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Seven months ago, #HirePedro was kicking off and Landing.jobs co-founder, Pedro Oliveira, was hopping on a plane to become a Londoner — a way of being he’s still figuring out.
With a brolly in hand and his sleeves rolled up, Pedro landed his own temporary seat at a few London startups to both provide his own insights and gain some first-hand knowledge on the London tech hiring scene.
When he looks out the window, Rua da Prata and the Tagus are now replaced by the London Eye and the Thames. You know he’s slowly starting to embrace a British sense by jumping on the Downton Abbey bandwagon and asking for five minutes to go get a cuppa. We’ve caught up with him to know how his experience in London has been so far.
So, Pedro. You’ve been a Londoner for the last six months. How’s the Big Smoke treating you?
(laughs) Actually, I think it’s already going onto seven now. It’s expected of me to start by saying that the weather isn’t the best (just try typing “(london)” on Skype). Honestly, having lived in the Netherlands and in Ireland, the weather here in London is very acceptable compared to those countries. The city is treating me well in very different aspects, from my personal life, my lifestyle, to my professional life. It’s been a great experience so far.
What is a typical #HirePedro day in London from dawn to dusk?
#HirePedro was something I did when I landed in London. I helped a few companies, most of them seed startups to go over their talent processes and helping them with technical hiring. I stopped doing that three months ago because I just didn’t have enough time. I’m leading our London team with the support of David Bento, our Head of Operations. Most of the team is in our headquarters in Lisbon, but they come to London in shifts every week. Things changed a bit, now it’s more structured. #HirePedro was a phase we needed to do to understand the needs, the founders, and the type of companies that we could target here in the UK, and especially in London.
Nowadays, I have more high-profile sales meetings, and meetings with investors and other interesting people. I just don’t have enough time to spend one week at a company, but it was really nice while it lasted. I learned a lot and shared those lessons learned with the team back home.
Before moving, did you have any preconceived ideas of what you were going to find? If so, what were they and did you end up confirming them?
I guess I had a few. I’m not sure if it was a preconceived idea, but it was definitely in the back of my mind: London was going to be the toughest market in Europe, and it’s proving to be so. The demand for tech talent is constant. Companies here are nonstop when looking for talent. You can’t really understand how true this is until you’re here, feeling it and seeing it with your own eyes.
Not disregarding other markets with high quality standards, especially the German and Dutch markets, but when you’re looking for a job here in London, you need to be really good to make it. It’s not the “best of the best” kind of thing exactly, but you need to know your trade. Otherwise it will be very difficult to get into the best companies, and at Landing.jobs we really make an effort to only have the best companies working with us.
What have you discovered is handled differently when hiring in London?
One thing is speed. The hiring speed is incomparable to Portugal, Spain or even Germany. Everything is super fast. It doesn’t mean that it’s done in a wrong or bad way, it’s just ultra fast. Both hiring managers and in-house recruiters from the employer’s side, they have no time to talk with us at all. You can talk with them, they’re always polite, like all British people are. But in the end, the conversation is two, three minutes long, even when you’re doing a sales call. The other day, I had a 3-minute sales call. I knew the person I talked to had no time to lose, and I don’t have time to lose.
The London pace translates into having no time to lose, saying what you have to say and being polite about it, and moving on. There’s not much space left for failure. Demand for quality is very high, and the pace is very high as well.
But the reward is also higher. Whenever someone gets hired here, the salaries are incomparably higher compared to any other location in Europe. Plus, we’re talking pounds, and London isn’t as expensive as one might think. To be honest, if you go to the pub and get a pint, of course it’s going to be £4.50 — but it’s a big and tasty pint, and you don’t need to go to the pub every day. Some companies even have pub tabs. You can also buy everything online when it comes to shopping. It is more expensive, but it’s not that expensive. The most expensive thing is housing, but that’s another issue.
What are some of the companies you’ve had the opportunity to consult at?
I worked at Talkdesk, Miniclip, Curve, Parcelbright, and Reedsy. There’s a few others where I didn’t officially consult but, yeah, I gave them fairly great advice, though…
When it all started, you said #HirePedro was a humble and human approach to understand the London market first-hand. Even with your willingness to add value, were people skeptical about letting you in their companies?
