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IT Crafts HR – Anthonia Wolleswinkel from Bitpanda

Podcast | April 8, 2020 | itcraftship | ,
IT Crafts HR – Anthonia Wolleswinkel from Bitpanda

Bitpanda went from a fully in-office company to a fully remote in a matter of days – with a team of 180 people. Listen to Antonia Wolleswinkel’s tips on how to preserve this new environment and ensure that your employees are still committed to the company’s mission. Antonia also shares insights on how to increase the ratio of women joining the fintech company, and how the way of working in the scale-up environment can positively impact the workflow. On top of that, she shares why the Internal Communication Specialist role gets significance.

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A photo of Maks Majer

Maks Majer

Podcast Host

Maks Majer is a software engineer, co-founder, and CEO of ITCraftship, a company that helps both talented developers get a dream job at tech companies all over the world, and companies hire remote software developer superstars. He’s also a remote work advocate and helps startup businesses embrace the remote work culture. Maks is passionate about solving pains and removing obstacles by focusing on good software design and user experience practices. In his free time, he broadens his knowledge of business development as well as focuses on a healthy lifestyle that gives him the energy to get the most of a 24 hour day. You can catch him on LinkedIn.

A photo of Anthonia Wolleswinkel

Anthonia Wolleswinkel

Internal Communication Specialist at Bitpanda

Anthonia Wolleswinkel joined Bitpanda in its early stages, roughly 2 years ago, when the company was just 60 people. Together with the team, she has, at this time, helped Bitpanda grow to a team of 180 people from more than 40 nationalities. Besides setting-up recruitment processes, she was involved in many different areas within HR, such as setting up a feedback culture and speaking on behalf of the company at international conferences. Before that, she completed her studies in Barcelona in international business and worked in the HR department of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Something that you wish you have known earlier

Actually, my tip or what I wished I known earlier goes back to the really early stage of startup recruitment (...) to really sit down, if you especially join a young startup, sit down with all your hiring managers and ask them what do they expect from you and what are they looking for. And have that written down somewhere, so you can also remind each other about it.

Transcript

Maks

Hello listeners, today I’m speaking with Anthonia Wolleswinkel, who earlier worked as a Talent Manager at Bitpanda, and now is their Internal Communication Specialist. Bitpanda is a fintech based in Vienna, providing an easy to use the platform to buy digital assets, such as crypto and gold, online. Hi Anthonia! Thank you for joining me on the podcast.

Anthonia

Hi, thank you so much for having me, I’m excited to be here.

Maks

Me too! I want to start by going straight into some of the questions that I prepared for you. I wanted to ask you if you can share something about yourself, what your position is right now, what are your responsibilities, and how that has evolved?

Anthonia

Sure, no problem, I’m more than happy to introduce myself. So, as you already said, I’m Anthonia, I’m from the Netherlands, Haarlem, I’ve been living right now in Vienna, Austria for the last two and a half years. I joined Bitpanda about 2 years ago. 

Bitpanda, as you already said, is an online trading platform or asset management platform and I joined the company when it was still quite small, so it was about 60 people and I joined in HR where I was mainly responsible for recruitment activities within the company and this was a crazy year because we grew really fast, from 60 people to right now 180 people as of today with more than 43 different nationalities. It’s a really cool and interesting international environment and I think that’s why I love my work so much.

Maks

It’s definitely impressive and you’re all based out of Vienna, right?

Anthonia

Yes, everybody is based in Vienna, we have a beautiful brand new office where we moved in about a year ago, so we also ask all the people to come, move to Vienna for Bitpanda.

Maks

Yeah, I heard some great things about living in Vienna. Is it a big perk for people to move there?

Anthonia

Definitely. Even though, if I would have been told 5 years ago that I would be moving to Vienna, I would be like “What? Vienna? Never really heard of that city.” It’s not really that known, but when you start googling you realize it’s the best city in the world to live in for the last 10 years, and I was like “okay”.

Ever since I moved here I think it’s a beautiful city, it’s really big, so there’s always something to do. It’s very international, but also super authentic, like within 30 minutes you’re already within the wine fields around the city center, to enjoy, for example, beautiful wines or local food, and within an hour you’re already in the ski area, it’s close to Bratislava and all the other big border countries. So, it’s definitely a really cool city. It surprised me how nice it is here.

Maks

Yeah, that’s true. Very few people know how great wines are produced in Austria, these are my favorites.

