficient capacity to take care of all operational matters. And our approach is to get rid of all the paperwork. So we build an efficient cloud-based payment and checkout solution that optimizes company workflows while still meeting legal requirements. We are operating in the German speaking market with a couple of thousand merchants, which are using our system on a daily basis across all operating systems and the multiple industries such as retail, service, and astronomy. Our goal in the end is to become a financial aggregator in Europe and support our customers with everything a small business really needs. And I think that already shows the complexity that we are facing as we are talking about hiring later on. We are facing challenges such as working with a combination of hardware and software, also building reliable services, financial products, for example, our own payment product, and in the end still meeting or fulfill legal compliance in every product and in the end still fulfill local compliance regulations. How has the hiring process over the last years changed for you guys? Yeah, so in the beginning, hiring was mainly done from the founding team. So mainly from our managing director or chief operating officer. He was doing all the hiring in the beginning as the company was still quite small and there was no expertise around hiring, but all of that changed mainly now when we introduced a professional HR department and also bringing Robert into the company. Yeah, I think it's an interesting topic. I think lots of recruiters can fall victim to the same mistake. Typically, a recruiter will get hired into a startup company when they've had a big round of funding and they're already behind in their hiring at that stage. So up until that point, recruitment might have just been, let's post a job and someone within the HR team, like a HR business partner, might have just been facilitating that entire process. So when the recruiter joins, they typically will be under massive amounts of pressure already from the hiring managers to get just candidates into the funnel without first taking the time to understand the company, understand the values, the process, and really if it's set up for success. What I wanted to do today hopefully would be to share some insights on what we did at Rage Order to evolve the processes which were in place to ensure that we were attracting the right talent. So first of all, what we needed to do was identify our overall hiring needs. And one of the first things I did when I joined the company was to sit down with Daniel and our chief technology officer to create a prioritization and allocation framework, which linked our hiring needs to our product roadmap. So this is to ensure essentially that the recruiting team are filling the right roles at the right time and helping the business to be much more strategic. It also helps the talent team to have a better alignment with all of our hiring managers as well, making sure that we're filling roles, not just for hiring managers that are putting the most pressure on us, which can happen in companies, or hiring for the teams that we have the best relationships with as well. So this was really useful for ensuring that all the business leaders and recruiting role singing from the same hymn sheet. Sounds like you don't have politics. No, not at all. And I think it's really important to say here that to support HR, but to create this prioritization and allocation framework, we in product development, and especially we as a leadership team started looking into the product vision, this product strategy and the product roadmap. So essentially what we wanted to ship this year, and we work back from there. So we sliced our product and the roadmap into specific business domains and assigned each business domain to a dedicated product development team, be it an already existing one, or one that we had to ramp up from scratch in order to meet the goals that we have set for the year. But that in the end gave us a good overview and the possibility to identify the gaps we had in our product development teams and to prioritize the positions that we need to hire for. And as you mentioned before, Christian, now product management is maybe set up a little bit different than in other companies. Our product management department is currently set up into four main components. I would say the fundamental structure reminds of a typical software company operating in B2B, P2C, FinTech, or the payment industry. But I would say due to our size of the company departments, which would probably be a standard loan entity in the company, are all reporting into one person. So basically into me and are therefore considered under product management. And in general, we have product design, product marketing, product management, and our own product compliance subunit to have internal expertise when it comes to new and existing regulations across all markets. And on the other hand, we are working very closely with technology in this common structure of cross-functional development teams. Yeah. So once we had an idea of what our hiring needs actually were, we started to drill down into the specific roles we needed to hire for. So, aka creating the job descriptions. When you are creating these job descriptions, alignment with your hiring managers is absolutely key. We had really long intake meetings where we essentially did a retro on all the previous hires prior to me joining. What worked well, what didn't work, the profiles they'd seen, and why they didn't meet the standard. So like off the back of those conversations, we developed our own brand of job descriptions, which all have a very consistent structure. So whether you're reading a job description for a marketing role or a job description for an engineering role, they all have the same feel and the same structure to them. So they typically open with, in one week you will, in one month you