One of the best parts of being on Team Alpha is getting to work with some of the best and brightest minds. Today, we had a chance to connect with a member of our recruiting team and asked them to share some of their Alphanumeric stories. Meet Luis Soares, one of our incredible recruiters.
Tell us about your experience at Alphanumeric. What have been some of the highlights?
A. I’m in Alphanumeric for around 2.5 years and it’s been a truly enriching experience. The major highlight was the conclusion of very difficult projects globally and mainly the people I’ve met from all over the world and from whom I’ve learned so much, I can’t even name everyone that I came to admire here. The company gives us the opportunity to work globally, one day I’m talking with someone from Europe, the day after from the US, and next week from Asia. This is quite motivating to me and gives us cultural knowledge and sensitivity that otherwise would be difficult to get and I feel I became a much more complete professional and person, having contact with all these different perspectives and ways of work.
How has your team changed since you started?
A. My team changed quite a lot. We started with 3, and in 3 months we were almost 15 in EMEA. Then I was promoted from EMEA to Canada and my team changed again for 3 only. I’ve seen quite some changes, almost no one I’ve started with is still in the company and it had dramatically changed over the last year from top to bottom. I’ve seen some improvements, especially on the marketing and brand side, which was something we struggled with in the beginning because no one knew the company outside the niche we work in. I’ve also seen improvements in the way the teams connect with each other globally, which I think is the major flaw we still need to work on, to become a truly global team. In my specific case recruitment has also changed quite a lot due to the pandemic and a “new” market that emerged from it, the hybrid/remote model.
How has your role evolved? Do any projects stand out?
A. My role evolved quite a lot and quickly, I’ve started as a Recruiter, then after 6 months was promoted to Recruitment Expert and now to Senior Recruiter, passing from a normal recruiter job to being responsible for all the recruitment process and tools of an entire region in less than 2 years. Also, my area changed quite a lot. Recruitment 3 years ago, before the pandemic was completely different from recruitment now and it made us adapt to the new market, which went from an employer market to an employee market. The most important project was surely the conclusion of a client project where we had to recruit more than 400 people with more than 15 different languages across the world, from Canada to South Korea, all over Europe, etc., in the middle of the pandemic when no one knew what would happen. We’ve managed to do it despite all the difficulties, and we were able to gather people from all over the world to work on the same goal. Was by far the most difficult and at the same time fulfilling project I’ve ever had and brought considerable growth and success to the company and everyone involved.
Name some of the biggest challenges you've faced
A. The biggest challenge was to understand how to work and recruit in big numbers when the world was closed and everyone was at home with their lives and jobs on hold, with the fear of not knowing what would happen tomorrow. I had to find alternative strategies of communication in a world that was also completely new to me, study labor laws from 10 different countries, look at all the different realities that I’d never seen before, and change the way I worked. It was truly a whole new world and reality. Another challenge was the adaptation to other work cultures which would occasionally collide with the European, especially in the organization and process parts. I overcame those challenges by being open-minded and with a lot of tentative/error until I was able to find the best approach and adaptation strategy to every challenge I faced.
Tell us about an initiative you're proud of.
A. The implementation of the new ATS in EMEA, CANADA, APAC, and LATAM. When I started in the company, they had just started implementing a new ATS to cover EMEA, CAN, APAC, and LATAM, and it was all still very new and disorganized. I was responsible for creating most of the processes in the platform together with training everyone involved in it for Recruitment. What inspired me was the need of having a truly global platform that allowed us to concentrate everything in one place, with quick access and organized in a way that all the teams could work globally in the most productive way possible, allowing us to do more in less time and have a user-friendly visibility of the work being done without having to waste hours looking for information and being all over the place with unproductive emails. The outcome was quite good, we are now using the platform in the most effective way in all regions, and we improved quite a lot the recruitment process and the candidate experience we can provide.
Connect with Luis on LinkedIn and find out more about our amazing Team Alpha by following us on social media.