Anthonia

Right? I think that’s the biggest misconception about Austria, it’s not just Beethoven, Mozart, they also have really good wine.

Maks

Exactly, I really recommend everyone trying. But going back to your past entrepreneurial experience, can you share how it helped you in your current role?

Anthonia

Yeah, I think that especially in my current role, right now, my position has moved. Since two months, I have a new position which is called Internal Communication Specialist, because we also realized, by growing so fast, by having so many different cultures coming from abroad into Bitpanda, into the company, you need to make sure that the communication keeps going like it used to be, and also that everybody is aware of the different cultures coming together as one in the group.

Because somebody saying something in a certain way is maybe really nicely set in one language but comes over a bit harsher in another language. So you really need to take into account that not everybody is a native English speaker and to really have that communication going… So, going back to your question, what my entrepreneurial experience does with that is the beauty of Bitpanda, is that you have so much freedom to come up with ideas and to also implement them. And it goes really fast. So, you don’t need to go through a hundred layers of approval.

I can immediately go to the one person responsible for it and get an answer or approval within an hour. This is something that really pushes you to your limit because you keep thinking “okay, what else can I do, what else can I improve to make it even better?” That’s why I love my job so much because there are 100 000 opportunities, there’s just not enough time basically before you can do everything. I think that’s just a positive way of having a healthy amount of work.

Maks

Yeah, awesome. I see that it’s kind of common among startups to have that kind of approach to decision making, approach to giving people the freedom to make the decisions. I know that you have had experience from the past working with governmental institutions. How was working there different from the scale-up environment?

Anthonia

Wow, that was a huge difference. I would say it’s actually night and day because I worked before at the United Nations and there to get one thing approved or posted on the Intranet, an article, I had to go to 15 people and that took me two weeks. Just to post a simple Internet article. Now I’m here, at Bitpanda, there is not really any strict approval process. If it makes sense, if it sounds right, you know, they trust you on your personal, good judgment, and if that’s good – you can just do it!

That really shows the difference in how Bitpanda as a company can move forward so fast, can adapt really fast to every changing industry or like right now, the society around us. Comparing it to the governmental institutions, which are far behind, they have just started with sourcing when I worked at the governmental institution. Now looking at Bitpanda, we have full-time sourcerers working for the company to reach out to people.

Maks

Absolutely. Well, in that case, you’ve also seen the growth and Bitpanda becoming a much bigger organization than it used to be before. From the last time we spoke, I’ve remembered that you’ve been taking it from 66 to 180 people. Can you share what was the evolution of the company, of the processes and the organization during that period?

Anthonia

Yeah, it was a bit hectic, I think. That’s how any startup that goes through this fast growth path sees it. From the outside, it looks easier than actually how it’s done, because by growing before especially since the moment I joined, it was still so small. We didn’t have any guidelines or any policies or any direction on what our process simply is because it wasn’t necessary. Because the group was so small, you could just directly write to each other. 

Now the company’s so big, I think the biggest change is that not everybody knows everybody anymore. That stops people from communicating or asking each other for help. That’s how certain projects go slower or are not moving as fast as we thought they would or how they used to. Because more people are involved and that makes it especially interesting, you really need to be aware of all this from the start.

Also, invest in the right tools, communication tools but also any other tool, like creating an Intranet or creating, for example – now at Bitpanda we have our entire onboarding, which when I joined, I literally got my laptop in a box and had to unpack it myself and set it up. Right now, when somebody joins, their entire day, their first day or week is already taken care of. It’s completely planned out. We have this Bitpanda Bootcamp where people have different workshops and help other people at the company about different topics that we think are important for you to know in your first week especially.

So, about our products, how we work together, about Slack for example, because we use Slack as our internal communication system and not everybody has ever used that before. We cannot assume that. So, taming Slack and proper use of all these abilities. We have a 1-hour Bootcamp happening in the first week for new joiners. So this is something that we saw, it minimized our onboarding time and we got people operational so much faster. These are all the small things that you need to sit behind, look over, and really have to set up to make sure that the people keep coming in and that the new people are also informed about the right things.

Maks

Oh yeah, absolutely. These are some very useful tips or some very useful organizational changes that people can expect when a company grows at such speed. But recently, it’s a very fresh topic right now, almost the entire world is being kind of lockdown because of the coronavirus situation. You’re already a pretty big organization. I wondered, what steps have you taken to preserve this new environment and how you’re handling it? I think it will be very useful for people to hear.

