What did you do before you came to Talent Place?
Just like at Talent Place – I was a recruiter. At the beginning of my recruiting career, I focused on translator roles. I realized end-to-end projects: from the moment I received inquiries from production, through the entire onboarding process, to the delivery of translator teams. During my career as a Vendor Manager, I started to become interested in other roles as well, and that’s how I became a freelance recruiter for various positions. As the IT market became popularized, roles in this field also appeared in my area of interest. And so for several years now, the IT market has been my speciality.
What does your role at Talent Place consist of? What do you do?
I have been working at Talent Place since March. At the moment I’m on the team of recruiters for one of the IT companies, but I also do recruiting for other projects. I combine the role of RPO recruiter and freelancer.
What does RPO cooperation look like from your perspective? What does such work give you?
I think, first of all, a sense of security. You are in a team and for several months you are assured projects, working for one client. You know that what was agreed at the very beginning of the cooperation is in force. You know the team you are working with and you begin to feel part of it, part of the company you are recruiting for. You know the people responsible, the decision makers. Simply put – it’s easier for you. It’s not like you get a new project every now and then and have to start all over again. Thanks to RPO recruiting and joining a team of internal recruiters, I know what a company requires, what methods it prefers and what it does not support. Besides, RPO recruiting is also a cool way to deepen my IT knowledge, because we take part in technical talks in internal teams. I appreciate this very much. Sometimes, already as a freelancer, I do other projects, outside of IT, so as not to fall into a routine. I value this kind of choice and take advantage of it, switching between projects from different industries.
What does your work day look like?
I work 100% remotely. First of all, I focus on RPO processes. I check for responses from candidates, questions about processes or team meetings. Basically, my day looks like this: I conduct searches for candidates, answer their questions or arrange meetings with them. It’s not easy, sometimes I have to work hard to get the candidate and all the necessary people together for a technical meeting – especially since there has to be at least one architect and developer from the team during the meeting, and each of them usually has a busy schedule. If I manage to arrange all this, I take a break from RPO processes and switch to other projects. Besides that, I also complete reports on the activities carried out or do some other activities: I try to plan my day in such a way as to make it as varied as possible.
What challenges did you happen to face?
Certainly one challenge is the issue of rates for the role. Clients, especially corporate ones, often have undisclosed rates, and nowadays candidates actually want to know the financial details at the beginning of the interview. And it happens that candidates end the interview the moment I say that unfortunately I can’t give a fork, because corporate rules don’t allow it.We had several meetings with the team to figure out how to deal with this problem. Because the market – especially in programming – is such that it is often the candidates who set the conditions. My teammates and I had to figure out what and how to tell programmers so that they would even want to talk to us, the recruiters. We came up with several ways. We are currently testing them and seeing that they are starting to work. The second challenge in the recruiting I do is that programmers are now under heavy attack and often don’t even respond to offers from recruiters. And here, too, we have to be creative: for example, we have started, together with the team, to come up with funny, unusual message texts to candidates that will catch their attention.
How can the Talent Place community help in the work of an RPO recruiter?
Both I and my teammates benefit from the support of HR experts located in the Community. This is helpful if only for the classified rates described above and how to deal with such a problem. We all share ideas on this topic. Being able to ask another recruiter who is running a similar process if, for example, there are any candidates who just happened to drop out in his recruitment, and if he could recommend them for one of the RPO recruitments – this is very valuable. In this way we bypass time-consuming sourcing on LinkedIn and the need to contact candidates from scratch, only to get a lead on a specific, open-minded person right away, and can thus speed up the whole process considerably.
And, well, you can also get a kick out of it (laughs). I’ll honestly admit that I had a moment when I needed support. Then a friend, BUM, called me, we talked, and it was very helpful. I learned a different perspective, a different point of view. I felt taken care of. I also like that in the Talent Place Community, even though we work remotely, there is such a sense of being part of a team, and that as RPO recruiters we work in internal teams. We have a dedicated HR Business Partner who is very helpful and often helps us with the administrative side or with client contact issues. If there is a problem, we think together on a solution that will satisfy both us and the client. Recruiters are not left alone, they can count on support and help in organizing their work.
To whom would you recommend working as an RPO recruiter?
I would definitely recommend it to my fellow recruiters, because I think it is something cool, something completely different. On the one hand, you have a “full-time” job, for one client, but on the other hand, you don’t sit in an office and you can combine it with individual assignments. I always speak about cooperation with Talent Place in only positive terms. We work remotely, but from time to time we also have the opportunity to see each other in person, for example at breakfast with the whole team. And that’s great. You feel support from all sides here, you can see that Talent Place as a company wants to grow with us, wants us to be part of the team, satisfied and eager to carry out more projects and achieve the best results. These activities I mentioned earlier are great for this. I’ve only been working here a few months, but I already feel like I’ve been here for several years. We have become so in tune with the community.
