It's been a year of huge growth at GoCardless, find out what we've been up to
A lot has changed for us at GoCardless in 2021; we’ve taken our first steps into the world of open banking to advance our product offering, embraced changes in our working culture by implementing a permanent Adaptive Working model, and we’ve also introduced new Operating Principles that better reflect the ways we work together internally. However, on top of all of this, one of the biggest changes we’ve experienced in the past year is the numerous fresh faces we’ve had join us here at GoCardless. This has been a massive year of growth for GoCardless. After receiving our Series F in December 2020, we took it upon ourselves to triple the company over the next 18 months. Fast forward to the present day and this month we’re celebrating our 500th accepted offer in 2021 - an incredible achievement that has been a company wide effort.
Back in April 2020, our CEO Hiroki Takeuchi shared GoCardless’ plans for managing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the company. He shared that we were taking precautionary measures to help the business reduce costs where possible, and this included some of our colleagues being placed on furlough. One team that was affected by this was the Talent Team and we paused all hiring and initial headcount growth plans. After weathering the initial storm of the pandemic, and GoCardless’ announcement of its Series F funding round, the Talent Team have not only been able to resume their plans, but they have made a tremendous effort to support the company’s growth and, as a result, the team has since scaled to 34 (from nine) and has growth plans to be over 50 in the coming quarter. We have hired a VP of Talent, Jerome Leclercq, and the team has been restructured into three core areas of Product Development, Go-To-Market and Customer & Support, with new manager levels to build and grow these teams. We have also introduced a Sourcing function of internal recruiters who are specialised on bringing great talent inhouse to GoCardless without reliance on job applications. As well as this, Talent are now working alongside the Business Intelligence team to build a more data-driven approach to recruitment; learning from past efforts, particularly around scalability, and working towards future improvements to understand what needs to be done in order to continue scaling GoCardless at such a fast pace.
We have also worked on introducing more consistent hiring methods, positively impacting the way that we hire - all the way from reviewing candidates to how we make decisions. We have trained Managers and Individual Contributors across GoCardless on how to best interview and empowered them to make hiring decisions by introducing ‘Decision Meetings’ with an impartial adjudicator across all areas, removing any previous single point of failures.
Hitting the incredible milestone of 500 accepted offers in 2021 demonstrates that our change in approach and hard work has truly paid off. We’ve had more accepted offers this year than we had employees in January, and it’s all thanks to an amazing company of individuals committed to helping us accelerate our growth.
We’ve learnt a lot of lessons this year, not just due to our challenges of navigating coming back to the office and colleagues returning from furlough all whilst actively scaling, but because post-UK lockdown we’ve had to compete with one of the busiest hiring markets we’ve ever seen. We’ve had to learn, and learn quickly, how to scale our processes to maintain consistency across the business and to deal with the challenges of high-volume interviewing and the bottlenecks that come with it. Whilst doing this we’ve undertaken a company-wide salary review, benchmarking against the market, to keep GoCardless competitive not just for new talent, but also for our existing GoCardless team members. It’s been a lot of work but we know that these are all things that will help us build and grow in the long run.
Despite the milestone, we’re by no means slowing and still continuing to grow. We’re hiring across all disciplines and would love to have more people join us on our journey. If you don’t see anything that matches your skillset, feel free to drop a message to our Talent team here.
