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Getting to know our future teams

As it’s probably the case with most startups, the biggest brake in our growth is the difficulty in finding the right talent. It’s hard to find smart, motivated and ambitious people who are a good fit at the right time.

In this post I am trying to reflect on what we have done so far, why we have failed and what we could do in the future. If you are reading this and are interested in working with us, I hope it gives you insights into how we think and what is a good way of connecting with us. Originally these ideas were shared between our teams while going through different interview process — sharing our learnings and failures.

It’ s a work in progress. With every interview and new person we meet we are learning and adding new thoughts to this reflection.

At itnig we have an internal HR team focussed on growing the different startup teams. With the exception of Camaloon who counts with their own HR team, I am thus in contact with each startup to understand their current and future needs. In this way, we have the advantage of being able to join efforts between startups and to find a the right fit for a candidate — it’s like a puzzle but with multiple places that connect to each piece. As the teams are working mostly on technological solutions we are looking for talented developers, product owners and designers as well as sales and marketing passionates.

Being one of the biggest stoppers in our growth means that we give the process of recruitment a high importance — a lot of what we do evolves around it and we have thought long and thoroughly about how to design a process of finding and connecting with the person in question which we try to transmit through all teams in our organization. Just as in the beginning of our startup journey the first new team members were old friends, colleagues and friends of friends, now as we scale up we have to find new ways of connecting with promising new developers, marketers, sales professionals.

When we call or invite a candidate for an interview we are most interested in finding out about the person and not so much in talking about us. Our first goal is setting the stage for an interesting conversation, giving all our attention to the person and bringing her or him to talk. Setting the right tone for an interesting conversation begins even before you lock eyes or shake hands — it’s in the preparation. To us it’s important to inform the candidate beforehand whom she or he will be meeting, what to expect of the conversation and how to continue in getting to know each other. It’s a long process of mutual discovery which can take months — a lot of times we won’t match the first time but keep in touch with talented people for the future.

What does it mean to interview at itnig?

These are a few ground rules we set ourselves:

  • We aim to give a brief introduction to situate the person: Who are you? Why are we here? — We try to find things in common just with the goal to establish a good ground for conversation
  • We are curious to learn about the candidate so we’ll try to let you speak
  • We ask open questions, it’s probably also what we encounter in our day to day lives
  • We try to remember that even though we can talk all we want about values, what really transmits them is our behavior (humility, curiosity, sense of humor, respect while treating other people, full attention to the candidate instead of computers or phones…)
  • As general traits for next team members we look for intelligence, flexibility, drive, ambition and a hands-on resolutive person — with the idea that this person can replace us and take over any part in our companies

Before the interview process

Before we reach out to potential candidates we want to be sure we are all on the same boat and aligned in what we are looking for in a person. We try to stick to these ideas in all the recruitment processes we do.

  • We want to establish a clear idea of technical / professional skills
  • We try to define what personality traits are important to succeed in this position (curiosity, team player, communication, organized..)
  • We agree on the frame of the process in terms of timings, people involved, steps of interviews and if we want to involve extras like written or technical tests, simulations (like role-plays), team get-togethers, cross-references, past work to check…
  • We aim to set our expectations for the future of this role, how the team will evolve, what we imagine to change in the next few months before reaching out to candidates
  • We strive to work out the big picture and convey what we think is the most interesting and appealing in this specific position

Only if we as an already existing team are clear and aligned on what we are looking for while talking to new people can we present a coherent picture and come to a conclusion.

Who we are as a company — What is in it for the candidate?

Other than talking about our individual company history, current daily work for this position and the vision and outlook for the future we think it’s also interesting to give a general overview of itnig and what this means for the development of the individual and the organization as a whole.

At itnig this means:

  • Technological base
  • Innovative products in their respective industries
  • Hard working, effort, do-it attitude & focus on execution
  • Ecosystem with shared open office space & events
  • Sharing of knowledge between different startups

We see itnig as a space open to learn and to grow, an honest and transparent environment with its feet on the ground, where we value effort, learn from our mistakes by trying and are focussed on the execution.

What is important to know?

In general, when I get together with a candidate for any of the positions, I am curious to learn about past experiences and educational background, to understand his/her current situation, expectations for the future, other interests and motivation for our particular startup.

  1. Reason for leaving current job. A straight question will probably get a superficial answer, so I try to look for details. Is the company / position in danger? Did the person disagree with team or company strategy? Is he/she doing a good job?
  2. Plans for future. I try to find out what the person is looking for in his/her future. What does he/she want to learn? How does the person imagine to work? What can we offer to the personal growth of the person?
  3. Personal life and extracurricular activities. A lot of the times what a person does in his/her ‘spare time’ says much more about him/her than the actual job. What are the causes they care about? Any hobbies? Sports? I try to find out what makes them tick, what moves them and where they see their most value.
  4. Motivation or interest in working with us. I ask the person why she/he is here. What are their expectations? What do they know about us? What is most exciting for them in our job offer or company? Ask how they chose which company to apply to, what they are looking for and whom we are competing against. I think it’s important to leave a lot of space for questions from the candidate.