will, in three months you will. So it really gives the candidates a realistic vision of how they would slot in and how they would be working from then on. As well as that, it really ensures that the hiring manager is prepared for the onboarding experience, the first week of that person joining, and the expectations that we've set for each new hire as well. Rob, you mentioned also that when you joined there was already like a process in place and then you started continuing or reworking also a little bit the process. So I was curious because I've seen many companies approaching it differently. What are the steps that you have in your hiring process? Yeah, yeah, good question. Yeah, I think prior to me joining, I think we were focusing on probably the wrong things in what we were assessing. There was some bad habits that we needed to get rid of, like lots of repetition throughout the interview process. I think a lot of what interviewers were going into was they'd meet a candidate and they'd say, oh, can you tell me, give me a synopsis of your career to date? And then every single person in the interview process was asking that question. Obviously, it eases away the time and it gives the feeling that the hiring team aren't aligned or they're not prepared for that interview or that they don't really care. Overall, it just gives a very bad candidate experience, which is obviously something we don't want to do. Obviously, when I first joined, I got a lay of the land. I didn't want to change things too quickly. I wanted to make sure I understood where the pain points were, where the growth was going to be. We devised the overall hiring process into a recruiter screen, a hiring manager screen, the onsite loop, and then a final call with our managing director. We try to make our processes as cross-functional as possible, as this best represents what you're going to be doing as a product manager in ready to order. Recruiter screen is 60 minutes long. Look, I'm not a product manager. I'm not an engineer. I'm not going to be able to assess someone. You are a salesperson. I am a salesperson, but I'm not going to be able to assess a product manager to the degree that maybe Daniel would. However, I try to align myself as best as I can with Daniel to understand what those guys are doing and those people are doing in that part of the business so that I can really assess the candidate. It's a 50-50 call. It's 50% me selling and then 50% them selling themselves as well. Once the recruiter screen is done, I send out my notes to Daniel. He does the hiring manager screen. Overall, he will be giving an overview of the team they need, the composition of the group, where this role fits in within the organization, the team's goals, and why overall are we hiring for this new position. Something I've been working with Daniel on is I've been trying to create a used car salesman out of Daniel basically. The golden rule, ABC, always be closing, getting our selling hat on. We're obviously in a very competitive environment, competitive market space. Always just ensuring that we're portraying the company, yourself, and the role in the best possible light as well. Then we get into our onsite loop, which is the core and the bulk of the interview where we will delve deepest into the candidate's ability to perform in the role. Again, really cross-functional interview to ensure that we are assessing a candidate for every part of their skillset. The onsite loop is three components. It's three one-hour interviews. We have the project walkthrough. It's a discussion designed for candidates to present on a project that they have led or worked on from inception right through to delivery. We ask them typically to come up with a project or some sort of presentation. They speak for 20, 30 minutes, and then we ask questions for 20, 30 minutes. A really interactive environment. We don't want to create something where a spotlight's on you and try to make you... I think a lot of companies go with that approach. They'll scratch deeper and deeper until they find out where your faults are, and that's not what we're trying to do at Ready to Order. That's a one-hour interview, and we try to figure out, are they data-driven? Can they present in a concise and articulate manner? Would you be happy to work for this person? Could you trust this person to present to senior members of staff? Then we run into our case study, which is the second part of the interview. I think Daniel probably knows this part of the interview better because he facilitates it quite well. The case study basically aims to see how the candidate reacts to an approach in real-life situations. In real-life situations, I mean during his time, he would work together with us. We also recognize that the candidate probably does not have full context of working with Ready to Order, and he probably also might not have worked in paytech or fintech industries before, but we still want to see how they would tackle these challenges and problems and break them down to manageable solutions and take steps as a product manager to ensure execution in the end. Do they ask qualifying questions before they are stepping right into the launch of the solution? Do they have sufficient enough context to start mapping out the solution in a way? How do they measure success? Who do they involve into the process? Do they have a sufficient idea about stakeholder management? Do they have enough data to make their decision-making approach very solid? Yeah, I think that what we found through trial and error is the case study component of the interview is probably the one where most product managers fall down in. I think most people get a little nervous because we give them, as I said, this scenario, so we'll ask them a scenario-based question like if they were to work at Ready to Order, so it's quite a paytech or fintech question, and if they haven't worked in that space before, it's a bit of deer in