Anthonia

Definitely, especially since my new position came at the right time, because we went from a fully in-office company, on-site, to fully remote at the moment in a matter of days. We were following, of course, closely the news, but it’s always hard for a company to decide when do we go offline and when do we go remote, and when is it still safe to come to the office. So, we decided that as of this week we’re going fully remote and that is, I could see in our dev area that it’s much easier compared to other departments.

I think because a lot of people working there had already done remote or freelance positions or jobs and therefore already were used to working from home. But for other people, they feel lonely after a day, especially if you came to Austria for Bitpanda and now you have to work from home for the next week, two, three weeks and you’re alone in your apartment. It’s not always exciting. This is where the actual culture online comes into place. So we put a lot of different things.

The first one is that one of our CEOs is called Paul, just to keep the information going and flowing we set up now a Friday Paulcast, so this is a podcast from one of our CEOs and it’s just recapping what happened during the week, which departments did what, what events were happening, what launches were happening. This is just very operational to keep the information going but to look more on the cultural side what we did now is for example – I really like it – we set up a Quarantine Cantine.

This is an online lunch meeting on Google Hangouts during lunch and people can just tune in while they’re having lunch, and they can see some colleagues, they can chat with some colleagues and once they’re done, they can leave again. Today we had the first one and it was a good success, it was a lot of fun to see all my colleagues and we created different meeting groups so people can join different tables so to say, they can see who’s sitting at which table and who was having what for lunch and how everybody is. That was a really fun way of keeping spirits lifted, basically.

Maks

Yeah. I like it a lot. It gives this kind of in-office feeling, a sense of being with people which I really like. You’re using Google Meet for that, right?

Anthonia

Yeah, so we use Google Hangouts because we use GSuite for everything already, that’s why we thought “easy, we’ll use Google Hangouts as well.” We didn’t want to change anything. It’s a very interesting time and I think the most important for now is to just keep checking in with your colleagues.

You can have virtual coffee breaks. You can just send each other phony messages or gifs because, in the end, the amount of social interaction you have in the office is so much higher, you realize it’s when you’re at home that it’s not there anymore. It’s very important to also actively keep it up.

Maks

Absolutely. Have you introduced any other tools since going remote or going for the home office to help you with that?

Anthonia

Actually, so far these are the only tools, like we already used Asana before, the project management tool, which was great because everybody already got used to that for the last few months. With Asana it’s really easy to keep track of each other, and what everyone is working on, and give each other tasks or write to each other.

So far, I think with Google Suite, Slack, and Asana we’re going pretty far from a non-technical perspective, and of course, we have already used Gitlab in our dev area for any project management. I think that’s also going pretty well.

Maks

That is very interesting and like very hands-on things that you shared, which will be definitely very useful. Going back to the standard interview that we planned, I wanted to ask you about, also from the perspective of what happened recently, that you have taken a new role as an Internal Communication Specialist, how did you decide in the company to need that kind of position? Now we see that it was a very good point in time but what led you to create that position?

Anthonia

 I think what became more clear is that certain topics for this position such as internal communication processes, also company-wide “town hall” meetings we would already do before, they were always coming like on the lowest priority because nobody was fully responsible for these topics and nobody really took lead in that. I had it on my plate as well, already but it was more like a side project, I was really busy with other topics, with recruitment, which for me was always my top priority, then it always came in the second place.

We decided that from now on I’m going to do this full time and I’m going to really take care of it and make sure that whatever we’re executing from this direction, from the communication perspective is being done right. This became especially necessary – look, we’re 180 now, we’re going to grow maybe to the next 250, who knows? This is a disclaimer – I don’t know – but if that’s the case, then our internal communication needs to be spot on.

Otherwise, you can grow as much as you want but if you keep getting people in that are afterward only half as productive due to internal communication and being done right then you’re trying to hire even though you do not really add any additional resources to your team. In that case, I spoke with different people from our leadership team and they also said we need this position. I was very excited to take it on full-time. I said, “yes, let’s do this” and within a week I changed to this position.

Maks

That sounds very exciting and the timing was perfect.

Anthonia

Yeah, it definitely was.

Maks

Your organization is very mission-driven. Can you tell a little bit more about this, about the mission of Bitpanda?

Anthonia

Sure. Our mission is to provide ownership of all assets in one place, which means – Bitpanda is a digital asset platform where you can trade not just cryptocurrencies, which we’re mainly known for but also other digital assets such as gold and silver and many more to come in the future. We want people to be able to invest with a very easy entry barrier and very low-key and simple to use.

