Aleksandra Gurskaite has earned her stripes in end-to-end recruitment with years of working in-house at rapidly growing innovative businesses across Europe. In her last project, she joined Mollie at a critical moment when Mollie's internal talent acquisition team faced increasing hiring demands and required support to achieve its high-volume recruitment goals.
Today she shares with us her experience working as an embedded recruiter for Mollie. She offers advice on the best recruitment practices and explains how she overcame the challenges she faced when hiring for a scale-up in a hyper-growth phase.
She also shares her views on the current recruitment landscape and how recent trends might influence the future of the talent industry.
1. Make it personal.
The candidate should always be your priority. It's important to make your candidates feel special, valued, and human. We're working in a candidate-driven market, so it's essential that we deliver an outstanding candidate experience, that we pay attention to our outreach, and that we always take time for feedback.
2. Work on decreasing the time to hire.
Losing a candidate because you were too slow might be one of the most painful reasons for having to look for someone new. Not only because you might have missed out on an amazing employee, but also because all the hard work you've put in until now will be lost. Of course, you can't always speed things up, but understanding the reason WHY you lose a candidate and streamlining your recruitment process will help you snatch up the best talent out there on time.
3. Build relationships with hiring managers.
Having strong professional relationships with your hiring managers will benefit you, your HMs, and your candidates. Invest in getting to know your HMs, understand their needs and communication style, and build trust. This is not only going to boost your performance, but it's also relevant for future networking.
I’m a goal-oriented person who thrives when working in a fast-paced environment. Once I set specific goals, I won’t stop until I achieve them. It is satisfying for me to see instant results in the form of data and numbers.
Besides, I’m highly motivated when I have a busy agenda. No challenge is too big for me as long as I manage expectations and prioritize accordingly. This is why I’m always preparing and planning my days in advance. However, I also leave time for unplanned and urgent matters - especially when working with start-ups.
Tip: Allocating time for a specific task helps to stay focused and get things done.
For the past 13 months, I was on assignment with Mollie, one of the fastest-growing fintech businesses in Europe. As a result of a rapid expansion, Mollie's internal talent acquisition team faced increasing hiring demands and required additional support in order to achieve its high-volume recruitment goals. I was embedded in-house with the Mollie internal team to help scale the Operations department. My objectives were to hit hiring targets of 5 hires per month across the board for the CDD/Remediation, Tech Support, Transaction Monitoring, Risk, Fraud and Disputes, and Strategy and Planning departments.
I arrived with an open mind and was ready to work on anything thrown my way. For that reason, I also focused on different consultative efforts, providing additional value-added insights and training to the internal team. For example, I set up salary benchmarking for KYC/CDD roles and I was training Mollie's internal recruiters in sourcing and recruitment techniques to successfully hire top talent.
I would say it was very similar to being an internal or corporate recruiter. I sourced, communicated with hiring managers, used data to influence decision-making, interviewed candidates, and helped scale up the company.
Mollie was going through a tremendous growth phase due to changes in the industry and buying habits influenced by the onset of the pandemic and the lockdowns. With most sales moving online, Mollie was taking over the SME and entrepreneurial markets and was scaling aggressively to match the customer demand. This meant a high number of open roles and the need to find experienced talent fast, without sacrificing quality for quantity.
I've partnered with my hiring managers to better understand their needs and the main pain points. We quickly established a good working relationship that allowed the hiring process to run smoothly. I focused on the priority roles and created a plan and routine which allowed me to have a continuously strong candidate pipeline.
I'm happy to have had the chance to work as Mollie's brand ambassador and help them expand to new locations. It has come with its own challenges and wins, but the experience has made me a better recruiter. Additionally, helping scale teams this fast has also been a very rewarding experience.
I loved the trust Mollie has put in me to represent their brand externally and further grow their name. Together with other Mollies, I attended recruitment events where I had the chance to present and promote Mollie, speaking about what Mollie was working on, and sharing our values and ambitions.