Elena Volk founded the IT recruitment agency EvoTalents and the online school for IT recruiters, EvoTalents.School. 8 years ago, she made one of the most challenging but best decisions of her life — to leave her job, move to London, and start working for herself, first as a freelancer and later as an entrepreneur. Over these years, she built a team and established an agency that is now among the top IT recruitment agencies in Ukraine.
Elena Volk, Founder & CEO of EvoTalents recruiting agency
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.
My name is Elena Volk and my journey in entrepreneurship began 9 years ago. After working for 7 years in companies as an IT Recruiter and Recruitment Lead, I quit the company, moved to London and began building my own IT recruitment agency. It is called EvoTalents. Now we have 15 people in our team. We work with clients all over the world. We have also been teaching recruitment and sourcing processes in Ukraine for more than 5 years.
I am constantly learning. I am very interested in learning new things, delving even deeper into business and recruiting topics. The main part after learning new information is to share my knowledge with others. And besides this, I am a person who constantly tries new things, explores new countries, and has visited more than 24 countries, some of them several times. I am obsessed with finding new hobbies and new sports, such as climbing Annapurna Base Camp, paragliding, diving into the depths of the sea and swimming with stingrays and much more.
What inspired you to start EvoTalents, and how has your vision for the company evolved over time?
At some point, I realised that we devote most of our lives to our professional activities. Just imagine, we give 8 hours to work a day, that’s 168 hours a month, 2021 hours a year, 80640 hours throughout our life.
And it became important for me to devote this time to what I really like and pass it on to other people through all my projects and building an atmosphere in the agency where employees develop as much as possible and enjoy their work.
So, through the recruiting agency EvoTalents, we help great companies and top employees find each other.
I help people start their own project that they will be passionate about through my masterminds. More than 50 people have been mentored by me over the past year. Each of them went into their own self-development and started their own online projects.
How does EvoTalents differentiate itself from other recruitment agencies in the market, particularly in the tech industry?
EvoTalents is a technical recruitment agency with deep expertise in sourcing, which allows us to find the most unavailable candidates (who are not on Linkedin).
This helps us fill even the most difficult vacancy within 28 days. Over 350 vacancies have been closed since 2016. We found great IT specialists for such companies as iDeals, Erbis, YouScan, Sitecore, Wix, Reface.
I began to study more and more about sourcing after moving to London. My team and I started to develop this direction in Ukraine and created the first sourcing courses. That is how we united people in the Ukrainian Sourcing Community.
We have technical knowledge and experience of closing different vacancies, even the most difficult ones (for example, Clojure Engineer or Senior Java Developer from Europe, who moved to Ukraine).
Can you share some success stories or case studies where EvoTalents has made a significant impact on a client's recruitment process?
One case immediately comes to mind. We closed the vacancy with the first candidate in one week. I will tell in more detail:
The company did not have an internal IT recruiter, but had plans for growth, so they turned to our IT recruitment agency to close several vacancies at once: Project Manager, Blockchain, Back-end and ReactJS developers.
At the beginning of the work, we prepared a salary analysis for the client to depict the state of the market. Next, we posted vacancies on all profile sites + searched on Linkedin, viewed candidates in an active search, because speed was important.
For the role of Project Manager, among 15 candidates, they found the one who best suited the requirements. The vacancy was closed with the first presented candidate in less than 1 week.
Word of mouth worked for the position of the Back-end developer: an acquaintance of our colleague was actively looking for a job. He became the first and only presented candidate who was immediately hired.
With the increasing shift towards remote work, how has EvoTalents adapted its recruitment strategies to meet the changing needs of both companies and candidates?
Since I originally set up a company with a team in Ukraine when I lived in London, we initially set up a remote work format. From the founding of the company, all our processes have already been sharpened as much as possible for the remote work format. Therefore, we didn't have any difficulties that other companies encountered when switching to the remote. On the contrary, it helped us to keep our pace as much as possible and to effectively continue to close vacancies. In order to build such a format, we arranged all processes as systematically as possible. And this is what we have now. All processes are so arranged that there is a clear understanding of how we work as a team, what results we show, and how we interact with customers.
What are the key challenges you face in the tech recruitment industry, and how does EvoTalents address these challenges to deliver top talent?
Our team has gone through a lot of challenges over the past 9 years, which were mainly related to the scaling of our agency and the changes that are taking place in the market. Very strong changes occurred during Covid, when most companies put vacancies on hold and started turning to agencies less often. And, of course, the last two years have been quite difficult for our field.
But periods like these help us look even more closely at how we can influence processes. We have paid maximum attention to restructuring processes over the past two years. We restructured the internal process of the team, involved sourcers and switched from full-stack recruiters to pair work, where a sourcer and a recruiter work on each vacancy in order to reduce the time it takes to fill vacancies.
We have also built the process of finding clients as much as possible, and now we have a separate team that deals with this. There are also separate sources that help us consistently bring new clients to the agency. We have placed maximum emphasis on the diversification of our services. Last year we made several different packages that help meet the needs of our clients. Starting from the Recruitment Lite package, where we do more sourcing and transfer warm candidates to the client, to Recruitment Pro and Recruitment Advanced packages, where we are involved as advisors, helping to build processes. We have RPO packages as well, where our team becomes internal recruiters of other companies for some time. For example, now 6 of our people work in a large company. We help this business scale as much as possible and transport our strong technical guys to their office.
How do you ensure that your team stays up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies in the recruitment industry, and how does this knowledge benefit your clients?
Let me start with the fact that we initially select for our team people who are focused on development. That is why we do not need to motivate employees to learn something new. They already have this internal motivation. Therefore, we are always studying new trends in the foreign market as a team. We also have our online school, our community, where our employees are always taking part as members and as speakers. Additionally inside the company we began to make Demo Study calls. Every month the team meets and discusses what new they have learned, what new things they have implemented and shares it with the team. By hiring the right people, building a process where we provide the opportunity to learn and share knowledge as much as possible, we have come to the conclusion that our team is always studying new trends, trying something new and always stays ahead. And, of course, this has the maximum impact on clients. When introducing something new, we always look at how it will affect the results and how it will help improve the metrics of our work.
Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.
The most turning point for me was the period when I left the IT company where I worked, moved to London and started my own business. It all happened at one moment, and it greatly transformed my life and brought me to the point where I am now. And I am very grateful to myself that I was not afraid and went through all these changes, because they really became transformational for me.
Therefore, I would like to wish everyone who is thinking about starting their own business, but is still afraid and worried, just start moving in this direction. Just give yourself time and the opportunity to try, and you will definitely succeed.
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