On the lookout for senior designers

Full disclosure to start with.

The first draft of this blog post was titled “The Unbearable Lightness of Finding A New Designer”. Yes. Coming up with a good job ad is hard from the get-go. On top of being cringey, the initial headline made zero sense.

This painful confession sheds light to our job at hand – finding new designers to work at Wolt.

To put it bluntly:

We at Wolt are looking for 1–2 Senior Designers to join us at our Helsinki HQ. Wolt is the world’s best mobile interface for eating. The job is challenging, exciting and something like nothing before.

Enough about you, let’s talk about me

At night, I keep on coming back to the same questions.

“What am I doing?”
“Why is finding good people so hard?”
“How do we reach them?”

The difficulty of finding the best talents out there is crucial to Wolt’s success. And therefore, at times, demanding.

When we evaluate potential designers, there are some crucial bits we simply need to know. These are things such as the candidate’s previous professional experience, versatility of their skill set and a general way of thinking about stuff.

1/3: Experience

Your previous experience may include positions in software companies (agile methods, knowledge of technological possibilities and restrictions), agencies (recognising the value of creativity and insights) and startups (iterations, scaling, growth mindset).

In general, a rich background in terms of creative ways to solve challenges is a major plus.

2/3: Versatility

When it comes to competence, versatility is the key, we believe. There are roughly four phases in design in need of hugging and care while building new newness:

• Goal: what’s the key challenge and coming up with a plan to solve it.
• Scope: what kind of solution is optimal in terms of reaching the goal.
• Approach: defining the user flows, interactions and main experience.
• Refine: tweaking the visual hierarchy, look and feel and details.

It would be great if you already excelled at least in two of the phases above. Did we say something scary? Don’t worry, we will support you for the rest. However, right now the focus is on people who excel especially in Approach and Refine and have a strong, proven track record in web-based cases.

3/3: Thinking

Moreover, we like to see and hear about your way of thinking: how do you approach challenges in practice? Do you grab a pen and paper? Do you take walk to think? How do you plan for scale instead of making one-off diamonds? How do you keep learning and finding inspiration?

It’s always interesting to see how people get their ideas, how they approach challenges and where do they find their inspiration.

Challenging sweetness

Many of you potential talents reading this probably have sweet gigs going on as we speak. My mission here is to guarantee you that we are offering something sweeter and more challenging. A better job by all traditional and non-traditional metrics.

Because, while humble, our track record and the open position is pretty spectacular.

As said before, putting the news out there in an effective fashion is challenging. But when it comes to praising Wolt – as a product and as a place to work at – at least we don’t need to lie.

So about this Wolt thing

Wolt is the one app for discovering and getting great food in your city. Find the best restaurants in town, send your order with a couple clicks only.

I copy-pasted that from our site. I’m not lazy. It’s just that someone wrote it and I respect their work. (I’m also lazy.)

Anyway, Wolt’s story is a nice thing to look back at.

Success.
Awards.
Many many users. And more.
Operating in almost ten countries and more to come.
We just might be the best in our field.
We want to be the best in the future.
To succeed, we need the best people.

So about that job

Our organization at Wolt is flat. (But really, whose isn’t per 2018?)

Working at Wolt, you are always a part of the design. We relentlessly follow the latest shenanigans in the world of design and actively discuss them. Because that’s what we are into. Hope that you are too!

You’ll be part of the product team of about 30 developers and designers. Also, you’ll be part of a certain small focus team so you can focus on the specified area as well as possible. Also, you’ll be a part of our design competence group.

Our whole product team works together under the same roof in Helsinki. It’s just convenient to build things together and, if needed, sit side by side with the developer to tweak some details as long as they are just right.

That being said, sure.

We do have a Playstation with a big screen for everyone to enjoy.
We have beer. And wine.
We have Aspa-Aku.
Our people organize many cool employer-sponsored activities.
We travel. We party.
Of course we do. You know, stuff that was crazy in 2008 but is taken for granted today.

We offer you a competitive salary and benefits with a stock option plan. We also offer super flexible remote working possibilities and basically every team can come up with unique solutions when it comes to tools, methods or ways of working.

As a friend of a recent hire put it: “Why would you join Wolt? The app is ready!”

Well, you are wrong, you random friend of an anonymous colleague. Wolt isn’t just an app you use for ordering food; it’s also a set of intelligent systems combining a lot of algorithm-chewed data from different sources in order to help the work of our staff, restaurants and couriers.

Should we ever see face to face, we’ll gladly show some plans, concepts and mockups for the near future. It will take a while but we can go through only the most relevant stuff regarding your upcoming role. Still, there will be of course a possibility to mold the roadmap together with the team.

Our culture is about evolving and our product and design team never stops improving. It sounds very Nikesque and straight out banal, but it is true. We have a big bunch of ideas and need more. Even better, we are about to put them in action.

Like it or not, designing a thing like Wolt is a never-ending mission.

Could it really be you? Talk to us!

So here we are. The end of the post.

Are you interested in joining us? Approach us in a way that makes the most sense to you while dazing us.

Because we would really like to meet you and do great things together.

Feel free to ask any questions from any of us. All questions and conversations are treated confidentially:

• Laura Teerisuo, Recruitment Lead, laura.teerisuo@wolt.com
  
• Timo Sulanne, UX Design Lead, timo.sulanne@wolt.com
  
• Mika Matikainen (me), Co-founder, Design, mika.matikainen@wolt.com

The official job description:
https://jobs.lever.co/wolt/b0b497d9-df6d-46d5-b41a-73d7f497c878

(Btw. the title “Senior Designer” can be tweaked to fit your wishes. We really don’t care about strict titles but we just had to type in something.)