How to Attract, Develop and Retain Talent
Six HR leaders share best practices, 100+ Greek startups hiring, funding rounds, a YC startup, early days of Workable, news and more
Happy Friday! Welcome to Hunting Greek Unicorns #25. I’m Alex, a product guy turned VC, and every two weeks I send out a newsletter with everything you need to know about the Greek startup industry.
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🔍 How to attract, develop and retain world-class talent
The most valuable resource a startup has is talent. Naturally, when talking about startups and growth a lot of answers come down to attracting, developing and retaining people. So, this week I invited a group of really talented professionals from different functions within HR, from Greek startups and not only, and asked them to share their learnings and insights on:
Attracting top candidates amidst rising competition for talent
Changes in how recruiting is done post COVID-19 outbreak
Developing talent inside an organization
Employee retention and company culture as teams scale
A HUGE thank you to Adonis Garefalakis (Director of People & Culture at Signal Group), Eftychia Karavelaki (Principal Recruiter at Workable), Elena Lymperi (People & Culture Partner at GWI), Eleni Kourmentza (Head of People & Culture at LearnWorlds), Nikos Bozikis (Head of Talent at Blueground) and Sanne Goslinga (Director of Talent at Marathon Venture Capital). They were all willing to share their precious time, stories, and insights with me and I deeply appreciate it.
Attracting top candidates amidst rising competition for talent
How can a startup recruit top notch talent? Everyone agreed that competition for talent in the startup world is rising. The demand is rapidly increasing at a global scale. Remote work, and its acceleration due to COVID-19, is opening up a far larger market for companies to recruit from, but at the same time is creating more opportunities for candidates. Inside Greece, the recent startup boom has generated even more competition between companies looking for great people to join their journeys.
More and more teams are now hiring candidates to work remotely. This has led to an increase in international applicants, diversity and the pool of available candidates in general. Nonetheless, this means more opportunities for candidates, thereby causing higher turnover to some extent. In Greece, we are noticing a significant repatriation wave. People who lived and worked abroad, although having very successful careers, they have decided for different reasons to return to their home country. Many Greeks and non-Greeks came to work from the country during the pandemic, when their offices temporarily closed. Now, a high percentage of them are looking for a remote job from Greece or a job in a Greek startup. This is huge if you think that some years ago, brain drain was a reality.
Eftychia Karavelaki, Workable
So in this environment, what are the key elements in attracting the right candidates? Most of the answers were related to the following themes:
Build a strong company culture
Offer opportunities to the employees to learn & grow
Have a great leadership team
Make attracting candidates everyone’s business
Set up a competitive compensation and benefits package
Provide positive candidate experience throughout the interview process from a well-crafted job description to providing feedback after the process
Establish the right talent acquisition channels
Candidates are no longer just looking to add a big name to their resume or be paid top dollar. They apply to jobs because of the company’s culture. It is therefore extremely important for companies to showcase their culture. And by that, I don’t mean having a ping pong table or beer Fridays, but rather what working life at the company looks like. These are aspects such as ownership, accountability, flexibility and work life balance. In particular, work life balance is something that the next generation of workers is looking for. They want a job that fits their lifestyle.
Furthermore, learning is something that should never end and top talent is always keen to learn more. This does not mean that every company needs to create a robust Learning & Development department, but they do need to provide learning opportunities and allow employees to challenge, innovate and make mistakes. Through open dialogue with seniors and peers in the company, an employee can learn a great deal. It is allowing these opportunities to happen that will attract top talent to join the company.
Last but not least, invest in leadership. Hire great leaders, those who can lead and inspire teams. They will attract the right people.
Sanne Goslinga, Marathon Venture Capital
One of the most critical pillars of our talent attraction strategy has been our people brand, which stems from the high caliber of the team members we have brought on board throughout the years. The people themselves and the products they’ve built are most typically the reason why people come to Signal for their next career step. We have a very strict selection process and that has allowed us to recruit the best, which becomes a strong value proposition for further attracting very talented people.
Adonis Garefalakis, Signal Group
Apart from initiatives such as building a career website that reflects the company’s culture, promoting job ads to the right channels and sourcing candidates, a strategy many of the teams have established successfully is to include their own people in recruitment. This can be initiated through employee referral programs, which are usually a source of high quality candidates, but also empowering employees to become the company’s best advocates, showcasing their work and having presence in meetups, conferences, etc.