Something that I like so much about it is that this is very focused on our target audience which is between 25 – 35 years old. When we look at the demographics at Bitpanda, our average age is 30 years old. We are basically the target audience building a product for ourselves. I think that’s very important to know because that means that the products being built by our development team are actually being used by them.

They make sure that we have the latest features, the newest and most interesting features and everybody is with two feet on the ground and knowing what’s happening in the current market.

Maks

Yeah, that sounds like one of the ways also to ensure that your employees follow and are committed to the company’s mission. Do you have any other ways to ensure that?

Anthonia

Yes, for sure, like for example the Bootcamp is a big part of it because there they get literally an hour of introduction per product. Also, the moment you join you also get a test account in our testing environment so you can also play around with the product, you can check it out, you can find and report bugs. We want everybody that works at Bitpanda also to be able to explain the product cause they used the product. 

Get also all the feedback from not only your users but also your team members on how to optimize the product even better. I’m not allowed to say that much but I know that certain features were proposed from people internally and then implemented afterward because they said: “hey, this would be cool to introduce, I would love to see that on my app.”

Maks

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, definitely. Diversity is also a pretty hot subject right now, especially in HR. You’ve been quite successful in increasing the ratio of women joining the company. Can you share what were the strategies that worked for you to improve that?

Anthonia

Sure. I think it’s important to be aware that hiring diverse talent is not just a project because the topic is so hot right now. Like this should be embedded within everything you do and everywhere you go in the company. Of course, in the end, I believe somebody applies because they feel connected with the company and this can be on 100 different factors.

The most important from an HR perspective is to rule out the factors that would disengage people and potential applicants and not make them want to apply for Bitpanda. Instead of really promoting it, we just make sure that it’s really inclusive for everyone, not just females. We also realized, for example, when I did research on this topic, the most common data available also says females only apply or the majority of them applies once they meet 100% of all the criteria on the job description compared that to e.g. male applicants who already apply when they only meet 50% of the requirements.

This is in general. Of course, there are always exceptional cases, but in that case, we’re like, okay, how can we take a quick measure there. So, what did we do? We had drastically decreased the number of requirements on the job descriptions. So, instead of having a list of 20 things that they need to do and need to know, we have a maximum of 5. This made a difference. We do not have the raw data yet to prove it but from my personal experience I just realised we got a lot more applicants, we got a lot more females also joining Bitpanda and not necessarily in tech positions but in all different departments.

For me, it also has shown that we’re not being seen as a full-on blown tech company with only males in a fully male industry but it’s open for everyone and I think that’s the most important to show that. Another thing that really helped us was to invite candidates, if they make it to the final round, also to the office. Let them come for lunch, go for lunch with the team, meet their team leads in person, meet the company in person, see how we all look like, how our office looks like, to really show it first hand, how it is to walk around Bitpanda’s offices and to work here every day. I think that really helped in our hiring process.

Maks

You mentioned that these improvements that you introduced, from your perspective, have shown an increase in the number of applicants. Can you share some of the numbers that you’ve seen an increase in terms of either the percentage of women who joined Bitpanda or the female to male ratio changes that you’ve seen or you don’t have that?

Anthonia

That’s right here, I’m sorry.

Maks

Okay, that’s not a problem. One important thing of hiring for diversity is important to basically be avoiding bias in the screening process. You shared a few things that you use in your process that help. Are there any other things that you can recommend to do in the screening process to avoid it?

Anthonia

I think it’s also very important now too, e.g., when an applicant applies we ask a lot of times for a piece of sample code and this is always forward to the hiring manager to have a look at it and to see how the coding is being done. After that, every technical position if you apply for Bitpanda, you’ll get tested.

We make sure that you have to do a coding test first and then together with your entire application, so CV, cover letter and any other information that you gave and your test, you’ll be reviewed by the hiring manager, the hiring team. That means that they do not just look at your CV but they actually look at your coding style. They look at how you completed the test.

If they have some questions or irregularities they can also check them out on the CV but the most important for the hiring managers is the test. It’s HR who’s checking in the CVs if it’s feasible for this person to potentially move to Austria, if they have the right requirements for a work permit and things like that but people are mainly being assessed based on their test, this is not biased at all, because anybody could have made the test. There’s no picture of the person next to it. In that sense, I think it’s really nice that we give everyone a fair chance.

Maks

Absolutely, sounds really great.

