To help solve schematic issues (for example with certain software) tutorials, tediously written FAQs in the form of walls of text or first line support are created. Stonly is a Polish-French startup, developing a new application designed to make it easy to share knowledge. The solution developed by Stonly enables anyone to easily create tutorials to be placed anywhere.

Stonly was founded by Alexis Fogel and Krzysztof Dąbrowski in July 2018, and by the end of February 2020, the startup had received as much as USD 3.5 million in funding, which allows the company to expand its New York office and enter the American market.

What’s so special about this startup?

The intuitiveness, flexibility, ease-of-use and modular design enabling the application to be used in many forms of sharing knowledge. Apart from the ease of explaining complex problems, Stonly’s statistics collection makes it possible to check at which stage of solving a problem the most users “fall off”, thus reducing support costs. 

Startup currently consists of nine people. This means that every employee has a really big influence on the product and is sure that their ideas will be considered.

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From the candidate’s point of view

It is an excellent company for people who want to have a big impact on the product, who enjoy matching work environment and would like to solve interesting programming problems. 

Need for back-end developer recruitment

Stonly came to us in late March 2019. First, we had a video call with Alexis and Christopher, the founders of Stonly, where we learned about the history of the company and the product concept. This conversation helped us understand what kind of individual they were looking for when it comes to the cultural match / personality. 

At first we found out that they need 3 people:

Once the needs for back-end developer recruitment were specified during discussions with Michał (Front-end Developer) and Krzysztof; we agreed that the person responsible for the backend would come in handy first. Why? Because it is the most labor-intensive, and moreover, the most urgent from the perspective of further product and company development. 

When the priorities were agreed upon together, we started sourcing a Backend Developer who is familiar with node.js. Specifying requirements and needs together with the client is crucial. Especially when working with small companies / start-ups that do not have people assigned solely for recruitment. 

Companies with such a structure usually need the most substantive support and frequent communication from us, recruitment is not their expertise. Let’s not fool ourselves, this is one of the main reasons why Humeo was founded! We want to support IT companies from the very beginning of their activities. It gives us great satisfaction to make every little contribution to the development of this market.

Action strategy for back-end developer recruitment

1. A face-to-face meeting in Stonly’s office

We would love to meet with clients at the launch of every recruitment, however, it’ s not always an option. With Stonly, our offices are about a ten-minute walk away, so we were happy to take a short trip to them.

Why do we enjoy a face-to-face meeting?

We can feel the vibe of the place on our own skin. Live contact with staff (even briefly) brings more value to the project than online conversations only. A face-to-face conversation enhances the feeling that you are working with a human being.

Through direct contact with a technical person from the team (Michał) who has an overview of the whole project and after speaking to the founders of Stonly, the concept of a person who fits in with Stonly both in terms of hard skills and personality profile has crystallized.

2. Communication

We have designed the communication in a narrative form, presenting the product, the company and who and why we are looking for. Then we started sourcing.

3. Sourcing

Using LinkedIn and job boards we started to target companies that use node.js on the backend, not only as an auxiliary tool to support frontline or testing. We focused on the following:

Backend Developer Recruitment – results

5 candidates for the Backend Developer position, 2 of them with high potential to become a Fullstack Developer as well

All individuals were introduced to Stonly. Out of 5 candidates, the company picked a candidate who knew node.js well, and we also found out during the screen call that he is interested in developing towards full-stack. This person spends her free time learning React and carrying out his own projects. 

Stonly offered the position of Backend Developer with a view to expanding his React skills and with the aim of dividing his duties into front and backend.

Summary

Recruitment of Backend Developer for Stonly was very interesting and brought us a lot of satisfaction. Particularly because of the direct contact with the client, which resulted in the success of this project. Full openness to our suggestions from the founders of the startup, encouraged us to act. ?

We knew exactly what personality profile would fit, which also helped us to pre-select candidates at the level of our screen calls. Furthermore, when designing the approach to candidates, we benefited from the fact that Stonly is creating a product that we feel like using and supporting the progress of the IT community. By working on an application that enables programmers to share knowledge quickly and easily.

The crowning achievement of this project was a nice technological change for us. Node.js is one of those rarer technologies, compared to Java or .NET, thus working on this position was an interesting challenge.

Paulina Drąg

IT Recruiter

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