Meet Our People: Yoana - Questers

Meet Our People: Yoana

Yoana Bahchevanova (a.k.a. Pepelyankova) returns as Head of Recruitment & Resourcing

After one year of maternity leave, our colleague Yoana is returning as Head of Recruitment & Resourcing. We are excited to have her back on board and asked her few questions about the past year and her recent return to the office. Read what she shared with us.

Tell us a bit about yourself for the people who haven’t had the chance to meet you yet. What’s your educational and professional background and how do you enjoy spending your free time?

I have graduated with a Master’s degree in Work and Organizational Psychology from the Sofia University. I got really interested in recruitment after an internship in one of the local recruitment agencies. I found this professional area really challenging and dynamic, so decided to try it out. My first touch with the IT recruitment was in 2012 and since then I feel that this is my “destiny”. Outside of the office I love spending time with my family and traveling to beautiful places in our country or abroad.

You are returning after a year of maternity leave. Is this a scary or exciting experience and why?

Returning back to the office was really a scary decision, but I believe that’s the right thing to do. Now I have more social interactions with people, feel useful not only at home, but also at work and last but not least try to do my best and appreciate any second with my kid and family.

What are your favourite parts of the job? What did you miss the most while away from the office?

The recruitment job at Questers has so many interesting bits. One of them is the diversity of profiles we’re working on - any new position that we face is an entirely new world - related to lot of research, clarifying the requirements, getting familiar with the talent pool, making new friendships, etc. Throughout the years we’ve managed to hire both tech people with more “standard” and popular background (such as Java, C++, .Net, JS, etc.) and some exotic and rare high-profiles (such as Oracle EBS Developer, Scala Engineers, Catalysts, Machine Learning/NLP Engineers). Another exciting thing is the interaction with hiring managers from companies around the world with very interesting business domains. Overall, you will never get bored in our team :)

What are the main challenges you are facing right now?

The main challenges currently are related to several high-profile recruitment projects that we have to close in the near future. These are related to some DevOps and Senior Software Engineering positions which are usually not the easiest to fill in, but with the right approach and detailed information about the projects we manage to find the right people.

We know the recruitment team has a lot of work right now. What are the vacancies you are currently recruiting for?

Currently we have options for Java, Embedded C, JavaScript/React/Angular, Python Developers, DevOps Engineers, Automation QAs, DMs, POs and many more.

For one of our big clients – a Swiss product company called SpotMe we are looking to hire another DevOps Engineer to become part of their Ops team. Further, we have an Automation QA position for our newest client Premfina - a fintech company, based in the UK. For their Bulgarian team we have already successfully hired four people (3 Developers and a Cloud engineer). And we now have a DevOps role for Funding circle’s team as well – as you may already know Funding circle is one of the biggest UK peer-to-peer lending platforms.

Although we’ve recently successfully transferred out Ocado Technology (the technology company behind Ocado - the biggest online-only grocery retailer) to their newly created Bulgarian entity, we still support them by providing recruitment services and are now looking for Embedded Engineers, Development Managers and Product Owners. We are also very excited to work on a Designer role and some non-IT profiles (Amazon operations specialists) for Logitech.

Few big and quite exciting projects are about to be announced very soon – stay tuned for more!

Guess the increased demand for tech talent you are currently experiencing lead to the need to grow the recruitment team. What kind of person are you looking for and what would they be responsible for?

Top qualities we are looking to find are team work orientation, proactiveness, passion for tech recruitment and a smiley face! :) The new person would be fully engaged with a wide variety of recruitment campaigns, working closely both with the hiring managers from clients’ side and the candidates. Other responsibilities are related to headhunting and sourcing, candidates screening and interviewing, organizing tech events and the last, but not least - being creative and going beyond the traditional recruiter’s work. 

More details about the open positions at Questers you can find here and if you would like to drop Yoana a line do not hesitate to do it in LinkedIN or Facebook.

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