I am Vyacheslav and I manage marketing at ispmanager. We are growing – in two years I conducted 70 interviews and closed 9 vacancies. Two had to be replaced. My experience will be useful if you need to assemble a team that works autonomously – without micromanagement. Or get to one.

The general principle of recruitment at ispmanager is a short time-to-market. The sooner an employee starts bringing benefits to the company, the better. There are two tactics: look for ready-made ones or grow new ones.

We have a lot of “burning” work in our marketing, so we are looking for ready-made ones. I hire independent people who do not need to be constantly led by the hand. But for support, colleagues are looking for growing ones – there they are more important than the software that mom and dad raised. It is faster to learn technical expertise here.

In our system, the usual concept of hardware and software is not enough. This is when the hards are the level of qualification, and the softs are communication skills, goal setting and other useful skills. The competition between candidates in ispmanager moves to another level, where it is not enough, for example, to have hard knowledge of commands in Linux, and software to be able to give feedback correctly.

I call our evaluation system the Candidate Value Pyramid. It consists of six consecutive levels. Each ispmanager department has a different sequence of floors of the candidate’s pyramid of values.

Here’s how the levels are built for marketing:

→ Filters.

→ Hardy.

→ Software.

→ Work experience.

→ Professional education and work experience in the industry.

→ Salary expectations.

I will talk about each item in detail below.

Filters

There can be hardware, software, place of residence, experience and other important elements without which the candidate will not even get to the interview. If 6+ years of experience is important, then you can send as many resumes with 3 years of experience as you like. It is unlikely that they will even look at him. Although we look, because sometimes there are nuggets hiding there.

We always use filters. This helps to quickly process a large number of resumes. We recently had a PR vacancy with experience abroad. Therefore, all candidates without experience of working with foreign companies or foreign markets were not even considered in their resumes.

If you are an applicant – carefully read the vacancy. Sometimes the filters are specified right there. If you are an employer, specify the filters openly, this will reduce the number of redundant reviews.

This is how we looked for Shefred on Maxim Ilyakhov’s “Work for the Editor” channel. He misspelled the company name twice, but appreciated the filters.

Hardy

Figuring out what is more important, hardware or software, helps answer the question of whether a skill is needed to do the job. In marketing, levels are second only to hard filters. For development too, but for support – software is more important. For example, a person’s desire to help users and the ability to communicate. In order to work on the first line, sometimes it is enough to apply software, the rest will be taught.

Tip: Before the interview, study the job requirements and review everything related to these topics. Questions about hards in one way or another touch on skills, and focus on them.

Software

Software is “what my mother taught me,” as one of my fellow executives says. Seriously, these are universal human skills, such as setting tasks, the ability to conduct a constructive dialogue, and give environmental feedback.

In our marketing, software is needed, but on the third level after hard drives. Software is often not specified in job vacancies, they are somewhere in the manager’s head, but they are important for hiring. For example, for department heads, we are looking for people who can give correct feedback and resolve conflicts. Both are software.

You can find out how well the candidate has developed the necessary software through questions or through a test task.

I asked, for example, the following – colleagues do not agree on the design, the edits are already in the fifth iteration. What will you do?

The real test task looked like this

It is impossible to give advice here. Do not tighten the software before the interview, but during the interview you can always ask company representatives which employee they are looking for. This is how you can find out at least part of the software requirements.

Work experience

This is experience in managing a team, creating strategies, working in Agile, etc. It is mostly associated with hardo-softs and it is difficult to reveal it with filters.

We were looking for a PR specialist to work with foreign markets. Such specialists are very expensive, and it is very difficult to quickly evaluate PR – there is little that can be analyzed briefly in the format: action -> money. So we asked a lot of questions about work experience. For example, how does PR differ in different countries. From the answer of the acquirer, it is immediately clear who worked well and who did not work or worked poorly.

One of the answers was: “Indonesian fintech users are very active, they are constantly communicating with each other. There is communication on the forums, so they are negative, but if you help them, all their acquaintances will soon find out about it. Direct advertising works poorly, but it works well when the manager goes and personally writes to the group.” From this and other answers of the applicant, we saw that he knows what he is talking about. Therefore, they trusted him more.

