I want to share with you that I’ll be leaving XING on May, 3rd. It has been a fantastic professional and personal experience. I have learned a lot from every single one of my mates, and I want to thank you all my colleagues the love and support. Special mentions to Jens Pape, CTO, and Thomas Vollmoeller, CEO, for giving me such an opportunity. I’m leaving because I’ve received “an offer I cannot refuse.” Let me share some achievements and experiences.

XING E-Recruiting

I started three years ago as the Technical Director for the E-Recruiting Business Unit. It is responsible for developing the whole E-Recruiting products for HR, Hiring Agencies and Recruiters. I was reporting to Füsun Wehrmann, VP of Technology. I was leading 23 people. The challenge was clear: improving our delivery capacity. From having no Team Leads, I trained and promoted five team leads, hired a new technical director (after my promotion to VP), diversified the hiring strategy, tuned the development practices and improve the delivery to guarantee a fearless delivery to our yearly deadline, the Zukunft Personal trade-show. Now, the E-Recruiting teams are the ones that have fewer bugs and deploy more often and more times to production from all XING teams.

Barcelona

When I was promoted to VP, I also had the responsibility of taking care of the Barcelona Office. The plan was to unleash the whole potential of the Barcelona Office. After improving our delivery quality and speed, the Board decided to extend the development capacity of the XING Events Business Unit, based in Munich, in Barcelona. Since 2016, the office has grown from 50 people to 100!

For the last 6 months, we have been investing in the Tech Company Branding of the Office showcasing how it is to work at XING. From the Tech side and the personal one. You can take a look at some of the fantastic work that has been done by Marianella and the rest of the HR team on our YouTube.

Valencia

One of my last projects was to open the new XING office in Valencia. I received from Torben Schwellnus, former mate, an excellent work of choosing the final city from a long list and a lot of effort analyzing the best one. Then, the operational work was required to happen. We started the operations in January hiring and using a co-working space. Now, there are 15 people in Valencia, a new office has been found and getting refurbished, and the goal will be having 50 engineers by the end of the year.

Tech Assesment

The ones who know me know how much I enjoy challenging the current status quo. As a Tech VP, my primary responsibility was to find ways of making XING more effective. In this context, I’m happy to have contributed to the adoption of Slack Enterprise, the promotion of Cloud experimentation, the Remote work strategy, Tech Radar development, and a decentralization mindset.

What’s next

You will know soon what the next challenge is. For now, I can tell you that it’s going to be big and tricky.