At LearnWorlds, we think it's natural for smart and talented people to want to work with smart and talented people. For this reason a big part of our recruitment strategy is to put forward our current employees. To give them the confidence to put themselves out there, to showcase what we do, how we work and what we aim to achieve.
Eleni Kourmentza, LearnWorlds
Involve everybody in the recruitment process and let your team share the organization's success through social media to attract top talent. Building a structured employee advocacy program would be a great step in that direction.
Nikos Bozikis, Blueground
The crucial role of the recruiting team in the process was also highlighted:
Recruiters as the first representatives of the company need to be kind, honest, responsive and respectful of the candidate. We need to understand what the candidate is looking for and whether they can have it inside our company. A bad hire except for quite a financial loss might also create a toxic environment within the team and the company.
Eftychia Karavelaki, Workable
With offices closed and everyone working from home, how have companies adapted their recruitment process? For those that have always been remote-first, it might be business as usual; nevertheless many recruiting teams had to re-establish the way they work.
At GWI, we replaced face-to-face interviews and visits at the office with video interviews. Before the pandemic, the last 1-2 interviews were taking place in the office, where the candidate had the chance to meet the manager, team, and colleagues and get an idea of the work environment and culture. While now, apart from the video interviews, we had to find ways to evaluate the cultural fit and be able to give to the candidate the full picture of the company they applied to. To do that, we introduced a final cultural interview, where the candidate is not only meeting his/her future team, but also has the chance to meet people from other departments and discuss our culture and values.
On a similar note, we redesigned our onboarding process and partnered with new providers to make sure we had everything set up for a perfect virtual start. On the pros is that new joiners in all our offices have the chance to share the onboarding experience with their peers, participate in the same virtual onboarding round, communicate and connect.
Elena Lymperi, GWI
Since our assessments are now done through virtual discussions only, we needed to adapt our process and make it more detailed and robust (assessment tools, behavioral interviews, etc) to enrich our understanding of each candidate. At the same time, it has become more important than ever to showcase brand values and company culture throughout the recruitment process (at Blueground we are using the term “employment dialogue” instead of “interview”, as our approach is to have transparent dialogues with candidates to find common ground together and join our journey). In these uncertain times, candidates tend to be even more cautious of decisions that add more change into their lives.
Nikos Bozikis, Blueground
Developing talent inside an organization
After you have hired the right person, how do you make sure they develop and grow within the company, meeting their personal and professional goals, and contributing to the team’s success?
Many interesting lessons learned here! Most of the answers naturally fall under cultivating learning and growth opportunities inside a company. Initiatives such as establishing clear career paths, on-the-job training, personal training budget, mentorship schemes, performance reviews, 360 feedback, and growth plans were brought up during the conversations.
We have found that the best way to develop talent is by creating opportunities for training on the job, in the presence of a customized growth plan. When development does not happen, that is typically because managers or even team members are too busy with daily work. Therefore, a company has to find the silver lining: an environment of openness, where team members feel comfortable surfacing their development needs, paired with a structured process that makes it easy for managers and team members to work on a development path. Following that recipe, we have created our Performance & Development program to bring managers and team members on the table every 4 months to jointly draft development goals, on which they build during their regular check-ins. The combination of frequent discussions during check-ins, with the structured development goals, helps managers and team members collaborate for the common goal of upskilling.
Adonis Garefalakis, Signal Group
Some of the best ways to develop talent inside an organization are:
Set a personal training budget for the employee (from books to conferences to online courses).
Think and plan ahead. In other words, train your employees for their future roles and not necessarily the ones they currently hold. In addition, find the soft or technical skills you are lacking company-wide, and help develop those inside your teams.
Build career paths and help people identify with the roles or seniority levels that would match their profiles most.
Eleni Kourmentza, LearnWorlds
Moreover, establishing a sense of autonomy inside teams was also mentioned and should be at the core of every team that optimises for learning:
Giving people autonomy in the company allows them to dive into things, try them, make mistakes and correct the mistakes. A huge learning process.
