“The speed of hiring was 2-3x faster with WorksHub compared to generic recruitment agencies”
About Smartpay
Established in 2021, Smartpay is the first all-in-one payment experience and interest free "buy now pay later" solution built to solve Japanese consumer payment issues and improve merchant conversion rates.
Tech Team
SmartPay’s tech team has a flat hierarchy and is divided into backend and frontend teams. The Backend engineering team is Scala oriented and responsible for building backend services that power all Smartpay products and experiences.
Hiring needs
We worked with Pieterjan Vandaele, SmartPay’s founder from the time he was leading the product and engineering team at Paidy, where we helped him grow the engineering team by hiring more than a dozen functional software developers.
Smartpay works to improve the world of digital commerce by eliminating interest, hidden fees, and the anxiety consumers feel about sharing their data, aiming to provide the smoothest user experience.
After founding SmartPay, he and the founding team were looking for strong Scala Engineers who could own and shape their API and backend services from end to end and collaborate closely with the Product and UX teams.
They didn’t just want strong Scala developers, they needed product focused engineers that have a very strong understanding of the user experience, are detail oriented and are excited about working in the intersection of ecommerce and fintech.
Our approach
- Initial call with Smartpay to dicuss their hiring needs, agree on the perfect candidate profile and other hiring requirements.
- Prepare a Smartpay info sheet with all the insights from the call and other company information useful for potential candiates.
- Post Smartpay’s open roles on our jobs board, in the relevant communities.
- Conect with the Smartpay team on Slack for one single point of comunication.
- Start actively sourcing candidates and send relevant, pre-screened profiles to the team
- Marketing and employer building acitvities (email and social media campaigns, interviews, etc.) for Smartpay to attract more engineers from our communities to their open roles.
- Weekly catchup meetings with the Smartpay team to make sure we’re alligned on their needs and discuss candidates that are in the process.
Results
Get in touch to discuss your hiring needs
Community
Scala, React
Tech Stack
10-49 people
Size
Payments, E-commerce, Fintech
Industry
CVs
sent
sent
25
Interviews done
17
Senior Scala Engineers hired
2
Q&A
Why did you decide to use a recruitment agency in the first place?
No, no, no, that's the wrong question! It should be “Why did we decide to use Functional Works (a WorksHub community)?” It's not just any recruitment agency. I worked in the past with WorksHub, and you were the only ones who truly understood the requirements that we had specifically for the tech stack that we were using and how we were using that tech stack.
For Smartpay, what has been the biggest advantage of working with us?
Pieterjan Vandaele
Founder at Smartpay
Would you recommend other companies use our service?
I think first of all, you have a wide network of people, a big candidate pool, where people can be very specific on the skills as well as the aspirations that they have individually as employees. I think that plays to our advantage because we have a very specific stack that we're using.
No, I wouldn't recommend it because then they're competing with us for talent. Jokes aside, I think you have a certain advantage. I guess there's a bunch of modern recruitment agencies out there and I would definitely put WorksHub into that group of modern recruitment agencies. You're very specific in what you are trying to target.
What would you say are the reasons for that?
Did you iniatially sign up to our platform as a candidate?
We didn't have strong preferences on the location of the candidates, which made it a bit easier than what we used to do, where we would relocate people to Japan back in the day. I knew the team here at WorksHub, the team knew me from working with me at Paidy. They knew what our bar was and what our requirements were.
And it was just very easy for us to get going immediately, get a lot of very well qualified candidates in the pipeline, without us having to do multiple screening calls that you can’t get past the first interview.
And because of that fact, we can attract certain candidates that other companies would have difficulties attracting, or we can attract them at a rate that is lower than what other companies would have to pay specifically because they do not have the capability to offer them their favourite tech stack in practice.
I think the size of the talent pool, but also the very strong specificity of that talent pool. And I think the onboarding flow that you have with candidates. Before using your services, I signed up to the platform myself just to get a sense of how our people experience it. This also allows you to be very targeted and to be able to search candidates in a very targeted way, which is something that a lot of other recruitment agencies do not have. It's all about search and it's all about matching. And you guys do that really well.
Yes, I signed up as a candidate many years ago to see what the candidate experience was. I just wanted to check and evaluate, before I actually used you as a hiring manager.
Tell us a bit about how you're currently working with our team of recruiters?
It's a very straightforward process where we get the candidates sent through email or via Slack and we're always in direct connection with the team if and when we have hiring needs.
The relationship we have with the recruiters we’ve been working with has always been good. The ones that we’re working with right now as well as the ones that we worked with in the past.
What did you think of the candidate experience?
It resonated with me as I could clearly see how you would end up with the right candidates and be better at matching than other recruitment agencies, which is why I went onboard and why I immediately thought back about you when we started SmartPay.
I think in a candidate's market, it is advantageous for any company to work with a recruitment company that is very candidate-focused just because you tend to find the right people more quickly.
We know it works. We’ve done it a thousand times.
Ready to see it in action?