the headlights. Now realistically, it should be you apply your same product principles that you've learned in previous work and apply them to this new workspace. It shouldn't matter too much about the industry, but I think there's just something about it that throws people a little. So again, it's very interactive. We want people to do the discovery phase in the interview process, so it's okay, are they getting as much information as possible? Are they asking the right questions? Are they gaining as much context as possible? Yeah, but it is a difficult one. Yeah, and I think there's maybe one change that we're doing a little bit different than other companies. We're not sending the candidate the question before the case study, so we are showing them the question right after they joined the case study as one of their entry points in the case study. So everyone sees the question for the first time in the case study interview, not beforehand. Yeah, I guess that was something where I wanted to ask a little bit more in detail on how you run them, especially because you mentioned at the beginning, Daniel, that they are working with you. So is it like you put them on the whiteboard and you just go through this use case or this scenario and then they brainstorm on the spot? Exactly. What we want to identify in this process is also to give the candidate the possibility to understand if he would feel comfortable working together with us. So it's nothing where we say, okay, here's the question, please prepare a presentation out with 30 slides because no one wants to see the slides in the end. We really want to understand if we can work together with the candidate and the candidate can together with us. We don't have the expectation to get a pixel perfect presentation in the end. It's rather for us to understand the thinking process and how a candidate would really approach a problem. So this is actually what we are doing in this step. Something that I find hard to measure sometimes with such cases is what you want to learn or what you are expecting from the people to deliver. Because something that I usually discuss when I prepare people for interviews is I have like my own case study where I say, Hey, you have feature A and feature B. You need to pick one of those and explain why. So to, for example, understand in which direction the business thinking is going off of that person. Or sometimes I also ask people to prepare a project and set up the first sprint and talk to stakeholders. So I'd be curious to hear from you, what are the focus areas that you are looking at and how are you trying to measure whether this person is matching your needs or not? Yeah, so I can quickly answer on them, but I think Robert can follow up on that much better than I do. So I would say in the end, you need to differentiate between like human skills and technical skills in a case study. So what kind of work is done and how this person is doing the kind of work. So I think it's really important to not only focus on the technical skills in the end. So you really want to understand the human skills and you want to find out some patterns in the end. So how did product manager approach work based on his experience and how can he adapt those learnings to a ready-to-order specific question? Yeah, it's an interesting one because there's no perfect solution. There's no end solution to any of the case study questions we give them. And each case study question is, we've built in a library essentially at this point of different case study questions, one for every different part of the business. Like we recently hired for a growth product manager and we have a case study question specific to growth. But again, it's a very interactive interview. We want them to ask as much questions as possible, work with the team. So it's very much being a team player is one of our company values. And it's something that we try to embed throughout the interview process, all our company values. And being a team player is being able to work with the different groups and leverage their different skillsets. So if you can't ask the right questions, you're not going to get the right answers and you're not going to be able to go about your work. So someone can do a project walkthrough and do an amazing presentation, but it's everything that's pre-prepared. You might have had a week to prepare that. And it's also something you're really comfortable with doing. It's a project that you've worked on for the last year, every single angle of it, all the nuts and bolts. But a case study puts you on the spot. It's okay. How would you deal with the situation in real time? If you were in a meeting in front of senior staff, how would you deal with this kind of problem? Do you ask the right questions? Do you follow the right pattern to get to the end process? As I said, there's no happy path for that interview. There's no end goal. It's just an open conversation to see where their mind goes throughout the conversation. And I think for the team leader, so the hiring manager, it's also really important to bring in the team as early as possible. It's also the question of who is involved into the case study, right? So I would suggest bringing in someone from the team, actually someone who is really working with this person to identify, does this person fit also into the team and the current challenges of the team? One thing you mentioned, Rob, was that this is also the step where most fail, like where you select them. In German, they would say, die Spreu vom Weizen. I can't translate that in English, I know. Exactly. It fits our bakery theme. But do you think you might miss out on some really great people simply because it's like the situation that puts pressure on them? 100%. Of course. But the thing is, you can't set up every interview process is going to have its flaws. And every candidate is going to have their off day. Do you know what I mean? You could