Warren Sukernek, FloCareer: “to win the war for talent, companies need to abandon many traditional practices”

Finding qualified employees is extremely time-consuming and with constantly rising demand and barely moving supply, it is harder than ever before.

But with new problems, new solutions arrive too. To find qualified individuals, companies now use different hiring processes like talent hunting service providers. A great example of such a service – FloCareer.

To find out more, the Cybernews team reached out to Warren Sukernek, VP of Marketing at FloCareer, to talk about the benefits of Interview-as-a-Service (IaaS) solutions.

Tell us a little bit about how FloCareer began. What has your journey been like?

First, our elevator pitch on what we do. At FloCareer, we help organizations grow their technology teams quickly, cost-effectively, and at scale. We specialize in unbiased technology-based interviews led by over 3000 developer interviewers. We streamline technical interviews via FloCareer’s flexible IaaS (Interview-as-a-Service) platform leading to reduced time to hire and improved client productivity. Interviewers have a minimum of 10 years as developers and are accomplished at performing video interviews following a structured interview guide.

The “Flo” part of “FloCareer” is related to the concept of Flow in the field of Positive Psychology. Flow is the mental state of mind where you experience complete absorption of yourself in the task at hand. The state of flow is not a miraculous moment of creativity, but rather it is dependent on an individual’s skill level and the level of challenge she is facing.

Inspired by the concept of Flow, FloCareer is created with the goal of finding a "Happy-Happy" solution to the talent hunt. People are the most important part of any organization. For hiring teams, finding the right set of candidates whose skills level matches the challenges that the job offers is crucial. This enables the right job seekers for the right job to Experience the flow! Thus, the concept of Flow has been foundational to f the company since we started.

We have been experiencing strong growth ever since. At the beginning of 2022, we opened an office in the US to bring the “Interview as a Service” platform to clients.

Can you introduce us to what you do? What are the main challenges you help navigate?

As VP of Marketing, I am responsible for branding, demand generation, thought leadership, and community. As an early-stage start-up, especially in the US, our largest challenge is brand awareness.

To grow our brand, we have a strong focus on thought leadership with content marketing.

What are the most common issues organizations run into when managing a team based all over the world?

Over the years, I’ve worked for several different global enterprises of varying industries and sizes managing teams and consistently, I’ve found the biggest challenge has been communication and alignment.

The mechanics of adapting to different time zones and communication tools notwithstanding, the key is to deliver consistent communications that are localized and impactful to each audience as well as the whole.

How do you think the recent global events affected the hiring landscape?

Two key impacts that have affected the hiring landscape: working remotely due to the pandemic and “the Great Resignation”. Most employees and companies are now accustomed to remote work. Several employees now seek it out and prefer to work remotely.

This has somewhat contributed to “the Great Resignation” as employees seek more than a paycheck and look for meaning and diversity in their work. Thus, major impacts on the demand and supply of talent. Companies that are agile and can react quickly with accelerated hiring processes have been the most successful.

Recently, maintaining creativity has been a serious struggle for some organizations. How can companies foster creativity and innovation when the majority of employees are working remotely?

Innovation is the lifeblood of organizational growth. Working remotely can stifle collaboration and creativity. How many Zoom Happy Hours can we attend for morale and relationship building. For creativity, connection and trust are key.

Many companies have had success in this area by bringing their remote teams into the office periodically. To succeed in maintaining creativity, I think you need to mix it up, experiment, and be innovative yourself.

Can you share with us some tips on how to make the interview process smooth and effective?

Today there are more jobs than applicants, creating a lot of stress in the hiring process. To win that war for talent, companies need to abandon many of their traditional practices in talent acquisition by accelerating the hiring process, considering candidates from more diverse sources, showing candidates more attention (and love), utilizing a structured interview approach, and eliminating hiring biases.

At FloCareer, we’ve been able to interview candidates within an hour or two of when they’ve applied to our clients. This gives our clients a leg up on their competitors by accelerating their hiring process and forming a much stronger connection with the candidate from the get-go.

What cybersecurity solutions do you think are essential for teams working remotely?

As a key player in performing skill-focused interviews for technology clients, we’ve seen the dramatic growth in cybersecurity skills required from our clients.

For companies with significant numbers of remote employees connecting from home, the cybersecurity threat has increased dramatically. I’m sure there will be a strong investment in cybersecurity tools that confront the increased threat.

What do you think an average workplace is going to look like in the near future?

I think that we will learn the lessons from the last few years and the workplace environment will be very much a hybrid environment of physical and virtual. The available talent pool will expand significantly as companies will become accustomed to most teams employing a global workforce that connects virtually.

As a result of the growth of remote teams, most physical office space will be much smaller and hotelling will be quite common.

Share with us, what’s next for FloCareer?

We are on a great journey and are confident that we will continue to see growth, not only in the US and India but also throughout the world and not only for technology clients but also in other innovative industries that can benefit from the Interview as a Service platform.