Tell me more about your career path? You went from an intern to CEO of a recruitment company in a short period of time.

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First of all, thank you for the invitation, happy to be here and to contribute to the community. About me, I have a business and economics background. Although in the early days I was more interested in sport, I had decided to obtain a degree in economics at the University of Porto and a degree in management later on. The goal behind that decision was to become a leader of a successful company in the future, something that is today called a unicorn or at least a very successful company. 

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My career started in big corporations. I thought I should experience the corporate world first, because you can learn a lot there, have a lot of experienced colleagues, available tools and resources. However, after my first quarter at Siemens, I figured out that it's not for me. I got stuck, the pace was not suitable and I had ended up teaching people with more experience than me. That's why my next adventure was founding an e-commerce company with my father. That experience helped me a lot to learn more about entrepreneurship and the start-up world and to aim for a greater goal. We sold the company after three years and I ended up accepting a new challenge at Landing.Jobs as an intern. The reason why I went from an intern to a CEO in a short period is that I was very performance-oriented, almost obsessed with performance (laugh). It turned out that in three months, I was able to achieve more than a team of two people in a year and that was enough to get managers' attention. As I was acquiring more responsibilities with every quarter, in January 2020 I had a conversation with founders where they told me they believe in me and think I have the right leadership skills, so they wanted me to run the company. I accepted the challenge. However, in just three months we were hit by the massive pandemic and the world went upside down so it was not an easy start (laugh).
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Tell me more about Landing.Jobs, what is your product, what are you doing, in which countries do you operate, your work model etc?

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The company first started as a recruitment platform only in 2013. However, with the pandemic happening in 2020, we saw that the professional practices started to change a lot, so naturally our work model did as well. Before, firms on markets were not remote-friendly, they were international but with an office culture and only open to relocating people. Now with the current situation and people not being able to relocate, companies became more open to remote workers and started adopting a remote culture. Although the vast majority of our clients thought having international workers is beneficial, the problem before was they didn't have legal tools to employ them. That’s where we saw an opportunity for providing other services and transforming our product, so we recently ventured into our new payments platform. Our services go from traditional ones like finding, attracting and evaluating suitable talents and presenting them to the clients, to the new service of providing all necessary legal support with the payments.

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The interesting thing is that we offer high flexibility to candidates in terms of payments models. We offer both options: traditional and digital currencies. They can decide if they want to receive their salary in local currency, in a mix of a local currency and USD for example, or in crypto. They can also choose to receive a part of their salary in traditional and crypto currency. 

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How did you manage to get successful in German and Dutch markets? Considering they are very competitive.

 

It was not easy for us to find clients there at all. The only easy market for us could be the Portuguese one as it's a rather small one. I mean, it's a competitive market, but it’s also very traditional and with our modern approach it's easy to show what kind of added value we can bring to companies here. At the end of the day for us, it turned out that it’s all about being a talent expert. We are a talent-first platform with 180k tech talent professionals and this community is extremely global. Our biggest foreign talent pool is Brazil but lately we’re also concentrating on low and middle-level economies in South America, Africa and Eastern Europe. With that kind of focus on the talent side, it's not difficult to attract companies.

 

What are the challenges of having clients in Berlin and Amsterdam and then having the HQ based in Lisbon? Are there any?

 

There are challenges, but Portugal’s reputation has changed a lot in the last few years with big personalities like Christiano Ronaldo or people on the professional side, like António Guterres or António Horta-Osório. Perhaps ten years ago we were perceived by other European countries as lazy people that have nice weather, food and beaches, something similar to how Brazil is perceived as well. However, that has changed, as we have a big pool of high-quality tech professionals and a lot of tech companies are opening their tech hubs in Lisbon. This only proves that we tend to be hard workers too.

We have a different approach for different markets. German and Dutch clients are different compared to local Portuguese companies. We hired people with experience working in those markets, people that have a lot of testimonials and success stories, so we can show clients that we have the needed resources to support their hiring needs.

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What is Landing.Jobs’ return on investment (ROI) with organizing an event like Landing Festival? Is that important to foster business growth?

 

It's extremely hard to focus on a visible aspect of ROI when organizing that kind of event. We are not an event company or event brand. We use events as a mechanism to boost our brand awareness and the business itself. We found out that by organizing a big conference and having a modest budget of 200-250k euros per conference (2000 attendees and 70 speakers) we were always able to cover our costs through paid partnerships and sponsorships. The main goal is, of course, to have brand exposure but you shouldn't overlook the time and opportunity cost too. We could use that time and resources to develop our product further. For example, the Landing Festival was rebranded to the Future.Works Tech Conference, and we plan to host it in different parts of Europe in 2022, but because of the opportunity costs, we decided to outsource many parts of the event planning so we can focus on our business. 

 

To summarize, these conferences help us to foster our growth and build our brand. It's a long-term investment and it needs to be done in the right way. On the last edition, we flew out John Romero, the creator of the game Doom, and it was a big thing because there was a big queue for autographs. My advice is, if you are doing it, do it with big names. Obviously the first time will be hard, as no one would like to be associated with an event that is unknown, but that's why you need to have a big budget that can support a good line-up.