do the case study 100 times and 99 times, you might do it perfectly. And the one time you do terribly, whatever. We set up the case study. The case study is built in such a way that we're trying our best to set candidates up for success. There, as I said, in an interactive format, it's usually a two-on-one interview. So we'll probably have someone from product and someone from engineering interviewing the candidates. Engineering will probably focus on their technical ability or how they work with engineers and do they ask the right questions of engineers and aim for the product side. It's just how they leverage different skill sets, I suppose, at the end of the day. So I think it's definitely really good to look at how they collaborate. And I think the collaboration aspect is very important. And why I was also asking that specific question is because I have to admit, I spend a lot of time thinking and discussing the topic of use cases and case studies and take-home exercises. And I think all these formats are really massively discussed. And especially, I think, me coming from the design space, I did it all in the past. I had whiteboard exercises. I had people who have to design something upfront. We tried them all. And I think, generally speaking, it's in the industry, there is this notion of people don't really want to do case studies that they need to prepare up front. And I think that's something where I see a lot of companies already moving away from it and taking it more to the on-site session and to really collaborate, which is awesome. At the same time, I think there is different opinions around, say, diversity and culture fit where people then might discuss. Because obviously, what you do in such a format is you hire a very similar culture. And you might exclude someone who's maybe introverted, who has a different process, and who sits down and structures work very well. It's going against different personality types. But at the same time, allowing you to hire people that really fit well at the organization that you already have. And I think it's a philosophical question. And that's why I'm also putting it a little bit out there. It's a really good question, because I think prior to me joining, we weren't assessing the competencies required for each role. I think we were focusing really on digging as deep as possible into a candidate's experience within point of sale, or FinTech, or compliance, or regulation. And the reason, I suppose, the interview process was set up in this way is that it's much more 360. It's much more holistic. It's getting a broader view of a candidate's skill set, as opposed to really digging in deep into how good they are with compliance legislation or compliance regulations across the EU. Because that might be very good for one specific task that you're going to work on, or you're going to ship. You might have a product person in your company for the next two to three years. And overall, your mission changes, the features you're working on changes. And overall, you need someone with a broader realm of skill set. So yeah, I suppose our interview process maybe is a little bit longer than some companies, but I don't think candidates mind so much, as long as you're as transparent with them as possible, and you communicate the process very early on. So what we do is we try to educate and prepare candidates as much as possible by sending them a document. And so it basically gives them hints and tips on the process, and how best to set themselves up for success throughout that. And I think, yeah, look, you're going to get candidates who drop out of the mix. If a candidate is interviewing with you, more than likely they're going to be interviewing with many other companies. And that's just the industry that we're in. Unfortunately, it's a very competitive market space. It's almost like the Tinder market. Yes, exactly. Exactly. And it is. Ultimately, I feel that we get the right people in the company, people who align with our company values. Obviously, we devise for company values, which we feel best represent us as a company and help us attract candidates who are best suited for our mission ahead as well. So they are customer centricity, open minded, ownership and team player. And in our final interview with our managing director, which I'm involved in as well, we have questions around them. And just to ensure that we're bringing the right people to the table for, as I said, for the mission ahead. And bottom line, I think the process that you're running feels not too long, right? If on site where you have different interviews, you see it as one thing. And maybe it makes sense to talk about how you solve on site now in our remote work. But I think like, maybe also to summarize, at least this is my point of view, and I'm happy to hear other opinions. But I think in order to keep the process also good for the applicant, if you manage to not give them too much work to do upfront, and I think they, as you said, they are probably interviewing with different companies. I would say everyone should have a portfolio or a project or something ready to present. Is it a developer? Is it a product manager? Is it a designer, product marketer, and so on? So I think like those are things that they should already have ready. So it's not like too big of an ask. And if it then comes down to, okay, do they understand the company? Did they do the research? Should they really want to work there? And so on. And at the end, all it comes down to is like the conversations that they're having with you and how they're performing in the session. I think that's super fair to ask someone. I think I see it more critical, like when companies feel like, okay, it's super normal to ask someone for a week of their life or for even just like days, because, and I think it's often also perceived unfair. And maybe one thing that I can highlight here also from past experience, like what I've