How to Hire and Onboard the Best Talent – the Serengeti Way

Every respectful outsourcing and consulting company should be aware that high quality and top performing employees are their most valuable resource. For this reason, Serengeti invests extra effort into recruiting the best candidates on the market and to onboard them in a way that their knowledge and skills benefit the company as well as the client’s needs and culture.

Our employees are carefully selected in order to achieve a multiple fit – for our strict technical skills and knowledge, for Serengeti’s organizational culture and for the needs and requirements of our clients.

All of this is not easy to achieve, but our dedicated HR team manages to tackle these challenges successfully. And here is how.

Candidate Selection Process

The main goal of the candidate selection process is to recognize and select the right candidate, with respect to candidate experience. And how do you achieve that?

Here at Serengeti, we pay extra attention to the cultural fit of the prospective candidate and to their technical skillset.

Taking into consideration that our future employees will also work with our clients, we have to ensure there is a double cultural fit. Sometimes the client’s work environment, their company culture and policies differ significantly from ours. This is why we value agility, i.e. adaptability, in our future employees. It is crucial for us to recognize this trait during the selection process, and the best way to achieve that is to use a semi-structured behavioral interview.

During the interview, we try to provide as much information as we can to inform the candidate about our culture and the way we work. We encourage them to ask questions and to reach out to our employees for additional details. This allows the candidate to evaluate Serengeti as a company and helps us assess the cultural fit with more accuracy.

Since candidate experience is a high priority, we try to adjust the selection process so that it fits every candidate’s need in terms of flexibility in arranging appointments. We try to be as quick as possible when it comes to feedback, allowing the candidate to prepare for the second and final step of the selection process – the technical interview.

When working as a vendor and a consultant, it is of major importance to hire experts in the field of technology. We value technical certificates that candidates, i.e. our future employees, bring to the company, but further assessment is certainly required. Skills assessment through technical tests can sometimes prolong the selection process, making it dull and tiring for the candidate. On the other hand, tests can either cover a wide set of knowledge with no in-depth questions or examine a specific skill in detail, without providing information about the candidate’s know-how in other areas. This is where we step in with the technical interviews, held by our top experts. The interviews last about an hour, and they are semi-structured. This means that depending on the candidate’s knowledge, the interviewer adjusts the questions to establish the candidate’s level of knowledge in each technology. Along with the opportunity for better targeting the specific knowledge required for the position, one of the upsides of this type of interview is giving the candidate an opportunity to feel the company’s culture, instead of burdening them with a long test that they may or may have not solved earlier.

Onboarding

The most important part of any onboarding process is making it as comfortable as possible for the new employee. Changing jobs is very stressful, especially if you are not used to frequent changes and don’t like new and unfamiliar situations. It’s very likely for new employees to feel stressed and nervous. Providing information and organizing the arrival of a new employee can significantly calm these unpleasant emotions and provide a positive company image. Due to our branch of business and the myriad of clients we have, we realized we need two types of onboarding procedures which include a lot of possible situations.

That’s why we have decided to establish two procedures: onboarding 1 – Company and business onboarding; and onboarding 2 - Project onboarding.

All of our developers work with different clients and the importance of project onboarding was as high as for company and business onboarding. Even top performers can show lower productivity if they feel stressed out or not well informed about their projects. This is why we find these two types of onboarding equally important for both our employees and our clients. Low stress levels, good first impression and a high-quality introduction to projects are beneficial for our employees – who are therefore more satisfied – and also for our clients who will be working with top performers.

Some of our projects last a few months, some last a few years. After working for a client for more than six months, coming back to Serengeti headquarters is a big change, so we established a procedure that will help us welcome and provide important details to the employees who are coming back. We also follow this procedure for our employees returning from maternity leave.

Good and quality company/business and project onboarding for all employees coming to a new environment is the very beginning of work satisfaction and leads to lower fluctuation.

In conclusion, our selection and onboarding processes are standardized to ensure that the best candidates are employed and remain within the company. On the other hand, both processes are flexible enough in order to accommodate the needs of all, even the most demanding clients.

We believe this is the only way to be successful in our line of business and to be recognized as the top employer as well as the best and lasting business partner to our customers.

So, feel free to check our open positions.