School of Hiring

How you hire has the single biggest impact on the foundations of your team and thus your business. There is little action of more significance that you as a leader can undertake. Your job as a leader is to build a team that can carry the business forward successfully. Full stop. Hiring is where it all starts. This is the foundation of any great team. Without great hiring you can not build great teams or healthy successful organisations. There however is no one way to make a great hire but there are thousands of ways to have your hiring process negatively impact your business, your team, your product, your brand and much more.In fact, hiring is an all encompassing topic. It involves of course people operations but also sales, finance, procurement, marketing, and of course branding.Hiring is such a difficult, multi dimensional topic and sadly one all too often diluted purely to the act of interviewing. What is even more surprising is that business schools do not teach about hiring. In a recent discussion with a professor at an executive MBA program I was told that the topic of hiring is left to the university careers services who focus solely on how their students get hired after their course completion. The topic of how to hire, interview, market to or negotiate with candidates does not come up in the curriculum even though the university teaches marketing, branding, negotiations and much more. A missed opportunity if you ask me.This is why in today’s episode I will tackle the issue of how you as a leader can help yourself by identifying how you can improve your hiring process. In this episode I am joined by Claus Höfele, Head of Engineering at doctari group and previously Engineering Manager at HERE Technologies. Claus has 20+ years of experience working in the tech industry in Germany, Japan, and Australia and has spent the last 7 years developing his skills as a hiring manager. Furthermore, he is truly passionate about the topic of building teams and rivals me in his pursuit of improving how we hire.Things you will learn in this episode:1. Why is learning how to hire, such an important skill to invest time into.2. What are the obstacles that most hiring managers put in their own way when it comes to hiring?3. How effective collaboration across organisations helps you become better at hiring.Follow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

Recruitment is not only about hiring people from outside the organisation. As leaders, we need to also consider our current team and in particular the impact of hiring on retention and promotion. More precisely, what will be the impact of hiring someone from outside our company be on the current team and is it in the best interest of the business and organisation.By not enabling growth from within your ranks you can alienate your current team members and critically give them reason to look elsewhere for new opportunities.When should you promote, how do you manage hiring from within your ranks, and should you actually consider moving people internally before you think they are ready?These are just some of the topics I cover with Bastian Buch, Director Platform at Zalando and previously Director of Engineering at Delivery Hero. He is also the co-Founder of The Mentoring Club which is an incredible not for profit initiative connecting individuals with experienced mentors from around the world who donate their time to help others grow in their careers and ventures. Follow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

If we would teach an MBA class on how to hire what would we have in the curriculum? What are the essentials that all business leaders should learn when it comes to effective hiring and interviewing?Well, it is all great to talk about the theory but one of the things that we all too often fear talking about is failure. It is easy to find a leader who is happy to discuss their success story or the theory behind it but finding one who is prepared to dig into their past and discuss their mistakes, take account of them, reflect on them and discuss what they learned is another thing altogether.In this episode I am tremendously grateful to be joined by the Nate Glissmeyer who has spent a lot of his career at Amazon where he worked in the emerging Digital Services and Devices world, then called Kindle, but today spanning Fire TV and Alexa, as well as the tablet and e-reader businesses. Later he worked on the development of the hugely successful Amazon Kids+ product, which included a bespoke interface for kids before they could read or type.Nate has a passion for customer-centric innovation and breaking paradigms have always been at the core. His approach is most clearly defined as one of harmonize the three aspects of “What are we doing for our customers?” (Product), “Do they know about us?” (Marketing), and “are we building it in a way that keeps us flexible and responsive to their needs?” (Tech). Over the years, Nate has been a part of not only Amazon but also founded companies and helped scale organisations within various sectors including, ecommerce, travel, and SaaS. At his own admittance, he has made plenty of mistakes and learned from them. From first hand experience of working with Nate as a hiring executive, I can only attest to this. He is the most engaged and engaging hiring manager I have had the pleasure of working with. His processes are based on exceptional clarity of communication and intent. There is little margin for error and yet candidates unanimously rate him as the best interviewer they have spoken with in their career.So how would we structure the MBA class on effective hiring with Nate?In this episode you will learn:1. What hiring failures to avoid.2. What can we learn from some past failures (both Nate's and mine)3. If we were to teach an MBA class on hiring what would be in the curriculumFor more insights head over to www.schoolofhiring.comFollow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

Any hiring process is a series of opportunities to make a statement.  How do you use your hiring process as a messaging tool? What do you communicate to the world through your hiring process? What statement are you making about you and your business?Hiring is about how you build a picture, support it with evidence and engage your audience. It is not about a job ad but about how you structure your hiring process to be an effective communication tool with candidates from initial contact, through interviews and onto onboarding.To cover this topic with me I have invited Alara Vural onto the podcast. A communications coach, NLP practitioner and messaging specialist. Her work focuses specifically on helping business leaders communicate what they do in a way that's clear, inspiring & memorable across multiple channels including pitch decks, websites, employer branding material and videos. All this to inspire your target audience to take action.Follow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