seen, some companies still do these extensive take-home exercises and so on. But I've heard like Hotjar, for example, what they do is they pay you like a freelancer, like an employee. They're like, okay, you do this exercise. We realize you're taking a lot of your time. You get a daily rate or whatsoever, independently if you get the job or not. Yeah. And that is a positive example. A bad example is companies sending you some exercises and they're taking your ideas and your feedback and making this their own product. And something that I just want to share in case you're a hiring manager or CEO, please don't do that first of all. And if you have your exercises, just put a small note into it that this feature is not going to be developed or has been developed already that people just know. Because I also felt better back then as an applicant, when I read that, because it is really effort. You spend a lot of time. Sometimes these exercises say, just don't take more than four hours and you for sure sit down there and spend more time if you really want that job. So it can be also sometimes very unfair if you then see this later in production. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to know if Hotjar are charging people San Francisco rates or like... You want to apply, yeah? Just the side income? Just apply for the income. I think that's more design specific that you're speaking about there. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I can imagine for designers, yeah, you'll have a portfolio. You'll more than likely have an up-to-date portfolio that you can bring to an interview. But if you're being asked to do a case study, like you're one of maybe 10 or 15 people in a process, you have a very slim chance of getting the job. Well, it depends how good you are at your job. It's a lot to be asked of someone who's interviewing at a company without getting a lot back. I think we definitely need to respect candidates a bit more and provide the best candidate experience. There's a stat of like 72% of candidates that have a negative experience will tell others about it. 81% of candidates who have a positive experience will share with their direct network. I think something that needs to be called out as well is ensuring that candidates get prompt feedback. It's a massive thing within the recruitment industry. Whether you're hiring at massive scale, like the Coca-Colas of the world, they might get 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 applications a day. And they are implementing AI technology, well, not AI, it's more of a natural language processing technology to help them reject candidates that just aren't a fit whatsoever, and progress candidates through the process that are. But ultimately, what we try to do is any candidate that gets to the on-site component, I'll have a one-to-one call with them. So we have a debrief after our on-site, we talk about the pros, the cons, our internal scoring mechanism that we use. And we try to give them as much as we can. Look, here's where you fell down, here were the positives. And I think that's the least you can expect from a candidate who's given that a bunch of time to a process. Daniel, who is making the final call for the product people? And is this like you sit down together, you discuss the pros and the cons, and then you give all the thumbs up, thumbs down, or how does it work? I think it's also really important, Robert already mentioned that we need to find the product manager for the mission ahead. And it's always a matter of, so in the end, your team is your product, right? So as a product leader, you don't have a direct product that you're working on, you're mainly working on your team. And it's also the question of, are you doing ideal product management in that sense, or pragmatic product management? So it's also always a matter of where are you currently in the company and where will you be like one year ahead? So we are still a scaling company. We are still early on in our evolution. That means you as a product manager still need to be very scrappy, resourceful, adaptable, and a team player. So the typical cliche of wearing many hats in the end. And as I mentioned before, you need to involve your team as early as possible. In the debrief session, you actually listen to the feedback from everyone. So you as a hiring manager, give your feedback as the last person to don't make an impact on the assessment on the others, but it's not only my decision. So if I really like a candidate, I would be able to force him through. But in the end, it doesn't really make sense if the team doesn't feel comfortable working with them. So I would say in the end, it's a team decision because of the process that we have in place. Again, it's a pragmatic process. We try to have a 360 degree overview about the candidate in the end. And also the candidate should have the right expectations. So it doesn't make sense to sell the company in a way that it feels and sounds really positive, and then the candidate joins. And then the experience drop starts immediately because the candidate experience doesn't end as soon as you sign the contract. It basically starts when you sign the contract, because you also have to consider the onboarding experience in the end. And for me, it's really important to set the right expectation, also involving the team into the process. So in the end, it's a team decision, and not me alone taking the decision. I think that's really interesting what Daniel said. We're looking for product managers for the mission ahead for right now. And that changes all the time throughout a company's evolution. So from my experience, when I was with Zendesk, the type of product manager we looked for then were... So it's funny because I think it stems from the top down. So Zendesk was a Copenhagen founded company, although the headquarters are over in San Francisco, and everything was about building beautifully