Hi, today we start a big interview about career in iGaming industry: affiliate marketing, corporate culture, career ladder, Alexandra – HRD CPA#1 will talk about this and much more.
Part 1, let’s go!
What methods do you use to assess candidates’ compatibility with CPA#1’s team culture?
Basically, this is the entire interview format we use. We try to make sure that the candidate has an opportunity to reveal himself/herself, especially in the first stages of the interview, because these are the moments when candidates talk about what is important to them in the first place, what they consider important in themselves. And we realize if the candidate, for example, is not a team player, is very demanding or, in general, the story is negative.
In addition, this is a story about previous jobs. In such moments it is possible to evaluate quite well: why a person decided to leave, why he/she changed jobs at all, what are the pains in relation to previous jobs.
If it is a conflict with the management, the reasons and its solution to the situation are found out. That is, we try to uncover the labor motivation of the candidate and compare how much it agrees with our team. At this stage it is possible to understand whether the team is needed, how important team interaction is, career goals and ambitions.
Dialogue first of all helps to understand a person, but sometimes one 30-minute conversation is not enough to understand the candidate’s match with the team and how much everything fits with what we have now.
How do you test candidates’ competencies during the interview? Are there any specific tasks or tests?
A lot depends on the vacancy. If you take, for example, an affiliate manager, you can find out where he has worked before, how aware he is of the market situation now, and how much he knows about affiliate marketing. As a rule, managers have a personal plan, which is drawn up for a month, and the criterion of its fulfillment or non-fulfillment is also key and we try to find out: whether there was growth, how adequate was the plan as a whole, what volumes the potential candidate worked with.
During the interview, we actively try to encourage candidates to ask questions: we can understand a lot from this, because it is usually the questions that show how deeply a person understands the field and how interested he or she is in what is important for him or her personally. Because a person with more competence usually has different priorities than a person with less competence.
If we take people with a leadership position, then here we can assess competence within the framework of management, all of the above applies to them as well, but it is management that becomes the key aspect: how he managed the team, how many people were subordinate, what results he came to, what changed with his arrival in the company/team and what is there when he leaves.
We compare, first of all, the dynamics and how he himself assesses his skill in managing people and processes in the team.
What do you most often encounter in interviews with potential candidates?
Unfortunately, one of the main problems we face is that potential candidates do not always look at our vacancies carefully. The fact is that they see a sales manager vacancy and think that if they come from other, especially white-hat verticals, they will do quite well with simple sales skills. But it is not enough to be just a sales person to hold a sales manager position, especially in the gambling vertical.
Therefore, on the one hand they do not review, on the other hand, they make their resumes in such a way that when we review them, it is not always clear to us what vertical we are talking about, what position we are talking about, what previous position the candidate held. So most often, when it comes to interviewing candidates with insufficiently relevant experience, these two factors come together.
Then, already at the interview, there is an opportunity to assess, one way or another, how well the submitted resume can meet our needs. For this purpose there is a set of questions that we ask candidates, trying to get them to talk.
This is probably one of the biggest challenges.
Are there any difficulties?
We can emphasize the complexities of human communication that arise inevitably during interviews, for example, a person’s aggressiveness, his unwillingness to hear to the end the conditions that the company offers.
If we get to the final stage, there will be an opportunity to adjust some conditions, to say that the practice of test weeks is not something special in our company, the same practice exists in other companies in the segments, so in most cases this conflict can be resolved, but, unfortunately, there are some extremes when people stop the interview at this point.
These are the conditions of the market, fortunately or unfortunately, we do not dictate them, so we have to not compromise in our conditions with respect to a certain number of candidates who have rather excessive salary expectations and whose competencies do not always match the vacancy that we place in our company.
for the position we’ve posted.
Thank you to the HR team of CPA#1 for the answers!
In the 2nd part of the interview the HR team will talk about the corporate culture at CPA#1, employees and their professional development. We will also talk about top specialists in affiliate marketing: what qualities should the top have? How to attract the best to your team, and most importantly, how to keep them?
Coming soon to the CPA#1 blog! Stay tuned!