Sanne Goslinga, Marathon Venture Capital
Employee retention and company culture as teams scale
A percentage of employee churn is healthy in every high-growth team, especially as they go through the different phases much faster, but how can startups make sure they retain their top talent?
In order to retain your top talent, it’s first of all important to understand what motivates them, what they value and how they currently feel within the company. You can do this by having engagement surveys or simply by having an open conversation with them. Some may be motivated by the salary (increase) they receive, while others by the scope of their role, responsibilities or learning opportunities. There are different things that can drive someone and they often change throughout their careers. Therefore, it is important to have frequent conversations with your top performers to ensure you know what they value and how you can best retain them.
Sanne Goslinga, Marathon Venture Capital
Talented people are looking constantly for 2 things: meaningful challenges and growth. Solving difficult problems, innovating and doing that by following the science is something we have found to be valued by many really smart people. And when work achievements are tied to a development process and clear expectations about career growth, it helps everyone know what to expect and feel confident that they are in good company (literally and figuratively). At the same time, everyone wants to be valued, acknowledged and listened to. Caring and listening are the biggest prerequisites for retaining top talent. And it takes a humble and trusting leadership to listen. When the leadership is truly listening, there is a strong culture of camaraderie, which in return makes people naturally care for their team members. And that makes people stay.
As we switched from a hybrid-remote environment to a remote-first environment due to the pandemic, we realized that the meaningful problems or the growth discussions did not get affected, but other things we took for granted started to become more challenging: the closeness and communication became the first major challenge after we turned fully-remote. Not having the option for a team happy hour or fun getaway, pushed us to come up with new ways of gathering everyone in a zoom call and spending some bonding time together (e.g. virtual games, remote team workout). The next big problem that required creative solutions was the loss of efficiency; and I am referring to the lost efficiency when you can’t just walk up to someone and quickly chat/resolve something in 5-10 minutes. Process and better communications came to fix that. And then, after a few months of everyone working extra hard under these circumstances, the biggest problem becomes switching off. We are working hard in order to resolve that and be able to switch off more, but that’s an oxymoron, right?
Adonis Garefalakis, Signal Group
Nonetheless, the right foundations for employee retention are set during the recruiting process:
Talent retention starts with the recruiting process. Identify what are the aspects of the company culture and strategy you want your future employees to have, and try to find people who will be the best fit. When GWI opened an office in Greece, we were looking not only for top talent, but also for people who would fit well inside the culture we are building and who would like to grow within a newly established company in the Greek market.
Elena Lymperi, GWI
A good percentage of the points raised in regards to retaining top talent are connected to culture, so I was curious to learn more how/if a startup’s culture should change as the company grows. What are the biggest challenges there?
A great culture consists of a mix of leadership initiatives and grass-roots actions. The former requires sincerity and maturity at the leadership level, in order to be who you say you are and show that with your actions. That’s the biggest challenge in startups early on, especially in the case of first-time founders. We see many startups promising “fun” but don’t bother clarifying what the expectations are and that’s the start of all kinds of problems. Later on, as a startup is scaling up, the culture may start getting diluted, sub-cultures start to creep in and people self-isolate in small groups. It takes a common fabric to bring them all together, such as a genuine culture map, and a lot of acceptance on why people have the need to differ. And a combination of freedom and structure can allow team members to be themselves and flourish.
Adonis Garefalakis, Signal Group
When it comes to company culture the hardest bit is to accept that you can’t control its shape and form after a certain point. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Cultures evolve and adapt to the people you hire as you scale. Why force the culture you had as a 20-people organisation to your now 150-people? You need to let go and only try to steer your culture towards a direction that would match your values and mission. And you can do that by bringing the right people aboard, communicating frequently what you value the most as a business, and introducing practices & initiatives that point to the direction you’d like to head in.
Eleni Kourmentza, LearnWorlds
Before we wrapped up our conversations, I asked everyone to share the HR tech tools they use in order to shed some light on this aspect of the game as well. So here they are:
Workable, Greenhouse (ATS), LinkedIn Recruiter (Sourcing), BambooHR, HiBob, Sapling (HRIS), Small Improvements, CultureAmp (Performance & Development), Donut (Remote work), Typeform (Surveys), Tableau (Analytics), SageHR (Tracking time-off), Slack, Gsuite, Asana, Trello (Collaboration), LearnWorlds, LinkedIn Learning, Thinkific (Learning & Training).