simple products. So it was very UX, UI driven, very creating beautiful aesthetic products, very feature heavy. And then I went to Deliveroo over here in London, and their product managers were different, completely different. So they're very commercial minded. So constantly looking at your P&L, very data driven. And then it changes again when I go to ready to order. So you're constantly looking for different types of traits and skill sets within the product management realm. And as Daniel rightly called it there, we are a company of 100 employees. So we're looking for scrappy, resourceful, adaptable team players, that kind of thing. So the startup wearing many hats cliche, as he said. Yeah. And I think back to also the expectation management, that's such a crucial point, right? Because I think you can over promise and oversell a role. But at the end, that will also fall back on you as a hiring manager, because then you either have an unmotivated team, because it's far off what they are expecting. And you might even lose talent, which means you need to start again. So I think if you already invest the time to hire, and we're talking about hiring notice periods and so on, you lose a couple of months till you finally have someone in the company. And if they then change while they're on probation period, simply because you over promised or told them that everything's perfect. And at the end, the challenge is to actually make it perfect, make it great. I think it's super important to be transparent here and honest about things. Exactly. And I think that also already shows two main challenges and also one of the key responsibilities of the hiring manager. So on the one hand, as we are a growing company, everyone involved in the process really needs to understand the purpose and needs to have the same understanding of the role and why and what we are actually trying to fill in this role. And on the other hand, you also need to be very transparent to your team, why you're actually hiring for new people, new roles. And as I mentioned, one of the key responsibilities of the hiring manager, and Robert also touched on it in the beginning, is to make sure that the recruiter, in this case, Robert, really understands the actual product vision, the roadmap, the challenges that the team is facing, the current and the target structure. So it can be explained to the candidates to also have this expectation right from the beginning. And also the selling process can start right from the beginning. But it's crucial to have the proper understanding so that the recruiter can also bring in the right candidates into the process. We talked about it in the podcast many times that good hiring starts with the basics of defining your product strategy and your product vision. And it has such a big impact. It has not only the impact on the product development, as we can see, but talking about transparency, I know it's a not easy topic. And since we have also Robert here, he can decide if we, if you answer these questions or not, but elephant in the room, the salary discussion. So I know there are different ways how a company approaching salary, some work with salary bands, some say, we pay whatever the candidate wants, because we want to get the good people. How are you guys approaching it? Yeah, as we started with hiring, we basically drafted a 12 months budget plan for the product and development department. And this is actually also the first time when numbers from the plan will start telling you the truth around the actual costs for the business. And this is where we work very closely together with HR and also finance. And this is something that we as ready to order need to contend with on a regular basis. So we already mentioned before, Berlin especially is a very highly competitive market, and we are still a small fish in this big pool. Initially, we needed to do a lot of research, which was done by our head of HR to assess where in the market we can compete financially. And we also use data companies, so external data companies to identify similar companies in the scale of our own company, but also in similar industries to understand salary bands from the market. We are focusing on the German speaking market, so we try to understand with which salary bands do we actually need to compete in the different roles. We need to find other ways essentially of appealing to candidates if you can't compete financially with the likes of the Amazons, the Facebooks, the Googles of the world. Absolutely. So ultimately, I think that we get the right people anyway, who are joining for the right reasons. But aside from that, what's important for us is to develop our own company employee value proposition. So set of offerings that a company promises in return for your time essentially. It tells the candidate like why they should apply for a job with your company and what's in it for them. We're a small growing company, so we can offer product managers a huge amount of ownership and responsibility quite early on. Also direct access to leadership, so working with Daniel day in day out. Overall, we have a pretty flat hierarchy as well. We also offer a lot of flexibility in your working hours and where you work from as well. So we've already made that commitment to full remote experience and other fun things as well. So for example, we're now rolling out workations. So we're renting a lovely villa. I think it's in Tenerife. Is it Tenerife? Yeah, so in Tenerife. So we're renting that out for a month and people can come and go as they're pleased as the employee. So just I suppose really trying to identify what makes the company great. Why are we doing the podcast remote? I don't know. Why not in Tenerife? That's weird. Guys. But actually, just before we close to go into the direction of the end of this call, we were discussing like the process and especially the onsite. So maybe back to I announced I wanted to follow up on this