By navigating a remote world, companies today are finding innovative ways to adapt their recruiting strategy to continue building great teams. One of our clients SumUp continued hiring and on-boarding employees remotely. Olga Casian is a senior software engineer who joined SumUp exactly when Berlin was into total lock-down in April 2020. We had a friendly chat with Olga to get feedback on the recruitment process and how remote work impacted her life.

Olga used to be a graphic designer before moving into backend development. In the middle of this journey, she was working as a frontend specialist and learned several programming languages. Participation in various university programs and hackathons helped Olga to get a broader view of what is available on the market, and what she enjoys the most. For the last 7 years, she has been working as Java Engineer.


Remote work

Many companies in Europe stopped all the hiring activities due to lock-down. Some of them even didn't onboard new team members because they didn't know how to do it properly. When we asked Olga how was her experience with remote onboarding at SumUp, she said - "My off-boarding from the old company and on-boarding was fully remote. Nothing special except, I received my documents and laptop by post. Everything else was organized online, so I didn't feel any big difference."

In the past, remote employees have had a bad reputation. Many employers believed their workforce would be too easily distracted at home, where their managers couldn't keep an eye on their direct reports. Remote work was very rare a decade ago."This was not a new thing for me. I had a similar experience when working on a project in New York, we also started remotely. I personally don't see any decrease in productivity, so I can manage it all easily", says Olga.

"This is rather another possibility to try new ways of working, and to find something which works best for me"

Hiring Process

For Olga, the hiring process of SumUp seems very granular with big attention to details, and soft skills. She noticed - "They really want to communicate very close and even eat lunch together. All of that helps them to understand better your social, and soft skills.

"I liked the technical parts as well, in particular the questions and tasks. They were all related to the real work, and what people are doing on a daily basis. They're not checking something academical like many other companies."

This statement one more time shows how important are real-life tasks when assessing software engineers. Recruiters need to make sure that hiring managers are not using too many algorithmic tasks that are disliked by potential candidates.



Experience with Placesetters

Elmira asked Olga if she knew about SumUp before Recruitty approached her. Olga said - "Nope, I had no idea about them and was already in the process with 6 other companies simultaneously. When you reached out to me, I decided to give it a try, and I'm glad I did. I love working here, and it's almost 2.5 months."

When we asked what in particular Olga enjoyed about working with Recruitty, she mentioned speed and communication as the best parts of the process. Here is her full answer - "I really enjoyed communicating with Elmira, because she provided all the necessary information. I had everything needed, and she could answer all of my questions. The level of communication was just right... not too pushy like with many other agencies. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much."


As we can see, some companies find turnaround and continue hiring even during the COVID times. We encourage more startups to incorporate digital tools for hiring and onboarding. You can't lose the fight for talents because your tech stack is outdated.