How can we find out about personality?

After the technical and professional capacities of the person in question are clear to me, I am curious to find out more about him or her in terms of personality, values, hobbies and ambitions for the future. As this is a tricky part, we’ve tried to come up with some questions. These are also questions I ask myself and often stumble with the answer 😉

  • What are the qualities you appreciate most in your co-workers?
  • What traits make a person likeable?
  • What’s the most interesting you have learned this year?
  • What changes have you made in working with others to be more effective at work?
  • What extracurricular activities did you do in college?
  • Side projects?
  • Can you describe a time when your work was criticized?
  • Have you ever misjudged someone?
  • What are you especially good at compared to others?
  • What’s the one accomplishment you’re most proud of and why?
  • What do you think is the most important aspect or ability of your craft?
  • What do you want to learn in this year?
  • How do you inform yourself of changes in your industry?
  • What publications do you read?
  • What are you looking for in a company?
  • In what kind of work environment do you prefer to work?

I want to enjoy the conversation, make a friend, be curious!

In the end, there are no right or wrong answers but it’s a way of discovering more about the other person. What are their values? What is important to them and where do they compromise? Other than the professional talent, it’s also important for me to see somebody we are looking forward to meeting every day and spending the day together, solving problems and sometimes getting stuck on hard ones together.

What motivates us?

This reflection is not only important to do with the candidate, but also with ourselves. I as person on the other side of the table am conveying the same messages and am being just as scrutinised as the candidates.

I would say that as an organization as a whole this is what makes us come to the office every morning:

  • Being part of a successful business and seeing its growth
  • Challenging ourselves and exploring something new
  • Advancing alongside just as talented people whom we admire
  • Seeing our impact and knowing the mission of the organization
  • Tackling a difficult problem

For you as a candidate I imagine that this might be a very important part in the interview process: To be able to see the team you hopefully look forward to working with. It’s probably one of the biggest motivation being surrounded by smart people and doing things together.

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The hardships of recruiting developers

Every week we take half an hour to talk just about any topic that crossed our minds during the last days and create a podcast for you (Listen to it in Spanish here and subscribe to our feed). We call it an Open Mic Podcast as we want to invite different people to participate, new ideas to take form and to shed light on various experiences and perspectives on business development.

Recording Podcast #17 at itnig

Today’s topic is about growing our team: How to recruit and convince new team members to join us in our endeavours to create and offer new products. For this Podcast #17 we have invited Gerard Clos, developer at Factorial. Together with Jordi Romero, Masumi Mutsuda, César Migueláñez and Bettina Gross we speak about how each found their way to itnig and how we are identifying, selecting and convincing new people from all disciplines to join us.

Gerard first heard about the project exactly to the day one year ago when Pau reached out to him by email with the subject line ‘Employee #1 in a new startup in Barcelona’. At that time, Gerard was working at another startup and after a few beers with Pau and Jordi, a mutual positive feeling and interesting technological challenges explained he decided to join Factorial as the first employee.

“In the beginning when hiring the first employees, the whole team was involved in the process.”

After asking for support of our direct network, old colleagues and friends at a certain point in time you can no longer rely on this group for finding new talent. So we had to take another approach. Now at itnig we work with a small Talent Acquisition team that collaborates directly with the team looking for a new hire to be able to combine well organized processes, a throughout selection and the technical knowledge.

How to be sure of technical knowledge?

Of course we spend a lot of our time in the interview and screening process talking about the actual work, about the topics that will be part of everyday work reality but through words alone oftentimes it is hard to judge a person’s skills. That’s why we like to use technical tests and see them as a big part in our recruitment processes — no matter the profile.

“The technical test should test what the candidate will be doing on an every day basis instead of looking for errors or possible gaps.”

The technical test is important and it is tricky to get it right. It needs a balance of difficulty — not too easy but also not to difficult making the test seem unrelated to real life problems. It’s a complex topic as a technical test can also be badly received. A candidate might even get the feeling you’re asking for free work so we try to make it very clear that this test will not be used for our work.

“Make the test so obviously unusable that this thought might not even occur. Create a parallel universe to your startup to test for skills without giving room to suspicion.”

However in the end, no matter the times you have met in person, talked over the phone or slack — as some companies might suggest — it is hard to understand another human being. We can always be wrong or change with time.

If you are curious to hear more about the topic and to hear Gerard’s full story, listen to our Podcast #17 in Spanish here:

Listen to it in Spanish here or

Subscribe to our feed.

