Irena Marinova
Lead Recruitment & Resourcing Advisor @Questers
Meet one of our super recruiters Irena Marinova. She has been part of Questers’ family for nearly 4 years now and we are all fascinated by her enthusiasm and dedication to everything she is working on. Therefore, we’ve asked her a few questions about her current excitements and challenges, and the vacancies she is recruiting for. Read what she shared with us:
Tell us about yourself. What’s your educational and professional background? How do you spend your free time?
I have graduated Masters’ degree in Organizational and Social Psychology and have been working as a recruiter for 4 years now – most of which have spent at Questers. I’m really happy that I managed to find a place which gives me the opportunity to work according to my educational background and to reveal my full potential.
However, since we aim for work-life balance, in my free time I love to go to the mountains. Recently learned to ski and therefore spend every weekend at very special and magical places, surrounded by great people. And of course, my biggest passion – my dog Bailey.
What excites you most about your work?
Everything is exciting – may sound like a cliché, but still true. Every day is different and has its own charm. The variety of people we meet and the situations we face are one of a kind. We get to communicate with people who may not become our candidates right away but if we keep the connection, in the end everything turns out positive. Also like the admin work – unlike most of the recruiters, I love playing some nice music and dive deep into the reporting.
What challenges you are facing at the moment?
A challenge and an excitement in the same time – to build a team of extremely talented engineers for NewsUK. Thanks to Questers they have entered the Bulgarian Tech labour market few months ago and we’ve already managed to hire 10 superstars. Their team is still growing, but so far so good :)
We know the recruitment team is quite busy right now. What are the vacancies you are currently working on?
As mentioned, NewsUK and their project for The Times is my priority #1. Finding the best talent here is quite an excitement because of the interesting tech stack they use. Working with top notch technologies, the guys here are building a platform with React and React Native.
SpotMe – the Swiss leading pure play mobile event app, is growing their team with us with a great speed. We have a variety of positions for them not only in the tech sector.
Apart from those teams, our partners pay a lot of attention to the DevOps role. We see the interest in it is becoming bigger and bigger. Currently we have more than 6 open positions for DevOps Engineers and expecting to get more in the near future. The profiles are quite different though, and every one of them is attractive in its own way. Therefore, we can find the perfect match for every DevOps Engineer who might be interested in working with us.
Tell us more about those teams. What they are working on and what is the team culture?
If I shall speak in particular – NewsUK’s team here consists of engineers who are very skilled and experienced. They strive for success knowing that the first people make the difference and set the culture. Described with one sentence – they code while having fun and have fun while coding.
As for SpotMe – if I may quote a song, that would be “Young and Beautiful”. The team is full of passionate and motivated people, doing everything possible to deliver a high-quality service. They realize that the app they build is really cool and try to stick to the idea of being a springboard for their customers, enabling the events to bring transformative change.
Share some insights, what kind of projects there are and what are the main skills the perfect applicant should have?
One of the greatest things about Questers is that we engage with building teams which require diversity and expertise in various fields. If I shall divide the skillset by positions, that would be: the DevOps Engineers would be involved in working with cloud-based infrastructure, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.; for the Software Engineers, depending on the tech stack, we have projects related to building meaningful platforms on React, React Native, Python, Go, Java (of course :)), iOS, Android. And last but not least – the perfect fit for all of our teams would have a nice personality and a zip – or follow the principle “get-up-and-go”!