A company is exactly as capable, as innovative, and as professional as its people. And hiring the right ones isn’t just important at the C-suite and team leader levels. Every person—including that new junior associate on her first ever full-time job out of college—contributes to determining an organization’s know-how, values, and vibe. So even when Applica is participating in a career fair at a polytechnic institute and simply talking to university students about future job opportunities, we are listening, learning, and strategizing. After all, everyone we bring in—today or after next year’s graduation—stands to improve how we work and enhance what we bring to our clients.
At all levels of recruitment, we rely on transparency and open communication to ensure that we are attracting suitable candidates. We are very specific about the hard skills we seek in our employees, because these include unique coding abilities applicable to the narrow specialty our company is pioneering. We also emphasize the evolved soft skills we value in the workplace—some of which can be learned, of course, but most of which are a matter of character. Trustworthiness is key, because our organizational philosophy is based on mutual respect between employer and employee. Flexibility is a must, too, because as a mid-size organization—small and agile by our industry’s standards—we need our specialists to have well-trained generalist muscles, too. Lucky for us, multitaskers with open minds are often excited about what we are bringing to the document automation sphere. And—lucky for them—a job that needs multitaskers is an engaging, dynamic workplace to come to every day.
Applica is a uniquely good fit for job candidates who identify as sharp programmers, software testers, DevOps engineers, data scientists, or computational linguists—or any combination thereof, because, as a product-and-service company, we take our product from the beginning all the way to the end, without skipping any of the steps or outsourcing any of the labor. Thus, we start with the research, continue on with the development, and see results at the customer deployment stage. Then, in the course of post-deployment support, we refine our solutions and workflows to optimize as we go.
We use technologies that include, in addition to all the popular clouds, Angular/Vue, Java, Python, Kubernetes, Docker, and numerous other languages, libraries, and frameworks that work well with AI, ML, DL, and NLP. In addition to technical excellence, we value the principles of collaboration, courage, and cleverness. Collaboration, for us, is about creating mutually motivating and inspiring relationships within our organization. We even like to think of our client work as collaborative, too. As to courage, it’s required of anyone doing something that hasn’t been done before. And cleverness is an inherent part of efficiency, ergonomics, and innovation. Finally, we require our candidates to have an oversize willingness to learn, because learning is something we do a lot of in our organization.
As an employer, we are attuned to the psychological demands of modern living. To us, it is obvious that people need balance in their lives and plenty of safety from the risk of professional burnout. We seek to make our workplace conducive to the holy grail of modern work-life balance. That’s perhaps why the turnover rate among our staff is relatively low: employees who are rested and cared for tend to be satisfied and fulfilled, both as workers and as people. So whoever needs extra personal time is entitled to it—without losing pay. We exist to foster talent and growth, so that all of us—company and employees and partners and clients—end up better off because of the work that we do as a team.
As an international company with offices on two continents and an accommodating employment structure, we have the vision and resources to find the best candidates from around the world. Recently, we attended the annual job expo at the Warsaw Institute of Technology, which is where a large proportion of emerging Polish IT talent get their education. (Notably, these are young people who combine the best of both worlds with regard to the status quo: on one hand, their education is strict and traditional, because so are Poland’s institutions, but on the other hand the mind-set is all about innovation, because Poles tend to be defiant individualists, accustomed to working around and beyond institutional limitations.) Our booth last month drew hundreds of interested people, curious to talk to us about what we do and whom we want to hire, while our contest—tough by any standards—got attendees to compete for a DIY game console kit that appeals to this kind of crowd. As for our team of four who fielded this job fair, they are pleased to report that their research combined qualitative and quantitative approaches: in addition to getting raw interview intel on a new generation of coders, we’ve also been granted access to many CVs.
Interested in a job with Applica? Contact us today!