Hiring with a bang: When the tech and recruitment teams work together

Dorota Kowalik, Global Recruitment Manager for Nordcloud joins Dariusz Dwornikowski, the Global Head of Engineering in conversation on the superfast Nordcloud careers journey.

Dorota: In the beginning, we started small, with an important team of 20 in our Poland office and without any designated recruitment team. However, from there we went fast, superfast. We are now over 100 employees locally, and across regions, we have rapidly grown from 250 to over 500 globally. So how did we do it? In part, it’s about partnership between internal recruitment and tech leadership.

How and why did you land at Nordcloud?

Darek: I joined Nordcloud initially to help as a cloud architect in Germany, in parallel I was helping to open our Polish operations. We wanted to build a competence centre in Poznań, and utilize the wealth of new talent that is growing the polish employee market. I think we succeeded with this, quite nicely. After nearly 4 years we are above 150 employees in Poland, running offices in a growing number of other cities too. Poland is very important for Nordcloud, for example, our RnD and engineering capabilities are 100% based here. Our presence continues to go from strength to strength here.

Dorota: I was inspired by the vision and potential of Nordcloud back in the time. You know, it is amazing when you see you can build or to have a real impact on the workplace. I wanted to offer an environment that is an engineering-positive and good place of work. Moreover, being around talented people and cutting-edge tech is exciting. Back at the start, the bar was set quite high and we’ve now set it even higher. My dream was to join a company which was at the very early stage of working on the local market and simply was destined to succeed.

What did you face at the very beginning of setting up recruitment? 

Well, in the beginning, there was zero brand awareness and quite limited visibility of Nordcloud in Poland. There was also a lack of enough “ready” skilled people on the market to be able to bring them to the company. Still, it has always been a great atmosphere, and our multi-cloud and public-cloud-only DNA has really acted as a magnet to attract top talent. We had a very small office with a super tiny kitchen. [laugh] Sounds silly, but no one likes eating lunch at their desk, right? Then, in a short time, we managed to grow within several units. During this time we faced some growing pains like any company in hyper-growth, be it standardising processes or standards, but we got there. We normally help each other on many fronts, both locally and globally. We moved to the new office in the city centre [Kupiec Poznanski] and kept developing internal processes with agility, the maturity of the teams and even more hiring to keep the sanity for some multitasking people!

How do you make it work?

We believe Poznan is a place to be as well as in other cities in Poland, so at some point, we opened 2 other offices in Poland, in Wroclaw and Warsaw. However, we are proud that our local HQ is in Poznan, the city of growing IT talent pool, liberal and modern place. You could meet us at different meetups and conferences. Our people are tech-savvy, so as speakers and trainers of Azure, GCP or AWS they contributed to the growth. Nordcloud is a not just a company, it’s a real culture where employees enjoy spending time together both in and out of work, sharing good vibes and ensure we have a truly enjoyable work environment.  We basically share a similar vision of Nordcloud’s future. To be honest there are not too many options in Poland to work with cloud-native technologies with enterprise-class customers on such big scale projects. Believe it or not, we interview a lot of people, and that’s the source of this knowledge. We hired super engineers and recruiters and that scales well. At Nordcloud, recruitment is part of growth and is linked to the business. Partnership with core business matters a lot.

Why does recruitment matter for tech teams? Why should techies care about recruitment?

Darek: Recruitment is the first contact that new potential colleagues have with the company, our values and our way of working. Recruiters have a critical role in showing new joiners exactly why so many people believe Nordcloud is a great place and a good fit. Hence, it is absolutely crucial in my opinion that tech and recruitment must work together to align which message we want to convey to the future Nordcloudians, but also which types of people we want to accept. Also, in a fast-growing market such as new technologies, it is important that recruitment understands deeply how we understand the evolution of profiles we are hiring, and without tech and business link to talent acquisition, it would not be possible. 

Dorota:  All of this couldn’t happen if we don’t cooperate. For us, it’s kind of informal upskilling, sharing knowledge, inspiring each other to understand what’s behind the technology. In the end, they represent us in front of our clients both big and small, across regions.  How do we hire with the right level of skills and experience if we don’t know what our teams are actually doing? It’s not about keywords but a real understanding of the power in our people’s hands. Recruitment needs to be efficient as well as knowledgeable about the business, market and the company’s portfolio.

How can tech teams support recruitment?

Technology and business have to support recruitment by providing them with knowledge of who we want to hire and which skills are needed. This is a highly evolving market so we need to be in constant touch to align each other and support growing demands. Our recruitment uses the same tools and methodologies, agile processes, kanban boards and so much more. It helps them to prioritize their work and better steer in the right direction, for business and tech it gives transparency and ability to work in a better yet unstructured way. The key in hiring top talent is spotting fast and closing fast.

Tech supports recruitment in interviews - the second stage is assessing actual technical skills and fit to the tech teams. We cooperate with recruitment by making our time available to check technical assignments, do the interview and discuss with talent acquisition further steps. Techies also contribute to the technical assignment which is approved by practice and business unit leads. Our recruiters are pretty knowledgeable about the technical skills they are looking for, some of them are even Azure certified.

Summing up successful talent acquisition is when the cooperation between tech and recruitment exists in a continuous way. It is crucial to treat recruitment in an agile way where stakeholders are part of the process and not just decision gateways. Ultimately, candidates who apply and are accepted will be part of the Nordcloud family and interact with the whole company - in everyone’s interest is to hire the best fit - from a culture and skill perspective alike. 

Wanna be part of it?

We are always on the lookout for people with knowledge & experience in cloud technology. Let’s transform the world together.

All openings to be found here: https://nordcloud.com/careers/.