Notes from SE2017 Kiev. Scale company and its culture.

I have visited Kiev a couple years ago just for a business trip. Due to long working hours, I did not have an opportunity to do a proper sightseeing. When departing it felt like it's definitely not a "goodbye", but "see you later" Kiev! And finally, last month, I had a chance to pay another visit to Kiev by dropping by to a technology conference SE2017.

Earlier this year, totally out of blue, I received an invite to perhaps the biggest IT conference in Ukraine, which I gladly accepted. SE2017 happened on 28-30th October in Kiev.

The event attracted folks working in technology and IT industry along with a widely represented local startup scene. The venue, Art Platforma Kiev, is surprisingly quirky. The old factory buildings were turned into creative spaces gathering thousands of conference participants.

 

Some would start wondering, what the heck recruiters are doing on technology conference if not looking for potential hires? They are just sharing their knowledge and experience on the topic which piques interest of all scaling organisations which is obviously hiring.

Those who dropped by to listen my speech were not only software developers, actually majority of the audience were people involved in building teams in startups, running HR function, actively hiring for their companies.

Generally, I was talking about good hiring practices in companies facing phase of high growth. I went through a couple of cases of organisation transformation based on their history of setting up meaningful values and the mission. I ended up discussing the contemporary model of sourcing function being an essential business partner to hiring manager. I loved the audience engagement during a presentation, as well as billion of questions asked after the talk!

Here you can have a sneak peek to my presentation from the conference.

It was pure pleasure to talk to such an amazing audience in Kiev! Thank you for the invite. I regret I could not stay for another day for some mingling and to learn more about the local market.

The only downside of SE2017 was that during three days long conference there were literally just three talks in English. It’s a shame, because most of the topics seemed to be super interesting, but were available for Russian/Ukrainian speakers only. To the organisers: if you like to have more international audience please plan more English talks ahead!

See you later, Kiev!