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Metric based business decisions

Every week we take half an hour to talk just about any topic that crossed our minds during the last days and create a podcast for you (Listen to it in Spanish here and subscribe to our feed). We call it an Open Mic Podcast as we want to invite different people to participate, new ideas to take form and to shed light on various experiences and perspectives on business development.

You will hear Bernat, CEO at itnig, César, Product Director at Factorial and Jordi, CEO at Factorial discussing different topics with guests from our start-up ecosystem in Barcelona. This week Pau Ramon, CTO at Factorial, joins us.

This podcast #16 is special in the sense that we have three Factorial team members with us and will be able to learn more about how they measure and make use of metrics in their business decisions.

Pau and Jordi started working on Factorial a bit over a year ago but the idea was already formed a while earlier, while talking over a beer with Bernat. At this time they were working at Redbooth and thought it to be a good moment for change, to start something new, to create a team and to have sense of ownership that they no longer felt at Redbooth.

Pau Ramon has been working in tech for over 10 years, he studied multimedia and then dove right into web. Fascinated by internet companies, he started helping a Barcelona company that was creating a social network for models. He was working alone at the time, had to start creating a team — Almost by accident he became CTO. Through this experience he learned a lot and decided to continue in this direction.

He went to the West Coast of the US for a conference, missed the flight back on purpose and stayed looking to start something himself.

There he met Pablo whom we would later work with at Redbooth and that’s how we actually got started talking about metrics today.

“My role is not CEO, I like to do the product behind the business.”

At Redbooth I learned how to measure the success or failure of a business, to undo decisions that have been taken. I like to have one metric as indicator for the whole business and then segment it further based on funnel. We assign one metric to one function within the business or one person within the company. It’s important that marketing, product, sales, support…have their own metric and that they can see that the work they are doing are impacting the business positively. At Factorial for example, all metrics are always visible and every Friday we make a point of going through them together at our all-hands meeting.

“Metrics — a complex topic summarized in one number.”

When we started out building the product at Factorial and were not yet at the stage of customer acquisition, we took ‘activation’ of our companies as our main measure. It’s somewhat of a North Star — Something to guide you when you take a decision.

“I prefer an approximation to no orientation.”

To learn more about how they use metrics, what tool they use to measure and how they base their decisions on these numbers, listen to this week’s podcast here:

Podcast #16 with Pau Ramon

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Podcast #15: Ubaldo Huerta talking about another kind of entrepreneurship

Every week we take half an hour to talk just about any topic that crossed our minds during the last days and create a podcast for you (Listen to it in Spanish here and subscribe to our feed). We call it an Open Mic Podcast as we want to invite different people to participate, new ideas to take form and to shed light on various experiences and perspectives on business development.

This week’s Podcast #15 is opened by Masumi with our regular participants Bernat and Jordi, whom you already know. As a special guest today we welcome Ubaldo Huerta and talk about another kind of entrepreneurship, a slow growth that is not VC fueled. Listen to our podcast on Youtube or subscribe to our RSS to be always up to date.

Ubaldo Huerta, a young entrepreneur who learned to program at home thanks to his mother, left Cuba in the beginning of the 90s to San Francisco to live the early years of .com companies. In this new industry everybody was looking for developers, companies growing like mushrooms but also closing again. After a few years in this frenetic environment Ubaldo decides to leave on a sabbatical and — burned-out — wanders through Europe. He arrives in the Raval neighborhood of Barcelona and is mesmerized. Quickly he decides to stay and migrates from the US just as he had years earlier from Cuba. In Barcelona he felt right at home:

“An organized place with ticks of a third world country.”

In Barcelona Ubaldo becomes an entrepreneur out of necessity: “I was earning a lot of money, but in Spain the job market was more complicated as there was no need for software developers at that moment. It was also the time of transition to dedicated servers, when you could get a server for a few dollars and build it up yourself. You could start out, try something without a high investment for infrastructure.”

Ubald started Loquo, a kind of Craigslist, a classified site from his living room. He starts with scraping email addresses from forums, sending out emails to these accounts and commenting on all kinds of threads. He starts out working on his own, with his own resources:

“I prefer to do something with my hands, spend my time writing code even though it might take time, I don’t need to live in the times of venture capital.”

“Everybody should do what he does best. If I had to spend my time raising money, talking to investors, I would go crazy.”

And after a while eBay becomes interested and ends up buying Loquo to expand their own service of auctions. Since then Ubaldo has moved on to many more interesting projects and is now busy with Fonoma.

When I create something I need to connect with my environment.

If you are curious to know what Ubaldo is up to now, go ahead and listen to the full Podcast #15: Youtube — iTunes — RSS

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How to start a business from scratch

Every week we take half an hour to talk just about any topic that crossed our minds during the last days and create a podcast for you (Listen to it in Spanish here and subscribe to our feed). We call it an Open Mic Podcast as we want to invite different people to participate, new ideas to take form, and to shed light on various experiences and perspectives on business development.

Continue reading “How to start a business from scratch”