Mobility to Estonia and Latvia: Day Two

The morning

On Wednesday we had a day full of company visits. In the morning we all went to Pipedrive, an IT company. In the afternoon we split into four groups and chose a company according to our interests: either a fashion brand that uses only recycled materials, or a branding company (that has designed the logo of 100 year anniversary of Estonia), or a telecommunication company, or a company where a Mexican expat told about experience of recruiting foreign workforce to Estonia.

Pipedrive is a “Google” of Estonia. By that we mean that it has an excellent working culture and we were really impressed by what we saw. From the moment you step inside the office you immediately notice that the employees either wear home slippers, or just walk in socks. That makes them feel themselves at home. They have a shower, definitely useful for the ones who cycle or jog to work. And the towels are being provided by work, by the way. There are numerous beautiful kitchens with free drinks, snacks and fruit (and a very good coffee machine, we can confirm that since we all had a try).
There is a massage chair, a gaming room, a yoga room, a sudoku hanging on the wall. But the cherry on the cake is….a napping room. Yes, a napping room with a queen size bed just in the middle of the office. Anyone can go and take a nap there whenever he or she is feeling low in energy.

Right after the tour of the premises we got a presentation of the company from the Head of Customer Support. The interesting fact is that they take their recruitment very very seriously. Each employee of the company has been through a minimum of 6 steps of recruitment: a test and 5 interviews. Minimum one of the interviews is a group interview, and the last one is always with one of the four founding partners. They believe that such extensive recruitment process is necessary to “filter” unmotivated people. Their opinion is that it is better to invest 5 extra hours of time in recruitment in order to find the right candidate because, in the end, it will definitely pay off. Another very important aspect of their working culture is 1-on-1. This means that each employee sits with his manager on a weekly basis, or minimum once in two weeks, to discuss the ongoing business, progress or problems that have been faced. The manager is able to provide feedback or offer support on a rolling basis, which is very important. In this way, once-a-year evaluations become basically redundant.

The Afternoon

The Evening

The Belgian team from Bruges (Elena, Nele, Vanloo and Wim)