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You often write about staff retention. Isn’t this bad for an agency recruitment business?

 

It's a very good question (laugh). I guess most of us would think it's a good thing for a recruitment platform if retention of tech people is low and the market is hot so we automatically make more money, but that's a short-sighted approach. For example, if a client isn’t able to retain, they would immediately think they use wrong talent acquisition channels and hiring processes, which would reflect badly on our business. That's why helping our clients to retain employees helps us to build trust with them. Especially with the launch of our new payments platform, we want people to stay with our clients because we can monetize that. We are not in the business of replacements, we are in the business of recruitment, which is a broader service.

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How important are benefits in talent attraction? What do you think candidates are valuing most highly these days?

 

What I think is very important for our candidates lately are career growth paths and remote options. By the career growth paths, I don't mean companies having pre-defined career paths, but instead providing the flexibility for employees to choose what course they want in the wanted time, duration and format instead of managers choosing it for them. Regarding the remote options, they don't want to be forced to get back to the office and this is especially true for tech people, as they are the ones with the negotiating leverage. Candidates want to be in an environment that fulfills them and maximises their happiness, so it's important to have the right policies that put them in the forefront of the equation. This needs to be emphasized because policies are either people or business-first. A lot of companies state they are people-first, but care only about maximizing the profit. This is wrong, because without having the right people, you cannot reach business goals and be competitive. 

 

In general, there are two types of benefits in my opinion: points of parity and points of differentiation. Points of parity are benefits that every company offers and, if you don't, you are screwed. Those would be training budgets, nice equipment, fit pass, good health insurance and so on. But if you would like to make a difference, you need to have some points of differentiation. One of them would be to treat contractors the same way as permanent employees or vice versa, as they both contribute to the company in the same way. We see that the labour market is transforming. 3-4 years ago it was made up of 30% contracts and 70% permanent employees, while now it’s more like 50%-50%, as people want the flexibility contractors have. In my opinion, the contractors' part will rise more in the future, and if the companies are not prepared to offer this, they will have difficulties attracting and retaining talents. 

 

Employees should also have more flexibility. Flexibility to receive a salary in different currencies or in crypto, to choose when they can work e.g. if someone wants to work on Sunday and not on Monday or even have the flexibility to receive the salary twice a month, in split amounts so they can have better salary management.

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How do you see the recruitment industry in the future?

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The market is getting extremely fragmented. There are different solutions, so I don't think recruitment agencies will be out of the business any time soon. Besides, I don't believe recruitment can be fully automated. We need to have a human factor in the process. Of course we can create chatbots, but candidates will always prefer to talk to humans as they want to be treated fairly and in a special way, and agencies do that. On the other side, what recruitment agencies need to change are the working methodology and principles. They need to be more oriented towards transparency and providing better candidate experience, because not doing so will directly influence your reputation and business. We have a massive tech shortage and candidates are extremely passive and selective, so it's important to have a humanized approach. At Landing.Jobs, we have a similar way of working as Tinder. When companies use our platform to search for talents, they cannot see candidates’ personal details. The only thing they can do is submit a request and only when a candidate accepts it, the profile is revealed. In that way, we make sure that candidates are contacted by the companies they choose. We do use AI for matching candidates with clients, but we also have talent advocates to provide career advice to candidates. For us, it's a mix of automation and a human approach.

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What would be your advice to other young people thinking to become founders or CEOs of companies in the future? Some of your learnings.

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I am extremely happy with the journey and experience I get every single day and I hope in the future I will feel the same, but I have to say that in our generation we have the ardour of creating our own company and being our boss, but it's not for everybody. Most of the time you’ll feel alone and frustrated. In my example, when I gained more responsibilities, I spent more time mitigating challenges and talking with people about problems rather than talking about how colourful and wonderful the world is. So my first advice is that people should reflect on their skills, ambitions and life purposes before deciding to found a company or become a leader. And it's completely okay if you are not capable of it. I have been seeing people going to management roles, setting high expectations, failing and getting extremely unhappy because of it. It’s a very delicate position. 

 

When you become a leader, it's very important to be people-oriented and be people-first. It's important to trust your employees by default, especially when some of them are working remotely. It’s important to empower your workforce and give them full autonomy to solve challenges. As a leader, you should focus more on building guidelines and not being side by side with your employees every single day.

 

Public speaking skills are an important trait or quality of every leader and you have a lot of experience with it. How did you master it?

 

With a lot of practice (laugh). Lately, I have been focusing on improving those skills. I have attended some online courses but I also have a coach just for communication. However, when it comes to communication, you should first focus on improving the internal communication with your teams in the company and secondly with external stakeholders and the public. There are a lot of different techniques and methodologies of public speaking, but to master them is all about practice. Of course, some people are better at communication naturally, but I think the very best speakers are practising a lot.