Say hello to Katya, our Head of Recruitment

How did you decide to become a tech recruiter? Tell a bit about yourself

I have always been very communicative and sociable. That’s why I always knew that I would like to work with people. During higher education in psychology I had several internships in different spheres and recruiting was the most enjoyable. After graduation, I was looking for a job in the recruiting or HR area, and I was given the opportunity to try myself in IT recruitment. It sounded fascinating and frightening at the same time as I had no idea about the IT world, but decided to give it a try. After a five or six hour interviewing process the job was mine and since then I've been a tech recruiter, having done it for more than nine years now.

How did you join Toughbyte?

When I was working at my previous job, Anton Korenyushkin was my hiring manager. I found candidates for him. A bit later he called me and told me about the new company called Toughbyte. And here we are now, having worked on Toughbyte for more than five years together.

What is your role in the company?

I am currently responsible for finding new team members for our company. I also work on making the recruitment teams more autonomous. Our company consists of several teams with different areas of focus: recruiters, developers, marketing and administration. My goal is to make the recruitment teams autonomous, so that they could make decisions independently. At the beginning, we were only one such team and now we have five.

How do you choose people for the team?

The projects the person has worked on are of course very important. I look at whether the candidate has relevant experience, their motivation, what is really important for people. We are also not afraid to hire junior candidates without any experience. A lot of them grew up professionally with us, learnt with us, made mistakes with us and they make us proud. We aren't afraid to let a person prove themselves if they really want it. Also, while communicating with candidates for our in-house positions, I sometimes feel some kind of chemistry and just know that this is the right person for our team.

What do you like about the corporate culture of Toughbyte?

We're open, honest and we're able to accept mistakes. No need to pretend to be anyone else. Recently we discussed our values and principles, and we really so follow them. That's the line we use not only in our company culture, but with our clients and candidates. It is an open and friendly way of doing business.

Our team is remote - do you think this makes building an open culture easier or more difficult?

It helps because we are forced to understand each other better from the get go. Also, having a remote team helped us stay productive during the Coronavirus situation, because we were already working remotely.

How do you see the future of Toughbyte? What do you dream about?

My goal is to make all our recruitment teams completely autonomous.

We’re also constantly working on improving our knowledge of new markets.We know the Finnish market well because we have started here, there are countries that are new to us and where we still have a lot to learn.

Finally, we are now investing a lot in developing our software platform to make recruitment faster and better. We want to make the service more useful to both candidates and clients.

I am absolutely sure that sooner rather than later we will be the number one platform for tech recruitment in Europe and beyond!