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IT Crafts HR – Evelin Andrespok from Toggl

Podcast | February 18, 2020 | itcraftship | , ,
IT Crafts HR – Evelin Andrespok from Toggl

Time is important, and Toggl knows it well – their employees work from 19 different time zones! Listen to the podcast episode with Evelin Andrespok, where she shares the success story on how Toggl, a company from Tallinn, Estonia, became a worldwide company with more than 100 employees. She tells, as People Ops Manager, what impact on a company had a decision to become remote and what are the challenges of managing people today. Find out how the hiring process at Toggl looks like, and what is their key to high employee retention.

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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.

Evelin Andrespok

People Operation Manager at Toggl

Evelin Andrespok is the People Operation Manager at Toggl, where she has spearheaded designing the company culture in transition from a small co-located crew to a fully remote team of 110 people in 30 countries. They have also changed the way hiring is done with the Toggl Hire tool designed for screening job applicants’ skills instead of relying on resumes. Evelin’s passion is building supportive relationships and environments that enable people to do their best work. She writes about remote work and leadership in her blog.

Something that you wish you have known earlier

I guess, it would be coaching. I actually used to be very skeptical of this concept because I didn't know it well. Later I had some courses about it and experimented with it, and now I think this is something that every leader, every manager, every HR person should look into. It will teach you how to listen and how to understand your team, and I've seen it also with our leaders in the company – when they started using it, they found out many valuable things about their team (...).

Transcript

Maks

Hello, dear listeners. Today, I’m speaking with Evelin Andrespok, People Operations Manager at Toggl, a productivity tool that helps you measure how much time you’re spending on certain tasks and projects so that you can focus on what matters the most.

Hi, Evelin, thank you for joining me today on the podcast.

Evelin

Thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here.

Maks

Yeah, it’s awesome, I’m very excited. Before we start, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how would you describe your position and responsibilities to our listeners?

Evelin

I’m the People Operations Manager at Toggl. I’ve been in the company for more than 5 years and currently, my main responsibilities are everything that refers to the employee life cycle, like hiring, onboarding, cooperating, supporting, learning, development and also, leadership training and stuff related to that. In the People Ops team, there are 3 people, two beside me and that’s how we roll.

Maks

Okay, so you’re leading a team of 3 people on the HR side. On your website, you mentioned that your employees work from 19 different time zones. How many people work right now at Toggl and how many people do the HR team need to take care of it? How do you deal with working at different hours?

Evelin

Toggl Business Group has actually 3 companies. You know that Time Tracker is the biggest; we have 84 people today. In addition, we have also Teamweek App with 18 people, and Hundred5 – now Toggl Hire with 7 people. Altogether, it’s almost 110 people, and how we work is fully remotely. Everyone is at home or in a co-working space and that’s how we do it, and in terms of time zones – it’s so distributed that we have somebody not in each, but in most of the time zones, let’s say, we have overlapped.

Maks

Yeah, awesome. Did it start this way or did you start as an on-site company or like a hybrid remote and on-site?

Evelin

Toggl is more than 10 years old as a company already and at the beginning, it was just a regular co-located company in Tallinn, Estonia. When I joined Toggl, actually, it wasn’t a remote company yet, but the decision had been made to become remote. My journey in Toggl has allowed me to see this transition from a co-located company to a fully remote global company and that was about 5 years ago. Definitely, we’ve seen all stages of this transition from the early learnings until now – being one of the veteran companies in this topic.

Maks

Awesome, that sounds like a great story. I think that only a few companies have had the opportunity to go through the entire transition, so it will be very interesting to learn a little bit more. As an HR professional, do you see any challenges that are typical for managing people in a remote company? What is the biggest problem for you and how are you dealing with it right now?

Evelin

I think this will not surprise anyone, that the biggest challenge is communication in all senses of the word. It means the technical side, how people who are not in the same space – physical space, can communicate. Of course, we can talk, we have more than 100 people and we use a Slack, for example, or any other chat app.

But there’s a lot of noise, so how to find the things that really matter in that huge pile of things, but also, in a more meaningful way, it’s the way we talk to each other as humans and how we give feedback to each other, how we communicate the company goals and all of this. I think I can speak for all remote companies, communication it’s the biggest challenge for anyone and probably companies worldwide, even non-remote companies.

Maks

Yeah, I think that companies really have a problem getting into the remote culture because of the communication issues, that it’s not as mature in their company internally before they want to go remote and they need to fix it first before they try.

