The Core of Any Team Is a Purpose: Interview with Dmytro Gryn, CEO of Jooble
I recently went one on one with Dmytro Gryn, CEO of Jooble.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Dmytro: I studied at the Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute in Kyiv, as did the owners of Jooble (Roman Prokofiev and Eugene Sobakaryov). I was doing small projects as a freelancer and was considering getting a full-time job. Right at that time, the job posting from Jooble’s founders appeared on the student network. Such a happy coincidence!
I was very nervous and put on my best shirt (it was truly awful) for the interview. Communication with the founders was light and pleasant. We felt a connection, and I became the first Jooble employee.
I joined the company as a developer and later grew within the company: I was a development manager, then a technical director, and became CEO.
Working at an early-stage startup allows you to grow rapidly as a professional of any kind.
Even when you join the company to work as a developer, you must be much more than that. My tasks included designing the website, thinking through business logic, pricing, being a sales rep for clients, a bit of financial accounting, building the HR function, and such. I was involved in the building of every new process within the company. During this time, I gained a lot of diverse experience. It taught me that if you want to create true value for the client, you shouldn’t be guided only by the job description.
You can’t go through all of this without any failures. There were many, but I’ll share the most painful for me.
As a job aggregator, one day, we decided to index every job posting on the internet — a very ambitious goal. And the way I have chosen to achieve it as a CTO was way more ambitious. I established the AI-based project to find and index job postings without human involvement. The project's to-do was as follows:
Identify the websites with vacancies.
Check if they are still valid.
Check if they are not scams.
Identify essential information, such as location, salary, employment type, and others.
After one and a half years of work, we were far away from success. We conducted a retrospective and found that manually adding a few people to work with data on a project's critical points would solve all the problems. The project in this semi-automatic configuration is now live for nine years, allowing the indexing of 140 000 websites daily.
And for me, it’s a lesson about the well-known Pareto Principle: 20% of actions bring 80% of the result. I always ask myself if there is a much easier way to achieve the goal than the first thing that comes to mind. And you know what? Usually, there are plenty of them!
Adam: In your experience, what are the key steps to growing and scaling your business?
Dmytro: First, you must choose the direction of development and scaling and focus on it. Focus is the key to success. We've seen scaling in different ways at different stages of the business. But sometimes we try to do many things at the same time. For example, once, we wanted to go beyond job search and make aggregators for different niches. We built and released aggregators for online store goods (“Chekkit”) and used car ads (“Carvester”). At the same time, we continue to develop Jooble in the job search field.
In a year or so, we realized that developing different projects creates a lack of focus, and, in our circumstances, we will not succeed in anything.
Therefore, we decided to close all projects not related to job search and focused explicitly on aggregating vacancies and scaling up in new countries. Since then, we have been very clear about what we want as a company.
Once you know what you are trying to scale, Jooble job aggregator, in our case, you need to answer where would you want to operate. Choose markets wisely, measure the probability of your success, and prioritize them. Do not try to launch all over the world at once.
Create a process for entering a new market. Try it on a few second-tier markets according to your prioritization. Be ready to fail, get feedback, and change the process. Once you fill confident – launch it on a scale. In Jooble, our process was designed to launch the product in a country or two every 2 weeks.
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
Dmytro: It is a highly complex question. After all, a leader's effectiveness depends very much on the company's context and stage of development. Therefore, the qualities of an effective leader are the ability to show exactly the type of leadership that the company needs now at a specific stage of development. At Jooble nowadays, for example, engaging and empowering people is what you should be able to do to be an effective leader. The crucial part of leadership is to understand that everyone has unique talents and ways to be successful. So you need to create an environment where people can achieve goals. In this environment, you should define "what to achieve" but never limit "how."
With an understanding of company goals, business operations, and client needs, every employee could use their creative energy and passion to create more value and do it the way you couldn’t imagine.
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Dmytro: In our minds, leadership is usually tightly bound to authority. But it is not necessary so.
There is a concept called "Servant Leadership."
I learned about it in the middle of an agile transformation in Jooble, when I was preparing to pass a test for Scrum Master certification. This is a life-changing experience for a manager, and I highly recommend learning more about this role.
As a Scrum Master, you are responsible for team and organization efficiency, but you don’t have any formal authority. You can’t give orders, fire, or hire people. On the contrary, you need to act as a leader or coach, build trust and convince people to do things in the right way. And a worldwide community of practitioners and trainers can teach and support you on this path. It changes a view on management and gives an understanding that you can do incredible things as a leader even without formal authority. Next level it is!
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Dmytro:
Don't be afraid of making mistakes. It's perfectly fine to make mistakes. Being a superman who never makes mistakes (or pretending to be) will also lead people on the team to follow this role model, making them overly cautious. Excessive caution often means missed opportunities.
Avoid working with people who don’t share your values, even if they are excellent professionals. Don't hire them, even when you desperately need to fill the job ASAP. Sometimes you can search for a person to fill in a particular position for a long time, close your eyes to the differences in your worldviews, and pay attention only to professionalism. But it is a bad idea. You will waste your as well as the person’s time and won’t achieve anything.