Tip: before the interview, I recommend going over your experience, which can be useful in the job you are applying for. It is good if it is detailed, but without unnecessary information. Because experiences without details can simply be invented. But you don’t need to do that =)

Professional education and work experience in the industry

Some companies don’t even consider a resume if it doesn’t include relevant education and industry experience. And they are right when the reason is a difficult dive. It is still possible to enter the conditional “AIT” without experience, but it is very difficult to start working as an operational director of an oil refinery without an engineering education.

An alternative to professional education is work experience in industry. When an employer sees a company in the industry in a resume, but does not see specialized education, it is easier to decide on hiring, because he understands that he will not have to tell everything from scratch.

In ispmanager, as a rule, we do not look at education – it is not an indicator. Unlike experience in industry. But there is a nuance.

IT is different. To run social networks of relatively light IT – for example, EdTech and social networks of relatively hardcore IT, for example, ispmanager, hosting providers, developers of infrastructure solutions – a different backend of the candidate is required. In our narrow segment, a marketer needs to know what Apache, Nginx, OLS, Docker, WireGuard, API requests, DNS and a bunch of other stuff are, without which it is simply impossible to form proposals for the client. Colleagues from conventionally light IT also have peculiarities and complex terminology, but still the life of marketers there seems simpler.

Experience in the industry is important because it accelerates the immersion of the newcomer in the work. But, no matter what, we consider guys from both light IT and other industries. Finding someone with relevant industry experience is difficult. I have to study.

For example, the immersion of our editors from other industries or light IT takes about six months. And our community manager came from a competitor, so it took several weeks to dive into him – the shortest connection to work in my entire work experience.

Tip: pull up relevant work experience or education in the feedback and judiciously assess your real opportunity and desire to further study and immerse yourself.

Salary expectations

Salary is the most frequent filter from the first point. There’s no point in talking to a candidate if you can’t pay them. But! After the candidate has passed the filter and we understand that the salary expectations are for us, money is one of the last places. We will look at all other levels to select the best candidates.

Low salary requirements raise suspicions. From our experience, they say that the candidate does not meet the requirements and tries to compete due to cheapness. Although there was an experience when such a candidate was hired, and he turned out to be a super useful employee.

Most often, we come across a situation where a seemingly good candidate comes for relatively little money. But you start to find out and it turns out that he either wants a second project, or he doesn’t have enough experience and skills. The co-designers are almost always immediately overboard. In other cases, I have to consider what will be cheaper for the company: study someone who is cheaper or take a ready-made one who is more expensive.

The decision depends on the situation and the vacancy. Now we almost do not take those who need to be taught a lot – there is a lot of work “right away” and very little time for swinging. For example, when they were interviewing content marketers, there was a girl for ridiculous money with a lot of experience. I didn’t even believe it at first. And then they discovered that the person had no experience in commercial work — she wrote materials purely for the purpose of production. Therefore, all marketing would have to learn it from scratch. I wasn’t ready. I had to refuse.

Tip: keep an eye on the market so you don’t accidentally lower your salary expectations. If you want to cover the shortcomings, try to tell in two words in the cover letter what they are and how you intend to do it. This will help you get an interview. Well, then everything depends on you =)

Man eaters

With the help of these principles, we solve three tasks: to hire a person who will do his job well and bring money to the company, and will also fit into our not the largest, but very valuable team. Now the product is 20 years old and I think my colleagues will support me that working in ispmanager is cool. come

Links to vacancies

Perhaps the article seemed cannibalistic and cynical to you. It happens. In any case, we are happy to discuss our principles in the comments.

Bonus

I asked my fellow executives to come up with their list of levels for each department. I share We have vacancies not only in marketing.

CEO: “First of all, I pay attention to experience in the industry – it goes off the list. If I see it, I immediately want to talk. Even if the rest of the points are not entirely relevant at first glance. Otherwise: filters -> work experience -> software -> hard -> salary”.

Commercial Director: filters -> work experience -> industry experience -> Meta Skills -> softs -> hards -> salary.

Product manager: industry experience -> filters -> work experience -> software -> hard -> salary.