Evelin

Yeah, there are so many assumptions we have about other people and how we work together, and many of those are turned upside down when you start working remotely. Many physical cues or facial impressions and stuff like this that you are so used to reading on people when you’re in the same room, you can’t do it suddenly, so you have to find how to actually get to know what the person meant – what were the connotations they were thinking of when they wrote something, assuming many people may not be native speakers of English which is the working language for us, so there are so many sides.

Maks

Yeah, absolutely, and you mentioned that the company didn’t start remotely. It started as a co-located company. So, it didn’t look like that from the start. Can you share what changes have you seen since transitioning in terms of like the results, the productivity of the team, the results that people have been delivering, can you share a little bit more about that?

Evelin

I think it’s a little bit hard to compare how the company was 5 years ago and how it is today because so many things have changed. It’s hard to say whether the productivity is because of remote or despite the remote or so on. Overall, I will say that remote work is such an internal part of our DNA already that it’s hard to imagine that we are not remote, and actually, on a daily basis, when we talk about work, we don’t talk about remote, that we are doing it remotely.

We are talking about the actual content of the work that we are doing and focusing on the actual tasks. I think productivity is high because people are happy. They enjoy the freedom, the flexibility that remote work gives and this is what boosts the happiness – the engagement, productivity, but it’s a bit hard to explain these connections.

If you would tell our people now that we will stop being remote, like in a month or whatever, in two weeks, people would leave because this is how the company culture is, how they are used to work and I think this shows how important this part is for people at Toggl.

Maks

Awesome, yeah, I understand that. We are a hybrid remote company. I know that this flexibility means a lot to everyone on the team. I’ve read quite a few articles about how the hiring process at Toggl looks like, and I know that it’s unlike at most other companies. Can you tell me what is so unique about it and what results are you seeing with this process?

Evelin

Yeah, I will say it’s quite unique because we never read any resumes and we only look at the skills of the applicant, and we do this by one of our own tools. I mentioned we have 3 companies and one of them is Toggl Hire, previously Hundred5, you may know it by that name, which is basically like prescreening test for any candidate.

All the positions that we hire start with this skills test. It’s really quick, maybe 15 minutes, a few questions that can be answered online, and based on this, we get automatically scored results. We focus on top candidates from there who have the basic skills that we are looking for. From there we go on with home assignments – let’s say what we call test drives. It could be an hour of online, live coding or it can be answering customer support cases, such things, and then we do a trial week.

It takes three to five days. Work is depending on the availability of the candidate. In this process, we usually never go into resumes because we really believe that what we want is people who know how to do the work and who are good communicators, and we don’t get that knowledge from the resumes because everything looks good on paper. What we really need to know is, do you match the way we work and the way we think and our values? So, this has been our approach and until now, it has worked really great for us.

Maks

Yeah, that sounds like something that many companies do, but it also makes a lot of sense. This recruitment process, did it look like it from the start or did you have a different process like years ago, and if that’s the case, what changes have you seen in results as well?

Evelin

Back in the day, before I even joined Toggl, we used to do the regular hiring thing, reading resumes… the very common traditional way. But it didn’t work for us. We couldn’t find people and it was taking so long. Finally, when we found somebody, they were not a good fit and then we wasted all this money. Actually, this was the reason why we also started thinking about remote work. We realized our hiring radius is really small and if you know anything about Estonia, that it’s a small country, there are not that many specialists, and we have a lot of startups.

It’s really crazy, a good scene for startups, so the competition is high. So, we thought like, why to limit ourselves to only one city in Northern Europe when we could look at the world. Then we thought “how do you access people around the world, how can you test the skills”, and we put these two things together – we turned it to this skills-based hiring and it turned global.

It also helped the product, we have more diversity so we never looked back. To be honest, we never tried any other ways after that. We iterated, made it better and made it work for us. Even I was hired through this test and the same system, and I’m not in a technical role. This proves that it can be done for any position because you still know the skills or mindset that people need to have to fit in the role that you’re hiring for.

Maks

Yeah, and I think that you are describing here a very common case where a company that actually opens up to the remote talent pool suddenly gets flooded with a lot of applications, a lot of people that want to join them because there are still not so many companies that are remote-friendly or that are remote-first.

When you do, then you have to find a way of how to process these applications fast and how to get the most out of them, and I think that the way you are doing it is pretty efficient and generates great results for you, but you talked about this trial period, trial week for three to five days.

As a candidate, I can imagine as well that committing to like three or five days of working with a potential new employer is challenging, considering my current employment status. Now, how do your candidates deal with that challenge?

Evelin

To be honest, it was never a problem for us. People who are interested in working with us, they will find the time. If it’s necessary, we won’t do full days, we can make shorter days, and because of the time zone difference, sometimes, people can work in the evenings in their local time zone, so there is a way to make it work, usually. I would say actually, this has never been an obstacle for us and like I said, we would prefer five days but sometimes all they can do is two or three, and it’s okay, we can still make it work.