A few of them, yes. I remember a company that thought it was very interesting, but didn’t have the time to onboard me. It makes sense, because companies did need to spend a bit of time onboarding me and giving me access to their hiring systems. Sometimes I even had to sign an NDA. Some gave me full access, others didn’t; some were skeptical, others weren’t. Ask me a number? I’d say 50–50.
Did you find structured hiring plans or are there a lot of mistakes being made when hiring in London?
Well, taking my experience into consideration, especially since Landing.jobs began, I see a lot of companies making a lot of mistakes when it comes to hiring. I guess the biggest mistake I see is when founders don’t respect and invest in hiring. When I say invest, it has to be time and dedicated budget. But I’ve seen so many processes, it doesn’t matter if it’s London or not. Until now, I’ve never seen a process that’s very similar to another one; each company has their own. Some do pair programming, others use technical testing, Codility, HackerRank or other tools. Some of them don’t do tech testing, they just do a few interviews, and that’s it.
I feel like there’s no right process because every company has their own culture. I believe there are a few fundamental values when it comes to hiring, which not just founders but the whole team needs to be aware of: you need to commit to hiring. You need to plan a hiring budget. I see a lot of companies without one. I usually tell Venture Capitals (VCs) that they should all invest in companies whose founders respect hiring. It’s the most important thing when running a business.
What were the main issues you identified as really needing a few tweaks in the hiring process?
Each company I helped always had something left to improve. Hiring is an ongoing improvement process. And also, the process itself shouldn’t be military-like. What matters in the end is to make the right hire, so it’s okay if you skip a step or two, as long as you’re sure that the person you’re hiring is the right one.
I found that every company needed a few tweaks, but that’s also due to my experience working with Booking.com, Spotify, TransferWise, Talkdesk, etc. I’ve seen so many different hiring processes that I can now easily identify when a company doesn’t even know what the hell they’re doing. When they explain it to me, I can easily say, “you should do this or you should do that”.
Actually, a good way to see the maturity of a company is by looking at their hiring process. It’s a critical way to see how mature they are, because the hiring process is a part of the core activities that companies do. Even Sir Richard Branson said that if you don’t value your employees, you don’t value your clients. And it’s true, because your employees will be the ones talking to your clients. Hiring is very important, and there’s always something to improve.
Were people receptive to your insights and have the companies’ hiring results improved since you were there?
My first few months in London were of adaptation. I also had a few trips back to Portugal. After September, the curve started to go up. I began to put down roots here in London, tried to understand where I was, especially by being away from the team back in Lisbon. It wasn’t easy, but no one said it would be. Now it’s starting to finally pick up and we’re starting to reach the numbers that we aimed for.
Landing.jobs’ Operations team were in London with you recently, contacting with companies first-hand. How is this face-to-face approach important to doing business with new clients?
It’s important to mention a couple of things. First of all, the Landing team is spread across 3 cities: London, Barcelona, and the headquarters are in Lisbon. 20 people in Lisbon, 1 in London, and 1 in Barcelona.
Second, Landing.jobs has two plans when it comes to pricing: the basic and the premium plan. The basic plan is a kind of self-service, and with the premium plan you can also benefit from account managing, tech testing and pre-screening. Having said this, there are three reasons why our team comes here, 1) is to open their minds, because Portugal is very nice but it’s an extremely small market. It’s cool that Portugal is hosting the Web Summit next year, but still, the fact doesn’t change that it’s an extremely small market compared to London, its companies, and the overwhelming number of daily events here; 2) it’s essential that they’re with me, so that I can pass on the London experience I’ve been absorbing face-to-face, be it the pace, the demand for quality, these kinds of things; and 3) is actually meeting the clients face-to-face and getting this not from me, not from my experience, not through what someone else told them, not from attending an event, but through actually having a meeting with them and understanding that, “this is it, this is what they want, now I fully understand”, and this is what we’ve been doing.
Every week, someone from the Lisbon/Barcelona team comes to London and spends the week here with me, and I think it’s a nice way to open up every team member’s brain, so that when they go back they can also spread that new, “aim for more” mentality, which is very present in London. I don’t feel it as present in Portugal. When we all go back, even me, we have the mission to spread this mentality to the rest of the team. Portugal is lovely, it’s awesome, it’s a great place to build the headquarters in, but we need to aim for more, and the London mentality is very “pro-aim for more”.