Design thinking is a process that helps organizations solve problems in a creative and user-centric way. It's often used in product design, but it can also be applied to other areas, so why not apply it to hiring?We all know that hiring is a critical part of growing a successful business. In fact we have covered many dimensions of this throughout past episodes ranging from interview preparation, importance of product vision, hiring for culture fit, aligning with candidates on mission, vision and values and much much more.In the final episode of this series I would like to tie many of these points together and discuss the use of design thinking to help you hire better.With me to discuss this I have best selling author, Jodi Brandstetter. Jodi has 20 years of HR and recruiting experience and has authored the book Hiring By Design and HR By Design.Follow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

Perception is everything they say so how do we set perception in recruitment? In past episodes we have explored the importance of your hiring process and the impact it has on a candidates perception, in fact, the markets perception of you as an employer. We have also looked at how data can be used to improve the candidate experience and dived into the importance of mission, vision, and values in hiring as well as how team culture should be part of hiring. Today I want to put all of this into perspective and hopefully bring these elements together for our listeners by exploring how all of these elements are essential in terms of your employer brand both for new hires as well as existing staff.In this episode I speak with Georgiana Ghiciuc, PhD, an entrepreneur, CEO, marketing consultant and employer branding expert.We discuss:1. What really is employer branding?2. Why does employer branding matter and how does it impact our business bottom line?3. How does employer brand impact retention?4. How you can use hiring to improve your employer brand?And much much more!Follow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

We all know that companies thrive on data and can use data to great benefit (as well as exploit it unfortunately) but how does data fit into hiring?In fact, what is Data-Driven recruiting? What does it mean for the candidates and for organizations? Should we fear it? Is it hiring by numbers and how does it impact the human aspect of employing people?In this episode I, Konstanty Sliwowski, have 2 special guests that have a lot of hands on experience in bringing data to life in hiring processes and have seen the good, the bad and the ugly and are here to share their insights.We are joined by Yas Ahmad, Global VP Talent at HelloFresh and Robbie Simpson, Lead Tech Talent Acquisition Manager at HelloFresh to look at how data can be put to use for the benefit of candidates and companies.What you will learn in this episode:What is data driven hiring?How can hiring managers use data to hire faster and better?What data should we be tracking to hire better?In this episode we also refer to previous episodes Importance of Mission, Vision & Values in Hiring https://open.spotify.com/episode/1TuiS8MAdimJKTGJA4WuNl?si=c8825b2215b142aaHiring for Culture Fithttps://open.spotify.com/episode/02vhhTtMqd405EWf33JfUn?si=3d1473e120564a00We also refer to the book Start with Why by Simon Sinek https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Simon-Sinek/dp/1591846447/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3ICN5MEPG3QO2&keywords=start+with+why&qid=1649927837&sprefix=start+%2Caps%2C156&sr=8-1Follow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

Companies talk about Mission, Vision and Values but does defining these do anything for creating a better business, improving your ability to attract and retain talent or have a more engaged workforce? And even if it does how do you address this topic and translate it into reality?We see companies state their mission and vision proudly on their homepage, in advertising and of course in job ads. We walk into offices and see posters proclaiming the company core values and have been witness to some bombastic claims about this. In reality though, does it even really matter? Do people care?To discuss this with me in this episode I have Emmi Meurling, Director of Product Management at Care.com and previously Product Director at Delivery Hero. In addition to this, Emmi advises companies on defining mission, vision and values propositions and bringing them to life within organisations. In this episode you will learn among other things:- The importance of mission, vision and values- How to define your mission, vision and values as a company and as a team- How to use mission, vision and values to engage candidates and represent your business effectivelyFor more resources visit www.schoolofhiring.com and check out our other podcast episodes.Enjoy!Follow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

In this episode Konstanty Sliwowski and Freddy Friedman address a topic that is critical in candidate engagement and decision making and yet is often overlooked. Product Vision.Freddy Friedman has decades of experience in product leadership having served as CPO at companies such as Glispa, Smaato and more recently as a Managing Director of TravelAudience. He shares with us a wealth of knowledge gained across a career that has seen him experience, the good, the bad and the weird.In this podcast episode you will learn:1. Why product vision is critical to successful hiring and retention2. How you can improve how you represent product vision in hiring processes3. How to use product vision to allow candidates to self select themselves4. What we can learn from product strategy that will help us hire better5. Top advice from an executive on how to improve your hiring gameYou can also learn more about how you can hire better at www.schoolofhiring.com as well as in our other podcast episodes available on all major podcasting platforms as well as here https://schoolofhiring.com/podcast/Follow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