one. How did the process change now where we cannot meet people in person, candidates in person, where we cannot like collaborate in a room on, for example, a case study or a scenario? Yeah, I joined this company in the middle of lockdown. So I've been with the company seven months now and I've never met Daniel face to face. But I feel like- Maybe that's good. Yeah, maybe. But you don't know how tall he really is. I think that's always the worst when you don't meet people in person. No, no, no. But even my team that I work with on a daily basis, I've got a team of recruiters that I work with and I've never met them face to face. You adapt. And that same adaptability applies to your interview experience. We use Google Meets for our project walkthrough. We use for the case study the exact same thing. And I honestly, I don't think it's made a difference for us. I don't see any shortcomings in it. Yes, maybe on the engineering side, when you're trying to do some paired programming exercises, there's different technologies to be used. But for what we use it in, for the case studies, the project walkthroughs on the product management side, works perfectly for us. Yeah. Yeah. I think this whole topic about remote working is actually an own podcast episode for its own. So we never thought that remote working would work for us. And you also need to make sure that remote onboarding works in a way that people who have never met each other before can still work with each other. And as we mentioned before, we are not only hiring in Germany and Austria, we're also hiring across Europe and also have employees across Europe. So that also makes it even harder for us in terms of onboarding and bringing the culture and maintaining the culture in a sense. Yeah. So we never thought it would work, but COVID showed us the difference from one day to another. Everything worked. We are using Miro. We're using Slack, Google Hangouts to communicate with each other and also still maintaining the culture. So you need to bring in people, bring them much closer together. So it's planning different activities to bring the team together and to make sure that you don't have a team that met before COVID and team that joined after COVID. So that's really important. And in HR, we've got a whole lot of projects and programs going on to make sure that we have constant touch points with all our employees in the company. So we're currently going through a remote working experience project where we had started off with just some quantitative and qualitative research. So we did interviews with different people from different companies. So parents, young people who have just joined us from college, different subgroups so we could capture as much data as possible. And off the back of that, we created some hypothesis and we've created some surveys that are going out to the rest of the company to validate those hypothesis. And off the back of that, we can create benefits and perks and schemes that people are actually asking for, as opposed to us making assumptions and just pushing our new benefits schemes on top of them. So from what we learned there is people really appreciate the small things. If you're a new parent, you're there to help your other half. You're there to see your children's first steps, all the really nice, cool things. But if you're just leaving college or whatever, you really are missing out on the exercise of walking into the office. Yes, the drinking lifestyle, the Friday drinks. So yeah, it's making sure we're doing temperature checks with all our employees at all times. And what are they asking for? Are your working conditions at home adequate enough? Are we providing you the right software, the right hardware, the stands for your laptops, the right chairs, all that kind of stuff. And if you're not in touch with your employees, as we said, it's such a competitive market space, they'll find a company that will. Yeah. And it almost sounds like Robert, you could also work in product listening to how you approach the problem solving, like from initial discovery down to validation. That's amazing. Yeah, it's actually like a product management process. So like you're setting up a hypothesis about the candidate, the job description, then it's like a really strong collaboration process together with the recruiter to get the job specs iterated over time. And I think this is also a key learning for myself. In product management, there are a lot of burning fires all the time, but you really need to make hiring a priority for you as a leader, especially when you don't have a team in place. You need to make sure that your calendar is freed up because speed is key in the end. We are in a highly competitive market and it has to come from top down and you really need to work very closely together with your recruiter. As I mentioned before, you also need to give him the full context about the team and the challenges. Yeah. Cool. Maybe to wrap it up and we're talking about hiring. So I think it would also be a good chance to ask you if you're currently having some positions in product open that we can announce here. We are indeed. We are indeed. So we're hiring for all positions across tech and non-tech at the moment. From my side of the house, we're looking for product managers. We're looking for designers, both a lead designer and a senior UX UI designer at the moment. We're also looking for people within brand and communications. We're looking for people in marketing. Yeah. They can go to ready to order, go to our job section or careers section and check out all those open positions. Cool. We will link it in a description, I would say. Amazing. Yeah. The whole spectrum seems covered. Great guys. It was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much. We are wishing you all the best. Amazing. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for joining us and good luck for the hiring. Cheers. Thank you.