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Are sales approached differently compared to other European cities?
I would say sales are pretty much the same, just taking into consideration the pace and speed that I mentioned before. We can do them in two ways: relationship-based or hardcore sales, or a mix of both. These two methods work really well. I can pick up the phone and start dialing or shoot an e-mail; I can just do content and clients come to us; referrals help bring in other employers; I can network with people that I meet at events or through VCs as well, we have a few clients that VCs introduced us to.
How important do you think your presence in London has been for sales?
It’s also a team effort, but we were able to get a few cool companies on board. Also Matt, who lived here, had an influence in London sales. Here we got Transferwise, DigitasLBi, Yieldify, Citymapper, GoCardless, Moonpig, Skimlinks, ustwo. ustwo is a really cool product studio company, no one knows about them back in Portugal, but their Shoreditch studio is probably the most awesome work space I’ve ever been to in my life.
You have to realize that this market is very candidate-driven. The demand for quality candidates is enormous, companies are desperate to find tech talent. I got an email today from a local London company saying that they were desperate to find a senior Ruby on Rails Developer. Of course we’ll help, but the market makes it easy for us to sell because the sales proposition is very easy.
It’s like going to a company and asking, hey, do you hire tech pros? 99% of the time, the answer is yes. The second question is, do you have any particular roles where you’re having most difficulty finding the right people?, and the probable answer is yes.
Most of the time, they answer that they can’t find someone who fits their iOS position or they’re not getting enough applications for the senior .NET Developer offer. We just need to say we can help with that and say, by the way, our pricing is half of the market rate. And we can only do this pricing because we have an amazing product backing us up.
A lot has happened at Landing.jobs in these last seven months. The team has expanded, and the company is continually growing. Do you think this growth is influenced by your move to London and what you have learned there?
I’d say partly, but it’s mostly team effort that enabled us to get here. I definitely contributed, but it’s a team effort. Always keeping one thing in mind: when José and I started Landing.jobs, we set up a few rules. One of them was that our business needed to be sustainable. By sustainable, I mean we need to make money. This rule is because in our country, in Portugal, and pretty much around the world, we see a lot of this “startup culture” that values events and awards over paying customers.
And we have been growing quite a lot. Right now, we’re hiring a Head of Sales and a Business Development Intern for Spain and Germany. All of them to stay in our headquarters, in Lisbon, which will involve trips to Spain or Germany every now and then. Honestly, in today’s world, you don’t really need to be at the exact place you’re doing business with. At least that’s how we’ve felt until now. We might change our thoughts on this in the future — we’ll keep you posted.
Switching over to a candidate’s point of view, are London companies open to the idea of hiring foreign tech professionals?
Yes, but there are two sides to that point, 1) they are very keen on hiring EU tech talent. 2) they are also okay with hiring from outside the EU, but again, the quality of the candidate needs to be top-notch, because it’s a real pain in the neck to get the visa sponsorship. I’ve never seen something like it. It costs money, time, and it’s not a guarantee. It just doesn’t make sense for tech pros to go through this. There’s a big demand from UK companies to hire these kinds of professionals, and then the UK government is making it harder for them. It doesn’t add up.
There are still companies who hire non-EU citizens; Transferwise, for instance. If they find a really good talent, say, from Brazil, they’ll help with the visa, no problems there.
Is the type of contract important when searching for a job in London?
I’ve seen some reports on this, and if I had to divide the market, first of all there’s an important number: when you talk about the UK tech recruitment market, 3/4 of it is in London. Related to that, I also found out that in London, 20% of the offerings are for contract roles, and 80% are for permanent roles. I think this varies from industry to industry. For instance, digital and media agencies deal with contractors a lot because they have short gigs that have already been done by someone else and they’re okay with paying £400 per day, plus the recruitment agency commission.
What I mostly see is, when someone arrives in the London tech market, they go for permanent roles. It’s easier. After you’ve been in the market for a while you’ll maybe want to move on to a contracting position. But it depends on the person, because by being a contractor you’re dependent only on yourself, and the type of roles that you do might not be the most challenging ones.