Kristen Mashburn is the founder of KPMashburn, a consultancy firm focused on helping organisations and their leaders build high performing cultures.Aside from a big smile and a lot of laughs, Kristen also has a wealth of knowledge about culture, hiring and communication that is exceptionally valuable to any organisation looking for an edge in hiring and retention.Her work is centred around using culture to create better productivity, drive communication that within organisations, improve retention, as well as promote star performers and finally, build a cultural reputation that attracts top talent to join the organisation.In this episode, Konstanty Sliwowski, the founder of the School of Hiring speaks to Kristen about all of this and more.You can expect to learn more about:1. the importance of culture in hiring2. how to define culture3. how hiring for culture fit is a false economy4. what is the difference between culture fit, culture add, and culture adaptability5. what culture traits define star performers6. how to use culture as part of the hiring processEnjoy the episode and do share your thoughts in the comments.For more information about improving your hiring and interviewing practices visit www.schoolofhiring.comFollow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

You have a team of 10-20 engineers and are ready to scale. Clearly, you need to plan headcount, recruitment and budgets, but how do you go about this? With so much uncertainty and constant change in a start-up and scale-up environment where do you begin?Don't fret, we have you covered on the School of Hiring podcast!In this episode, Konstanty Sliwowski, a veteran of 20 years in the world of recruitment and executive search speaks to Alex Allan, an interim CPO and a respected engineering and product consultant who focuses on scaling small engineering and product teams and taking them to the next level. Alex has worked for Awin, Urban Sports Club and recently GotPhoto.com as an interim CPO. He has planned and executed scaling of teams across multiple organisations and knows what steps to take when you are getting ready to go to the next level. He also knows what traps are lurking and shares with us how they can be avoided.The three takeaways from this podcast:Engagement of teams and timePlan ahead in 3-6 month cycles with the teamsHow to prepare yourself and your team for interviewsFollow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

Traditional recruitment is over while companies experience The Great Resignation. In this special episode Konstanty Sliwowski, founder School of Hiring and Managing Director of Caissa Recruitment speaks to Oliver Aust, founder and CEO of Eo Ipso Communications and respected author on the topic of executive communications and branding, about the rising role of employer branding in attracting and retain top talent.Tune into this episode to find out📺 How talent perceives potential employers🔝 How to update your company’s brand to attract the right people🔥 What recruiting has to do with energyIf you find the episode helpful, please share it with your colleagues and friends and give us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.If you have questions, or if you are interested in the topic of hiring better and would like to be featured on the podcast, please connect with Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn.Thank you for listening!Follow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

Stephen Nock is leading Customer Experience at Ada Health, a global health company created by doctors to improve human health by transforming knowledge into better outcomes. Their product is the world's most popular symptom assessment app, with 10 million users and 20 million completed assessments. Every three seconds, someone turns to Ada for personal health guidance.In such an environment and with so many people dependant on the service, customer experience really matters.This is also why Konstanty Sliwowski, founder of School of Hiring  and a veteran recruiter and recruitment executive speaks with Stephen about what we can learn from customer experience professionals and how these learnings can be applied to hiring, interviewing and employer branding.After all, candidates are your customers and the product they are buying is you, your vision, values and business.Follow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

Füsun is a customer and technology obsessed executive leader. She is an engineer at heart with experience in global product development, digital services, scaling and optimising organisations which offer digital solutions. Among her past employers she can count Microsoft, XING, OLX and Axel Springer where she held positions of VP Engineering, Director of Engineering and CTO among others.Currently Füsun is Head of Global Transportation Engineering and Product at Wayfair.'Think big, learn by incremental change' is her style. She love's turning organisational and product development challenges into opportunities of success.She advocates agile and lean processes in organisations supporting diversity, mastery in technology, innovation and continuous improvement. To her the success of today's businesses and the secret potion for high performing happy teams is based on effective hiring, understanding the users and executing in the flat management hierarchies.Throughout her career, Füsun has hired and onboarded 100's of engineering and product professionals. She has learned some great lessons, as well as at her own admittance made her fair share of mistakes,  which she is sharing in this podcast with the School of Hiring's Konstanty Sliwowski.Follow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

