Max: Hello, and welcome back to the Recruitment Hackers Podcast. Today I'd like to welcome on the show, Manjuri Sinha. Manjuri is the Head of Talent Acquisition for Technology for the OLX Group. Thanks for joining Manjuri. 

Manjuri: Happy to be here. 

Max: Manjuri is dialing in from Berlin. One of my favorite cities in the world.

And over the last few years, Berlin has become a tech hub, certainly in the startup space. But I think also beyond which is how the OLX group ended up setting up shop in Berlin. You were telling me?

Manjuri: Absolutely max. So I think this was pretty much the reason, the talent market.

So  let me also give a little bit of context on what OLX is. We are a classified platform my lovely friends  in Germany, you can, maybe relate to it with EBA, Klein and Diagon. That's something for the emerging market. So classifieds for a resale of cars, a resale of anything. If you talk to someone in Poland they literally tell you that from their phone to their cupboards, to their cars, to the apartments they have sold or purchased on OLX platforms.

Of course we have different brands that front-end us but  that's why exist. Yeah, across countries and being in Berlin is definitely due to the tech talent market that we have. And Berlin is our OLX Europe's tech hub. And in terms of usage we pretty much you know, have more than 20 brands.

Also we have around 300 million active users. As well as you see, the number of people is 10,000+ a strong employee sprint. And of course, we’re part of the overall process group. Which is one of the biggest investment companies in the world 

Max: I imagine that building marketplaces in all of these emerging markets means you need to have teams everywhere, all around the globe, right.

And that you want to have designers, product managers, marketers. Living in each of the markets you serve is that part of your remit or you're purely focused on the tech, which is more centralized perhaps?

Manjuri: Yeah. So  my remit is product, data, and technology.

So yes. All that you mentioned actually falls in that bucket. So designers, UX, researchers technology. When I say technology it's engineering. And data is everything to do with data science data analytics, as well as data engineering. So this is the world, and this is the gamut. Of course, we also have the offline part of the business where we have, you know, car inspectors and people who really look at when you do the, you know, inspection of a car before it's resold, et cetera, et cetera. 

So that's another world, warehouses, car inspectors, et cetera. So yes, and we do need to have presence in our markets, for sure. So even our tech hubs are distributed accordingly, Max. We have a huge presence in Poland, in Portugal, which are bigger markets as well.

Now we have stepped up on our building up of a tech hub in Romania and Ukraine. That's what we are doing at the moment. Super busy. India is a major tech hub in the Northern part of the country. We have a home office as well. And then we have Latin America where we have tech teams based in Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina.

Max: Do you find that hiring managers have moved past  the reflex, that habit of associating a job with a location and that now it's you know, they're not thinking that way or I mean, how fast are we moving in the other direction where everybody's remote and you can hire anywhere.

Is it moving fast and as fast as you'd like? Or would you actually, maybe you prefer to go back to a localized hubs?  What's your position on this hire anywhere or hirer somewhere? 

Manjuri: I would still say so there were two parts to your question, Max. One is how do we see hiring managers actually reacting to this?

I think for hiring managers, they need that seat to be filled. That's one of the basic you know, really important things for them. Yes,  they do feel that there should be some proximity to their teams. However, the understanding with most technology teams that we are hearing is either we go remote first.

That means that you don't have a partial thing, that you have 10 people sitting in the same room and a meeting room. And you have another 10 people sitting in different blocks because that's what is not good for the culture. So if you have a remote first team, everybody should be remote. And if you come together for a workshop, then you commute for that workshop.

But you shouldn't be divided half and half. The second aspect that you asked about hiring anywhere, hiring anywhere is a wish and a luxury because what we have not been able to kind of crack, and I think it's the same with all organizations is insurance, taxation, and so on and so forth. So we do stay close to our hubs.

We do hire remote in Poland. We hire remote in Romania. We hire remote in Portugal, but because we have hubs in those countries, we can. You know, basis that paperwork, et cetera. So I think that's one of the challenges for sure. 

We see the demands. I mean, I was just looking at a report just yesterday from this organization called Talent International and they were talking about this, I think the second, most important point that all of their survey respondents talked about in changing jobs, what will they consider? Is flexibility.

And this flexibility is around whether they can work remote, whether they can work from home or they can work from anywhere. So this will become, this will come from the pandemic push. And I think the second aspect will be the candidates demanding this also going forward, especially for the tech market, because that's a candidate driven market.

So what we would have to look at flexibility and hybrid ways of working that is definitely here to stay. You might have organizations saying, Hey, you know, it's three days. Come to office two days, work from home. I heard yesterday, Revolut has given a two months option to all employees saying that two months in a year, you can work from anywhere.

So every company is working different working out different ways of keeping their folks happy and keeping their ways of working flexible. And that's the way to go. That's what we will see in the future.

Max: It's moving slower than I anticipated really. I mean, we've been working from anywhere  for pre-crisis and I thought that by now everybody would be this is it. I love it. Yeah, I guess people. With this new cycle are also a little bit tired, and we would like to just kind of turn the page and that means going, the office, they'll do it. 

I found myself actually reminiscing and thinking, wow, I really miss commuting. You know, cause commuting was the time when I would switch off from one world to the next.

But I've learned how to commute while staying indoors. 

Manjuri: Absolutely. You made a very, very correct point, right? We are not what is happening right now. Right. You know, I'm sitting at my living room and at my dining table, you see a fake background behind me, but this is where I am. This is not working from home.

So this is the pandemic push of making me stay at home. Right. That's a very different thing. I don't get to meet those 10 friends that I would love to for the after-work drinks. But within the real wo...