Kristo Käärmann, 41, is the co-founder and chief executive of Wise, the stock market-listed London fintech valued at more than £3.8 billion. Originally known as Transferwise, the business moves about £8 billion in money a month between different currencies for 13 million retail and business customers, charging a fraction of the typical fees. It employs 3,500 people and Estonian-born Käärmann continues to interview key hires. The first in this two-part series appeared last weekhttps://www.thetimes.com/article/what-i-learnt-about-leading-by-doing-crdk32f2t
Interviewing is still quite a big part of what I do
We have 357 roles open today. I have just checked. We need to add a lot of people to the company to get all the things done that our customers wish we were doing.
Until we were 150 people, I interviewed every single person who came through the door. Since then I have gradually stopped, by function. I still interviewed every software engineer who came through until we were 120 engineers and the whole company was, say, 600 people. Now I still interview a large number of senior roles that we hire. I am usually one of the final interviewers. I get to meet people who are very likely to get the job.
There are occasions where I have turned down people at this point and they’ve still been hired. Some of them have turned out amazing and they still remind me that I turned them down in the interview.
Interviewing opinions are never completely accurate. I’m sure we have declined a lot of people who actually could have turned out fantastic. We have definitely ended up hiring people who don’t work out. There are mistakes and misalignment on both sides. This is fine.
Advertisement
I’m always surprised how little time the candidates spend interviewing the company
This is fascinating for me because from the company’s perspective if this person doesn’t work out, then we depart and then we hire someone else instead. We are making marginal changes when we hire.
But from the person’s perspective, you only have one job. So it’s a massive change if you change from one job to the next. If you make a wrong decision on the job that you’re going to get, it is pretty big. You lose months or years of your life.
When I observe the interviews that I do, it is still 90 per cent the company interviewing the person and not the person interviewing the company.
I’ve had some candidates that don’t give me a chance to ask a question. They just bombard me with everything like, “Why this? Why that?” “I opened your app, why did that thing not work?” These are the best ones, when they actually have gone through what we do.
The candidate could be stressed or anxious about revealing something about themselves through their questions, but it is also an opportunity for me to get to know them.
Advertisement
I think recruitment should be objectively aligned between the candidate and the role. It’s not in the candidate’s interest to end up in a role that has different expectations. There’s been many occasions that I’ve managed to talk a candidate down — someone who I think could have been amazing, but they actually want to do something else. It’s better for me to convince them that they should be doing that other thing.
One angle that I have found useful is asking people what they want to do after Wise. Assuming you join us — that is great — you’re going to be here for two years, five years, ten years, but it will come to an end. So have you thought about what you’re going to do after Wise? Sometimes the answer to that question can be pretty useful.
Kristo Käärmann was talking to Richard Tyler, editor of Times Enterprise Network