Maks

Okay, so it sounds like it doesn’t really mean that just like with a remote company, you don’t need to work 8 hours in a row, but you can be flexible, you can start in the time zone of your co-workers which isn’t necessarily the middle of your day, and then you can end within the time zone of some different coworker on the team, right?

Evelin

Yeah, that’s right, and I think this is what’s the beauty of remote work. It’s so flexible.

Maks

Yeah, that is, and I also learned from you previously when we talked, that Toggl has a very high retention of employees which I haven’t seen often. Why do you think it’s so high?

Evelin

That’s a million-dollar question. I think there are a few reasons. So, one is that we are remote and it’s so special. As you said, there is not that many companies, there’s more and more, but still, it’s not the mainstream, I would say, so I think people value this freedom and trust that they get with this. We don’t have any culture of micromanagement or anything in that sense that could come with the remote work if you don’t trust your people, so I think this is one thing.

Also, it’s just the general atmosphere which is really positive and a lot of people have made friends – you could think it’s hard in a remote setting when you don’t actually see people that often, but somehow, we’ve managed to make it work, and I think the people are what’s keeping us around.

I guess some people enjoy traveling we get to do as a remote company when we go to meetups and retreats together. And of course, last but not least, it’s the product itself and all this freedom that we have to make it better and people have a lot of choices. Let’s say they have opportunities to influence which direction the product is going in. Who wouldn’t like to have this meaningful work that they can influence? I think these are the reasons based on the engagement service we do.

Maks

Sounds like very good things that companies focus on to improve their retention, and coming back to your recruitment process, can you share what KPIs are important in your hiring process? What do you measure, and can you share what results do you see from inbound sourcing compared to an outbound sourcing in terms of successful hires, and then retention?

Evelin

I guess first, I should say, we never did outbound sourcing. All of the candidates find us and we have a lot of candidates. Sometimes, we have thousands of applicants per position, so yeah, we never did that. Actually, I can’t comment, and in terms of KPIs, we don’t really have very strict KPIs that we keep an eye on. For a long time, we had a few hiring cases open or let’s say campaigns open at the same time – it was a pretty much case-by-case approach.

Now, we are trying to pay more attention to how long the whole process takes for people and how they enjoy the process, let’s say. How satisfied they were? Did they get enough information about the company and the process, and feedback, and stuff like this? I would say more qualitative than quantitative because each case is a bit unique. We do collect the feedback but I know in many companies, the focus is on the number of candidates and such, but actually, we never had an issue that we don’t have enough candidates, so we have to focus on the quality of the process rather than the sourcing, let’s say because somehow, and it works.

I’ve seen in recent years that we have more and more candidates because remote is becoming so popular. So, it’s definitely also based on the feedback from the candidates. The number one reason why they were looking into Toggl is that it’s a remote job, so I would say it’s like a competitive advantage for us and would recommend it to other companies to join the club. But in terms of your question – I don’t really have, I think, good numbers that would be meaningful to share here in terms of KPIs.

Maks

Okay, and when you say that you are doing qualitative research with the applicants, what kind of applicants do you target? Only those that have successfully gone through the process or those who have also unsuccessfully gone through the process?

Evelin

First, my instance – how we get feedback is that everyone takes the test, the skills test. They get a small question box, you can answer how did you like it and that’s actually super positive always. But we all have to learn how to improve the test itself. Then the second important place is that everyone who does this test week with us – there are people who we think already have really high potential to work with us and their opinion really matters to us – so we always ask feedback from those people regardless of how they do, like if we hired them or not. It’s just really valuable feedback for us.

Maks

I understand, cool. What tools do you use to hire at Toggle? I know that you mentioned Hundred5 which was recently rebranded to Toggl Hire. Can you tell me a little bit more about that and what other tools are you using?

Evelin

Currently, I would say this is the number one tool that everything revolves around. Like I said, it’s a simple testing tool where you can create your own test specific to the position that you are hiring for or there are some templates or suggestions that you can use if you don’t know how to start, and there are recommendations, but basically, it’s maybe 10 to 15 questions. They are multiple-choice, there are simple data entry things, and then a few open text answers where we get to see your thinking and your writing skills, and so on.

Everything, except the open text questions, is automatically scored and we have thresholds – let’s say you get more than 80%, then you become, let’s say a possible hire. Then we will go and look at your open text answers and still review all the candidates based on this sense if it was like a serious application or not, and maybe if it’s a designer position, we would look at the portfolio in that case. Our team leads start contacting people and doing the live coding or whatever other home assignments they have, and then the next is the test week.

