We are talking to Lora Borisova, R&D Manager at VMware Cloud on AWS and Gergana Georgieva from the Talent Acquisition team. Lora is one of the managers at VMware with an ambitious hiring plan and she knows well that attracting top software engineering talent is challenging. She has an idea.
What was your idea?
Lora: I already had a great relationship with Gergana, the recruiter for my team, but I knew that to achieve our goal we needed to take our cooperation to the next level. So I decided to join the Talent Acquisition team. I took advantage of a great program at VMware called Take 2 – you can pick any team and organization and spend 2 full-time weeks with them to gain new knowledge, broaden your perspective or simply refresh your mindset.
I took advantage of a great program at VMware called Take 2 – you can pick any team and organization and spend 2 full-time weeks with them to gain new knowledge, broaden your perspective or simply refresh your mindset.
Lora Borisova
My goals were:
- to better understand the tools and techniques that the Talent Acquisition team had at their disposal
- to understand more about their constraints and how I can help
- to help them upgrade their technical knowledge
- to act as one team with my colleagues from Talent Acquisition as a result of the above
What were your ah-ha moments from working with each other?
Lora: That we need to build awareness for our team – who are the people behind the technology, what we do, what tech problems are we solving, what’s the spirit and the culture in the team. My ah-ha moment was that you need to approach the tech hiring process as you approach a marketing campaign – to define who is your target persona, how their goals and our goals align in the best possible way, and how do we reach them and get our message through.
Another valuable takeaway for me was the realization that we, the technical teams, sometimes fail to support our colleagues from the Talent Acquisition team. We are less likely to invest time and efforts into initiatives that bring ROI in the long-term and are instead focused on quick, short-term gains. However, the recruitment economy is very different today and to quickly fill 5 or 10 positions is not a trivial task. The tech teams need to be actively involved in activities and campaigns that tell the story of the company, its values, and its vision.
Gergana: Lora immediately grasped the essence of the shift that has happened in the way we source and hire tech talent in the past few years. The time of posting a job offer and waiting for the perfect candidates to show up is gone.
The time of posting a job offer and waiting for the perfect candidates to show up is gone.
Gergana Georgieva
To attract the best talent today you need to take them behind the scenes and show them more than a list of requirements and benefits. In order for this to happen, we need to involve the managers and the software engineers in the communication with their future colleagues.
How does the future of tech recruitment look like for you?
Lora: Employer branding is going beyond building the company brand. The engineers, the QAs, the interns and their managers are in the spotlight of the recruitment communication. And not because we are told so, but because of the realization that we need to be part of the process. It concerns us directly. In the complex world of technological innovations built on top of cutting-edge technologies, the engineers behind the products are the best spokesmen for the company.
Gergana: Synergy between the Technical, the Talent Acquisition and the Marketing teams and deep understanding of how each team can contribute to our common goal. We are using more and more techniques and tactics that used to be purely in the marketing domain until a few years ago.
Lora’s team is growing. Check out the open positions:
Site Reliability Engineer Lead