Anthonia

I would love to hear some feedback, if someone has any feedback or any other tips regarding job descriptions, we’re all ears, because I think we’re all in this together. Every tech company is struggling with it if the entire industry is already 30% female and 70% male, it means we’re all fishing in the same pool. We might as well just share resources and tips and tricks to make sure that it just becomes a more inclusive environment overall.

Maks

Absolutely, awesome. And about getting talent into the pool, you mentioned changing the job descriptions. Can you share a bit more about the sourcing strategies that work best for you and what results do you see from different sourcing channels?

Anthonia

Sure. I have to tell you tho, I’m not actively sourcing myself and I didn’t do that before either. I’m just not a big fan of it, I’m gonna be honest with you. I really don’t like it, but this is me, personally. One of the interesting and cool sourcing strategies that I really like, besides, of course, normal sourcing, is that we are actively promoting referral policy, referrals in our office.

That means that if somebody applies to Bitpanda and mentions because we ask in our application form, how did you hear of the position? And they mention the name of one of our colleagues in the office, and the person gets hired in the end, the colleague gets a €1000 bonus. This is something that once we implemented it, it became a great success. This is something I can definitely recommend to any other company out there that’s struggling to find the right people.

In the end, the people walking in your office are already active in the networks where you want to be as an employer, as a recruiter. How cool is it to let your own team members actively talk to their connections and their network about, first of all, how great the company is, and also that they should join. This is a much easier strategy to get people convinced, to get people on board than to do it through any other media. At Bitpanda, it definitely helped. We could see a big spike in applicants coming through referrals and people hired through referrals.

Maks

That’s definitely a great tip, the bigger the company gets, the more you should think about implementing that strategy for sure because you’re gonna have a bigger chance of getting more people into your pool and the people who are referred are usually the right people.

Anthonia

Definitely. Sometimes people are super excited as well because their best friend is joining Bitpanda or their neighbor is coming, it’s a lot of fun for them as well. I think it’s a win-win situation for everyone.

Maks

Yeah, definitely it is. The question that I like to ask everyone at the end is: if you have any tips or anything that you would wish to have known earlier, something that would be useful for other HR experts when they do their work.

Anthonia

Sure, I’m more than happy to share. Actually, my tip or what I wished I known earlier goes back to the really early stage of startup recruitment, cause when I joined in the beginning, I was very eager to start, I wanted to do as many things as possible and I really wanted to take as much work from the plate of the hiring managers because “I’m here now and I can’t do it don’t worry.”

The problem with that is I did not have the hiring managers fully engaged at all times. I was like “no, don’t worry, I’ll take care of that” or “don’t worry, I’ll fix that for you” or I’ll write the candidate, I’ll speak with the candidate, I’ll do this and I’ll do that. That got them more and more disengaged from the actual topic. One of the first things when we got bigger and our recruitment team got bigger, we also said: “look, we need to start doing like kick-off meetings with the hiring manager, where we ask them – especially since we’re doing active sourcing – we ask them how would your ideal candidate look like?”

If it’s with a certain technology or certain language, are there any substitutes for that language or stuff that looks like it. Really, keep poking and picking the brain of the hiring manager for a good hour, but after that, both parties felt like “okay, we’re both very clear and very much on the same page of what we’re looking for.” This is key because the recruiter makes the first selection at Bitpanda, we check if they meet all the basic requirements to not get too much noise to the hiring team but if they’re both looking for different people, sure it’s just more work for the other.

I cannot stress that enough. To really sit down, if you especially join a young startup, sit down with all your hiring managers and ask them what do they expect from you and what are they looking for. And have that written down somewhere, so you can also remind each other about it.

Maks

Yeah, that’s a really great tip, something that we’ve been using very extensively also documenting it in a real, structured way, which not only helps recruiters with the screening but also with the sourcing strategy because you kind of focus on some of the tools, some of the skills, that aren’t so frequently mentioned or aren’t so well known that you can kind of source and find like a long-tail of candidates in different sources when looking and doing outbound sourcing. So I do agree with that and it’s a very good tip. 

Yeah, these were all my questions! I really enjoyed speaking with you, it was a great chat, thank you very much for joining me today.

Anthonia

Thank you so much for the invite, I loved being here and I loved speaking today, thank you so much.

Maks

Thanks a lot again and I hope to speak to you soon. 

Want to listen more? Check out the IT Crafts HR podcast episode with Andrea LaRowe, Head of People Ops at Basecamp who gives insights on staying connected when a company is remote, maintaining high employee retention, and building a trustworthy company’s culture.