Iveta Stancheva, Senior Recruitment & Resourcing Advisor at Questers
Meet one of our super recruiters Iveta Stancheva! We admire her passion and creative thinking when promoting a new role or recruiting a particular candidate for a specific role. Recently, she has been quite busy (like the entire recruitment team), but we managed to steal a couple of minutes from her time for a brief chat. We talked about the challenges a recruiter faces in the dynamic IT world and what excites her about her work. We also asked her about some of the most interesting roles she is currently working on. Read what she shared:
Tell us about yourself. What’s your educational and professional background? How do you spend your free time?
My name is Iveta – I’m a young, enthusiastic and ambitious woman in the IT world and particularly in the recruitment field. I started doing recruitment almost 4 years ago, and currently, I’m happy to say that as part of Questers, I continue my professional development in the field, and what’s more, I’m helping tech companies worldwide build cross-functional teams in Bulgaria and grow their business.
Regarding my educational background – it’s completely unrelated to my current occupation. I graduated in Greek philology, and to be honest, back then, I wasn’t even aware of what „recruiter” meant. Interesting twist, isn’t it? :)
When I’m not working, what I really love to do, is spend quality time with my family and friends. Throughout the week, I work out and lately, I’ve been doing mostly kango jumps, pilates and yoga. Travelling and hiking are on the list as well.
What excites you mostly about your work?
“There’s no other day like today.” This is the most common expression you could hear from any colleague.
Every day as a recruiter, I’m in a head-to-head competition to attract top talent and if you are as competitive persona, as I am, well, then you can feel even more energized. I have played basketball for many years, so I believe this is where the competitiveness comes from. :)
There are a couple of other things that I can mention here and one of them is the impact on people’s lives. We can change their life by offering them their dream job or effectively guiding their career in a positive direction.
Another thing I find exciting is the opportunity to communicate either with potential candidates or people at C-level positions, experienced professionals coming from different work fields, backgrounds, skills and in our case at Questers - people from countries such as the UK, USA, Germany etc.
What challenges are you facing at the moment?
Let me tell you one thing - recruitment is all about challenges!
Let’s take a look at the candidates’ journey in the recruitment process – during the initial stage, you have to grab their attention, then you need to keep them engaged in the entire process until, in the best scenario, you place them successfully. I think that these are general challenges and all my colleagues face them daily. Nowadays, due to the various factors that affect the Bulgarian labour market (remote/hybrid work, new players entering the market, etc.), candidates have plenty of opportunities to choose from. This adds additional challenges to the recruiters’ job. Today, the competition for top talent is stronger than ever.
We know the recruitment team is quite busy right now. What are the vacancies you are currently working on?
Currently, I’m looking for experienced Ruby Engineers for Funding Circle - one of the oldest teams at Questers. Funding Circle is a UK-based product company, and their team in Bulgaria consists of amazing Software Engineers.
I’m also on the lookout for experienced Front-end Engineers who love working with React for one of our new partners – Smart Pension.
Additionally, I’m working on some non-IT roles such as Communication Operations Specialist and Amazon Operations Specialist for the EMEA regions
In a nutshell - plenty of career opportunities.
Tell us more about those teams. What are they working on, and what is the team culture?
Funding Circle is a peer-to-peer lending platform, which helps different businesses across the UK, US and some other European countries.
We have built their team at Questers from scratch, and to be honest, one of the main things that helped us gather this team is the culture of the company. As we all know, culture is key to making a group of people a team, and what makes you want to join a specific company.
I can give a simple example from one of the Lead Engineers, who shared with me that “The company culture and the high energy of people” are the things that he loves the most about this organization.
The company listens to its people and demonstrates flexibility. It maintains a very open atmosphere and focuses on teamwork and work-life balance. In addition, almost every Friday, engineers can spend the whole afternoon focusing on self-improvement and learning new stuff related to Software Development. I think all this is great, and it represents how the company takes care of its people and helps them develop further.
Another team I mentioned is Smart Pension, who also provide financial services, and their specialty lies in the field of pension and retirement. We’re currently building their team from scratch, and I’m looking for Mid/Senior Front-end Engineers (React) who love new challenges. One of Smart Pension’s advantages is their tech stack - amongst the tools they use are Kafka and GraphQL. For their team, we are looking for Senior Front-end React Engineers with solid expertise, leadership skills and who are open to new career challenges.
Share some insights, what kind of projects are there and what are the main skills the perfect applicant should have?
The Funding Circle’s team in Sofia works on various fintech tools that support the company’s clients (small and medium enterprises) to grow and develop their businesses. This year new products are coming out, so we will be looking for more Software Engineers who are polyglots and do not mind switching programming languages.
One of the newest projects that Funding Circle is working on is called FlexiPay. It is a new service that enables businesses to spread any UK invoice or supplier payment over three months, with the initial payment made upfront on their behalf. This provides businesses with greater flexibility to negotiate with suppliers, deal with unexpected payments, buy equipment and more.
So, as I mentioned, we will be looking for Back-end Engineers who want to join the team and work on this project with exceptional colleagues from the UK. However, the specific requirement here is the willingness to work with Ruby because this is the major technology the company uses.
This is a great opportunity for people keen on switching between programming languages and learning new stuff.
With regards to the Smart Pension team, we’re building it from the get-go, so we are looking for someone with significant commercial experience in React and TypeScript, who will be partnering with the Engineering team in the UK and will be also responsible for mentoring the newcomers.
The React Engineers will be involved in projects like Fund Accumulation for multiple partners, Innovation and Decumulation for a project called “Smart Retire”, and also an Analytics platform, so - lots of different projects.
Wanna join one of the amazing teams that Iveta described? Make sure you drop her a line at [email protected], she’ll be happy to share more about each of the opportunities available.