The team leads nowadays actually do a lot of hiring because they’re the experts in checking the specific skills. That’s, I guess, also kind of unique among many companies because all our team leads are really good at hiring. They know the skills they need, they do the interviews, and the HR role is mostly, I would say supportive – helping with sourcing, helping with the contracts, and onboarding later and things like these.

The test is made by the team lead and other steps are actually conducted by team lead: interviews and so on, but that’s very special and that’s why we can have such a small people ops team. We don’t need an army of recruiters, yeah, but that has worked for us really well. For collecting the feedback, we also use mobile app surveys and until now, we have not used any applicant tracking systems. We might look into that as we hire more, but we are researching this.

Maks

Awesome. It seems that your team leads and your teams have a lot of autonomy in who they hire, who they then work with. Can you share a little bit more, like what are the team sizes, so how the teams are organized?

Evelin

Teams are organized by domains, I guess. We could say there’s mobile apps team, desktop apps team, back end, front end, customer support, product marketing – very classical set up in a sense. It might change in the future as we grow and the teams become too big. I think we are close to that, so we are already looking into restructuring maybe two full set teams, but we don’t know yet what the solution will be. It’s a work in progress. If anyone has good ideas to share, I’m open to them, and the team sizes, I would say there are from 4 to 14. The 14 is a high end, and it’s only one team, I think, at the moment. I think that’s already getting too big for one team lead to manage and not burn out.

Maks

Yeah, I understand. I also wanted to know a little bit more about how you promote people for management positions, for leadership positions within the company? Do you hire externally for management positions or do you promote internally? How do you help companies evolve into leadership roles?

Evelin

Until now, it has been mostly internally. All our current team leads were specialists also before in Toggl, so they know the product and the business really well. We didn’t really need to hire externally but we might do it in the future. I would say it’s up for discussion, it depends on the roles.

For example, we recently hired a salesperson, and we never had that skill in house, so we had to start something new and we hired an external person, of course. Basically, we don’t have a formally defined path how you could become a team lead, but it’s more about just proving yourself and being a good team member, being a good specialist, showing initiative, being a general kind of proactive, let’s say.

These are the main things we are looking for, and one really important thing – you have to be a people person in the sense that you don’t have to be extroverted but you have to be willing to work with people, to do one on ones, to really care about people. You can be the best specialist in the world but if you’re not a good person to other people it will never work, so we really pay a lot of attention to that before we promote anyone.

Maks

Absolutely. So, you try to identify leadership skills and leadership traits in your employees before making them leaders and having them take on leadership positions?

Evelin

Yeah, that’s right.

Maks

Awesome, great. And that leads me to a final question. Because you already have a lot of experience also in such a transitional state at Toggl, and you have a lot of experience as an HR person. I would like to know, what do you wish to have known earlier and if you have any tips for HR departments from different companies that could help them improve their work?

Evelin

I want to give two answers to this question. One is from the perspective of just transitioning to remote or becoming remote. What I see a lot from people who talk to me about it and ask for advice is that people are really worried about the technical side of it: the apps you should use or even how to make contracts, but in reality, you will figure this out. This is not the hard part. For sure, you have smart people in your team who can set up all the systems and do all that. What you should think about is how to manage the people? How does leadership work when you don’t see people every day? How do you communicate? These things will have the biggest impact on your team.

I remember back in the day when we first started having remote meetings and all this, oh, we went through a lot of experiments which, looking back, were ridiculous but at the time we didn’t know any better way. We really focused a lot on the technical side of being remote but you will figure it out, this is the easy part. Focus on the people, that’s my advice.

What I wish somebody had told me before, in a more general HR domain, I guess, it would be coaching. I actually used to be very skeptical of this concept because I didn’t know it well. Later I had some courses about it and experimented with it, and now I think this is something that every leader, every manager, every HR person should look into. It will teach you how to listen and how to understand your team, and I’ve seen it also with our leaders in the company – when they started using it, they found out many valuable things about their team, so that’s another thing that I wish I had found earlier that could’ve helped me.

Maks

Okay, great, so thank you, Evelyn. These are all my questions. I really enjoyed talking to you and you’ve put some interesting perspective on things like hiring and managing a remote team. I appreciate you taking the time to join me.

Evelyn

Thank you for inviting me. It was so much pleasure.

Want to listen more? Check out the IT Crafts HR podcast episode with Gerald Bot, Chief Client Officer at Polyglot Group who explains what a company that plans to become remote-friendly needs to know before making the step towards telecommuting.