The most valuable resource a startup has is talent. From the founders and first employees that join the journey early on, to the people that come on board a bit later and help take the company to the next level, talent is what turns an ambitious vision into reality. How you attract, develop and retain top talent is what makes or breaks a team. Three closely interconnected areas, where one significantly affects and amplifies the others, in ways you cannot necessarily predict, but if done right they can really contribute to building a motivated and high-performing team.
🦄 Startup Jobs
Greek startups are hiring! Here are some of the latest job opportunities:
Causaly - UX/UI Designer (Athens) - Apply here
DeepSea - Business Development Manager (Athens) - Apply here
efood - HR Business Partner (Athens) - Apply here
Green Panda - Front End Developer (Athens) - Apply here
Pollfish - Data Engineer (Remote or Athens) - Apply here
Project Agora - VP of Engineering (Athens) - Apply here
Seafair - Growth Manager (Remote) - Apply here
Sync - Product Designer (Remote) - Apply here
Wappier - Customer Success Manager (Remote) - Apply here
👉 The job board is now featuring over 100 Greek startups looking for talent. First launch was a Google Sheet about 1 year ago with 28 teams; and here we're now: 638 jobs from 101 teams hiring in Greece, remotely or even abroad. Check it out here!
🗞️ News
Applications are now open for startups to apply to a funding program from the Ministry of Development & Investments, through the Elevate Greece platform. The program has an overall size of €60M.
Douleutaras, a professional services marketplace for Greece and Cyprus, raised a €2.3M funding round led by Olympia Group and announced the company’s plan to expand in new markets under the EasyHero brand.
Gerald, a startup transforming how consumers track, manage, and pay their household bills, with Greek co-founder and headquartered in NYC, officially announced it's part of the latest Y Combinator batch YC W21.
Few days ago, the incubation centre for space tech startups based in Greece (ESA BIC Greece) launched and is now accepting applications.
NBG Business Seeds announced the 10 teams that made it to the next round of its Innovation & Technology competition, with ventures in areas such as robotics, electric vehicles, healthcare, and more.
Indie hacker, Jim Raptis, launched MagicPattern Toolbox, a set of tools for instant visuals generation and won a product of the day spot on Product Hunt.
💭 Reading or listening
The early days of Workable, reaching $10M in revenues without hiring a salesperson, and the journey to becoming the top hiring software for SMBs with more than 20,000 companies in this podcast with Nikos Moraitakis, co-founder & CEO of Workable.
An interview with Niko Bonatsos, Managing Director of General Catalyst, on the Greek tech scene, the opportunity COVID-19 presented, why investors from the US & other parts of Europe are now paying more attention, what can make the ecosystem leapfrog and more.
A post by Grigoria Pontiki, UX Researcher at Workable, on designing for accessibility, why it’s important and many interesting links to educate yourself further on the topic.
Leading happy teams with five powerful rules from Vasilis Danias, General Manager, Greece at Beat, here.
Biotech is booming and here is an introductory guide by Will Manidis, founder of ScienceIO, to get you from 0-60 in understanding the field as quickly as possible.
A podcast with Matina Thomaidou, ex-Data Scientist at Facebook, with Antonis Kalipetis and Paris Kasidiaris at Mikri Kouventa, on how she got into data science, difference among data scientists, ML engineers & data engineers at FB, academia vs. industry, and more.
How the Skroutz team classifies products and how they have managed to enable merchants with thousands of products go live with 90%+ of their catalog listed in just an hour by George Hadjigeorgiou, co-founder & CEO of Skroutz, here.
An interesting chat with Cypriot in Tech, Andrew Michael, talking with Francis Suarez, Mayor of Miami, about the hot topic of City-as-a-Service and how the best cities retain their citizens.
A post by Babis Makrynikolas, VP Product & Pricing at Blueground, on good writing and its importance in business.
I’d love to get your thoughts and feedback on Twitter or Facebook.
Stay safe and sane,
Greek Startup Pirate 👋