The Hiring Journey: From Mistakes to a Clear Profile

What’s the Next Step When You Think You’ve Done Everything Right?

What do you do when it feels like you’ve organized and documented every process, built a training program for programmers and testers that rivals commercial ones, and recruitment agencies still can’t offer anything good?

You start hiring yourself.

Back in 2021, as a still-inexperienced and learning manager, I thought we had reached the point where anyone could just come in, read the documentation, follow the steps, and simply “fill in the blanks.”

That was when I started hiring on my own — and discovered what seems like a never-ending challenge: employees.

It turns out that hiring, especially in today’s overheated job market with changes happening almost monthly, is not an easy job. It’s a challenge I was never prepared for, never expected, and never even understood could be such a problem. I had always thought that the only real business problem was not having enough work or going bankrupt.

But in reality, the opposite is true — the curse of the 21st century is not that there is no work, but that there is no one to do it. And when I say “do it,” I don’t mean just sitting around and performing tasks, but truly creating value and results.

How to Really Test Talent, Not Just Skills

Initially, we hired people without a clear understanding of what we needed, what the person was supposed to do, or the specific competencies they truly required. Was it enough to just know PHP? Or did they need to be able to do something with it? If so, what exactly?

Even today, I don’t have a perfect answer to how you can figure out whether someone is truly talented after just two or three interviews and a couple of practical tasks.

Programming is a peculiar craft — part creativity, part structured logic. It demands more than just technical knowledge: logical and structural thinking, the ability to solve complex problems, and yes — a knack for mathematics.

In many other professions, an “average” performer can still get the job done. But here, so much depends on a person’s inner qualities and mindset.

And how do you choose a junior developer — someone who is just taking their first steps and “doesn’t know what they don’t know”?

Traditionally, we asked situational questions and checked basic knowledge. However, we later found that even successful candidates sometimes took two days to complete tasks that should have taken only two hours.

Mistake #1: Taking Chances on Career-Changers

In the early days, we often gave chances to people with the thought: “Maybe it will work.”

Today, we’ve made a decision: we only hire people with a solid, fundamental education in programming — people who have a real, contextual knowledge base.

The truth is, despite the media and training companies pushing the idea that “anyone can become a programmer or tester,” and despite the success stories from large companies, this approach simply didn’t work for us.

Graduates of short courses can often repeat what they were taught — but they haven’t learned to think like programmers. Six-month or even one-year programs don’t provide enough depth to build real problem-solving skills.

It’s like memorizing history facts without ever understanding why the war started.

For example, we once hired a tester who had worked with Magento and came to us to work with PrestaShop. The task was straightforward: locate the courier module and verify its settings. Without external help (not even Google could help), the person simply couldn’t find it.

This showed us that experience is not just about “knowing where the buttons are.” It’s about understanding the concepts. If both systems are modular, you should know that couriers are modules; therefore, you should look in the Modules section.

Similarly, programmers without a solid educational foundation often never truly “get” programming. They learn syntax, maybe a few basic algorithms — but if they don’t understand what a variable really is, how data is stored in a database, or how the ones and zeros work, they will always struggle when faced with debugging or inventing new solutions.

Mistake #2: A Good Person ≠ A Good Specialist

Sometimes you meet someone who is motivated, confident, eager to learn — and then, within the first days, nothing works, everything breaks, and problems multiply.

And yet, when the person is nice and not “problematic,” you want to keep giving them chances, hoping they will eventually “break through.”

I’ve hired people who seemed “normal” and capable, only to realize that they lacked the internal aptitude or technical foundation — and never managed to grow.

The clearest example is not from 2021 but from this year, when we finally had to part ways with a great person, almost the soul of the company, because it just wasn’t working. He wasn’t able to significantly improve his performance — or his salary — over the next two years. Even now, in September, we are still fixing his mistakes from January.

He was a wonderful person, great to work with — but in the end, results are what matter.

The hardest question is: how do you tell whether a person will eventually learn, grow, and improve — or whether the mistakes will just keep coming?

How We Hire at PrestaRock Today

Talking to experienced HR professionals, I often heard: “You just talk to them, and you know.”

And it turns out — it’s true. But you only gain that intuition after conducting enough interviews to start recognizing patterns in people. Over time, by comparing results and outcomes, you begin to sense who is who.

Today, we hire primarily based on values and mindset. Nearly a third of our first interview questions are about our company values, because we’ve learned that even a person with only average technical ability can achieve a lot if their values align with ours.

And I no longer ignore my gut feeling. One HR professional gave me great advice: “If you feel something is off, don’t hire.” Every time I ignored that instinct, I regretted it — and it always ended badly.

Finally, the most significant improvement over the past couple of years is that we now have a much clearer picture of who succeeds and thrives within our company. That “ideal profile” is what we now look for every time we add to the team.

Continuous Feedback and Growth

Another key part of our approach today is our structured feedback process. Every three months, we hold dedicated feedback talks with each team member. These conversations are not just about evaluating performance but also about discussing career growth, challenges, and opportunities for improvement.

Most importantly, these sessions provide employees with a real, tangible opportunity to increase their salary based on their progress, results, and the value they create for the company. This ensures that growth is not just a vague promise but something we actively encourage and reward.