For someone entering the market, I’d say looking for permanent roles is easier. After a while, then maybe shift to the contractor life when the local market recognises your value. Start by doing some moonlighting, freelancing roles, meeting the right people, going to the right agencies for contracting positions. I’m not pro-contracting because I’m a firm believer in putting on the company shirt, but I realise not everyone feels that way, so it’s good that London has these different approaches towards work. I don’t see this in Portugal, for example, just outsourcing and a bit of freelancing. The rest is permanent roles. The London and Lisbon markets are shaped in a completely different way.
Salary-wise, what is the London market like?
Salaries are very competitive, and the salary progression as well. Let’s say you’re a software engineer from Italy. When you arrive in London, you have an okay salary. Let’s say you have 2–3 years experience, you’re a good developer, you land a job. Now let’s say you get £35–40k gross annual in the first year. It’s pretty obvious that you’re getting a raise in your second year, so £45. The pace of changing jobs is also higher in London, it can be year on year, or every two years, and you also get a raise every time you move. Let’s say that after 4 years of being in London, you can easily move on to £60k per year, maybe more.
The market is very merit-oriented, which is great. There’s a big career progression in London, plus the tech community in London is very active. There are events every week for hardware, data science, Ruby on Rails, whatever, you name it.
Your career potential in London is multiplied by ten compared to being in Italy or Portugal, for example. The people you meet will constantly challenge you to improve. The companies you meet have challenging products and markets, so it’s almost impossible not to advance in your career in London, which is something that you cannot disregard. I think it’s very important.
How on earth can you stand out in a market as competitive as London?
Let’s say you come to London, you get a job at a startup or at a medium enterprise. My advice is to definitely start getting involved in the community, but also doing a really good job, making sure your CV is up to date with the projects that you did. Usually when you go to interviews in London, in-house recruiters and hiring managers dive deep into the projects that you’ve done. They go into specifics, which is something that happens less in other countries. Over here there’s always someone who is great at a specific technology that you wouldn’t be able to find in Portugal.
I would say that to be great at something, instead of being a generalist, start to get specific. I always say this, especially to the Portuguese and Spanish tech communities in London which I know quite well: be more ambitious. People are very humble sometimes, and they could “aim for more”. The alternative to becoming a tech pro in a specific technology? Lead people.
I would advise newcomers to meet fellow techies, engage with them, learn from them, go to meetups, hackathons, pub sessions… Follow the Landing.jobs blog and join our Slack community as well (we were inspired by techlondon.io), check our job offers, but ideally just perform amazingly well at work.
Is it possible to admit that there is a “London way” of doing business?
It’s kind of related to the speed again, and I also like the British politeness. It’s very unique and interesting. It can be tricky sometimes; you can be talking to a British person and they’ll say, oh yes, you did an amazing job. And what they’re telling you is, no, your job was crappy and you should do it again. It can be tricky. British people are not very direct in their speech. It’s mashed up into politeness.
So yes, there’s definitely a British way of doing business, and a London way of doing business, and you need to adapt to that. Compared to the rest of the UK, the thing about being in London is the mix of cultures you get. London is like a country within a country. There are almost 9 million people living here; it’s a lot of people and a lot of cultures. I still don’t know what it really means to be a Londoner, but I do know that it’s slightly different from just being a British person. But there are things that are intersect with each other, like the politeness, and understanding it comes with time. Again, if you do a great job, you’ll be rewarded. To answer the question, yes, there is a London way of doing business.
Have these last seven months in London turned you into a hiring expert?
(laughs) I wouldn’t call myself a hiring expert, but if you give me a hiring problem, I think I can help you solve it by giving you some hints and advice on it, or at least introduce you to someone who does. There are a lot of people I meet every day that are better at hiring than I am.
What I said about new candidates coming to London, what they should do is what I’m doing: learning from these people. The amount of talent you have here per square metre is much higher, so you’ve got to take advantage of that, right? And that’s what I’m doing. I’m improving myself, and of course that will have side effects to Landing.jobs.
And what now? Will you keep on facing the drizzle and fog or are other cities in the works of welcoming you into their companies?
I’ll keep the new system. #HirePedro was important, but it’s a closed stage, as I just don’t have time these days. I have to focus on other things like meeting investors, doing high-profile sales, team building (yes, hiring for ourselves), helping the team who deals with London affairs, and building our sales team together with @tarouca.
:drops bomb: Maybe Berlin’s next?
Lorena Wildering
Content Marketing Manager at Landing.jobs
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