Radical cost-cutting is a ticking time bomb for future business growth. Try to earn more or find an external source of funding instead. To make your business efficient and growing, you will need more people and better tools, which can be costly. Constant cost-cutting can kill great opportunities.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Dmytro: The core of any team is a purpose. There will be no team without a shared purpose and goal, just a bunch of people wondering, "What am I doing here?"
You need to state the team's purpose and find the right people to share it with you. Of course, they also should be competent enough to deliver the result and share the same values. This way, you get a group of cool, nice people. Now you need to make a team of it.
Here you will need to achieve a clear understanding of each other’s roles as team members and create a team’s code of conduct and agreements. As a team will work together, all these things should be constantly re-evaluated. Invest time, resources, and training to enable the team to communicate with each other and collaborate effectively. It is crucial to understand roles, role needs, personalities, and personal needs to achieve that. Nonviolent communication is a good fit here. Effective team leadership requires constant feedback.
For everything to go well at the management level in the team, it is necessary to ensure equal, transparent, and fair conditions for all team members.
Adam: What are your best tips on the topics of sales, marketing, and branding?
Dmytro: Often, companies enter the market like, "We have this cool product, so people will buy it because they need it." The truth is, nobody cares about your product. Everyone has needs, goals, expectations, and jobs to be done. During sales, you should focus on understanding customer needs and offering the best solution, even if it means you won’t close the deal. The worst idea is to actually sell your product to someone who doesn't need it. Even if you don’t believe in Karma, as I do. People will only want to work with you if you are honest, transparent, and customer-oriented. It means that you require not only the knowledge on how to work but also how to work with client's refusals as well as be able to refuse them when your product isn’t the best fit for their needs.
When a company operates in many countries, you may think using a unified approach for marketing and branding is a good idea. From our experience, that rarely works. Considering cultural differences and preferences, you should adapt your marketing and branding strategy, at least for your key markets.
In addition, since marketing is not only about ad campaigns, you may make every employee of yours a marketer. Everyone who understands both your product with its capabilities and limitations as well as customer needs, can not only do their jobs better but also create great ideas for clients and be your product promoters on the market.
Adam: What are your best tips on the topic of hiring?
Dmytro: Every company has its own culture and values. Since people spend a considerable part of their lives at work, they tend to seek teams who share their values to achieve better performance and overall quality of life. So do managers. To bring on board people who match your culture, you need to make company values explicit and transparent. It will require a lot of work to identify, communicate and agree on every value with your current team, but it will pay off.
I can share Jooble values, which took a few years to crystallize and became explicit:
The first value is the Internal Locus of Control. "I am the cause of everything that happens to me." You cannot blame the contractor for not delivering the project on time. It was you who did not control the stages of work. You are the leading creator of everything that happens to you in life. We are looking for people who understand this.
The next value is Passion for Work. We are looking for people who can focus on a task, be in a state of flow, and enjoy what they are doing. Here is a good place to recommend the book "Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Truly inspiring!
The third value we call Openness to People. The ability to look at the world through the eyes of another person. The ability to listen to another person with a genuine desire to understand why their opinion differs from yours. The ability to give and receive feedback.
Next is the Growth Mindset. Striving to be better every day than yesterday.
And another is the Ownership. If you don't like something, you know what's better, then go and do it. If you can't do it yourself, sell the idea to someone in charge, get empowered, and implement those changes.
If you see a candidate with a different set of values, even if they are great experts, avoid hiring. On the contrary, if a person shares your values, it’s a good idea to make an offer, even if there is some lack of experience. People can acquire new experiences and skills later, but unlikely will change their values.
It is also a great idea not to make hiring decisions alone. When you interview a candidate alongside your colleague, you may note different important things, have a live discussion and make decisions of better quality.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Dmytro: I received the best advice when the company was actively growing. I was working as a CTO, and the number of people in my team grew from five to fifty.
Being focused on hiring and technical stuff, I didn’t feel overwhelmed and kept a flat organizational structure.
Co-founder of Jooble Eugene Sobakaryov said, "When you start to feel that something is going wrong, you are already at least three months late."
I realized that it is necessary to constantly analyze the actual capacity of any system I am building and update it before it hits the limit. It applies to organizational structures, technical and product infrastructure, etc.
In that case, after receiving the advice, I gave up the flat structure of the department and established the Engineering Manager role. It was premature then, but it turned out to be beneficial a year later.
Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Dmytro: Before becoming a CEO, I read The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, which has the concept of a Peacetime and Wartime CEO. I understood that I would enter the position as a Wartime CEO. But I didn't expect it to happen so literally.
Jooble's headquarters and most of its employees are located in Ukraine. I have never felt the importance of socially responsible business as strongly as during the war. Thanks to the proper management decisions and a strong team, our business grows despite regular russian shelling.
As I mentioned, leadership effectiveness depends on internal and external context.
I hope your readers will never face the challenges of running a business during the war, but they should know it is possible. Jooble and hundreds of Ukrainian companies have proven it. And I am extremely grateful to the people of the Free World for all the support to Ukraine.
Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.
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