Artem Demchenkov is an experienced CTO, startup co-founder, team leader, and architect with vast professional experience in different IT areas including fintech, social networks, media, games and analytical systems.Artem is the co-founder and ex-CTO of Billie.io, a Berlin-based fintech startup providing innovative B2B payment services from short-term liquidity to online payments.  Billie was founded in 2016 by the former founders of Zencap (later acquired by Funding Circle) and currently has 110+ employees from over 35 countries.Following his experience in building high performance tech teams, Artem has now co-founded Teametry, an engineering management software that utilises data, analytical systems and AI to build, manage, and scale high-performing teams.In this episode, Konstanty and Artem discuss the very hotly debated (and often contested) topic of tech assignments, tech tasks, and technical tests that all too often are used in interview processes.Do we need tech tasks? Can we hire engineers without a take home challenge? How can we use tech assessments to better engage with candidates?These and many other questions are up for discussion in the latest episode of School of Hiring.Follow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

Jan Hendrik Ansink is a serial founder and currently the CEO of volders GmbH (http://www.volders.de). He is also an angel investor at Tillhub, Oceans Apart, Lumiform, Superchat, and Taledo. As a serial entrepreneur and company builder, Jan has long appreciated that the secret to success is finding, engaging, hiring and crucially onboarding top talent. In fact, Jan believes that onboarding is the critical factor that defines the future success of his people as well as their tenure within a company.In this episode of the School of Hiring podcast, Jan shares with us his passion for hiring, onboarding and working with incredible people. He also shares his wealth of learnings and things he wishes he knew before.Tune in for a fun and engaging conversation with an experienced founder, CEO and  leader.Follow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

Yasmine is founder of Negotiatress, an initiative to help women negotiate authentically for themselves without feeling like they have to give up on their identity. She is a certified mediator and group facilitator with 10 years of experience in conflict resolution in the political, NGO and private sector.Konstanty Sliwowski  is the founder of the School of Hiring and the CEO of Caissa, a technology focused executive search consultancy. He has 20 years experience in hiring across the EMEA and APAC regions. During his career he has interviewed over 10,000 candidates and personally facilitated 100's of hires. His experience is a treasure trove of anecdotes, personal stories and some mistakes that serve as a backdrop for conversations recorded in this podcast series. In this episode of the School of Hiring, Konstanty and Yasmine discuss how negotiating is perceived differently by women and men. They dive into the topic of how negotiating can be better understood by the different sexes and what impact this can have on diversity and inclusion hiring efforts.Yasmine and Konstanty also take on the topic of interviewing and generally hiring. They look at how hiring processes can be changed to be more inclusive and less intimidating for candidates as well as how organisations can better address the general market need for more diversity hiring.Follow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

Davin Pidoto is Engineering Manager at Care.com. He is an Australian who has relocated to Berlin not once but twice and has a very personal take on both being hired remotely as well as building and onboarding remote teams.In our podcast we focus on the topic of remote hiring and onboarding and the importance of the hiring process in making this a success.The last year has been quite a ride and of course there is a lot of talk about remote working, the future of work, the challenges of remote hiring. Countless blogs and webinars have covered this. What is interesting to see first hand though is the changes leaders such as Davin have made on the ground to the hiring process to make it effective in a real world remote setup.We also discuss the constant question of when does onboarding start. I know that to many listeners it may seem rather obvious that onboarding starts when the candidate actually starts in their job. I am however of the opinion that onboarding starts with the first contact someone has with the company. Does Davin agree?Finally, we also look at advice we would give to engineering leaders who are onboarding remote staff into a hybrid team as well as the mistakes and lessons learned throughout the last year.Follow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

Stefan Berndt is the Head of HR at Treasury Intelligence Solutions (tis.biz), a global leader in managing corporate payments. TIS is a company with an incredible history, impressive management style and is well on its way to becoming the next European unicorn. In fact, it has been named by the Financial Times as one of "Europe’s Fastest Growing Companies" for 2019.  All this success though rests on a carefully planned approach to people, recruitment and hiring. This is also where Stefan comes in. He is a passionate HR leader with a track record of helping fast-growth companies mature their HR processes, especially in regards to how to “find the right people, in the right place, and at the right time”.Stefan speaks with Konstanty Sliwowski and they discuss the place of recruitment in an organisation and how to align it with the business. Is it HR or does it hold a different function in a business? How should you position, plan, and execute hiring? How can you scale a business with purpose and the right people. These are just some of the questions they touch on.Follow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog

Jack Godau is an empathetic, cooperative and passionate leader, with a career as a technical leader in strategy consulting at Schutze AG and more recently in eHealth as a VP of Software Engineering. Jack has a wealth of experience in helping organisations of all types and sizes to manage their Digital Evolution by providing technical and strategic leadership, guidance and coaching. He is highly proficient in team building and in fostering an inclusive culture to enable local and remote teams to really succeed. Jack, speaks with Konstanty Sliwowski about the high's and low's of hiring and discusses why many hiring managers focus their energy when recruiting on the wrong questions.Follow Konstanty Sliwowski on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sliwowskik/For more insights check out www.schoolofhiring.com and www.caissarecruitment.com/blog