EP 10: DeepL’s New Recruitment Philosophy and Its Impact on Growth

[00:00:40] Adriaan: All right, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Leaders in Talent podcast. And I’m here today with Amanda Johnson in Amsterdam and welcome Amanda.

[00:00:50] Amanda: Thank you.

[00:00:50] Adriaan: Amanda is currently the head of TA at DeepL, a global leader in the language AI space. And before joining DeepL, Amanda works at companies like Uber, Project 44, and Salesforce, and led different TA organizations in that capacity. Originally you’re from the U. S., but you’ve lived for almost 10 years in Europe. Almost 10 years, yeah. How many of those years in the Netherlands?

[00:01:17] Amanda: Seven.

[00:01:18] Amanda: Seven years now.

[00:01:19] Adriaan: Seven. Yeah. So you really embraced the rain and the cold in the Netherlands. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. and has extensive experience leading, international teams. Amanda, officially welcome to the podcast.

[00:01:32] Amanda: Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

[00:01:34] Adriaan: Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Today we’re going to be talking about hiring philosophy and hiring principles. Fascinating topics. I’m really happy that we get a chance to dive into this particular topic. But before we go into that space, can you tell me a little bit more about what DeepL does and what your role is at the company?

[00:01:52] Amanda: Yeah, of course. I’ll start with DeepL. And as you had already mentioned, DeepL is a leader in the language AI technology space. Yeah. Headquartered in Cologne, Germany. We have over a hundred thousand business customers using us and millions of users worldwide. And our mission is really to break down language barriers.

[00:02:48] Amanda: So really bringing cultures closer together and we’re growing a lot. We’re a global company, so we have presence here in Europe and several different hubs- in Tokyo, Japan, Austin, U.S., and we just opened our New York tech hub. Really exciting. Yeah. And then a little bit about my role here at DeepL. As you said, I’m leading our global talent acquisition team. I started in February, so still recently new, but very happy with my choice.

[00:03:14] Adriaan: Amazing. Amazing. When we started, preparing for this podcast, quite quickly, we actually landed on the topic of hiring philosophy, because when you were interviewing for the role of head of TA at DeepL, they ask you in the interview process, what is the first thing you would focus on and would prioritize, and you mentioned, the hiring philosophy at DeepL, which I find an amazing and interesting answer. So tell me a little bit more, what is hiring philosophy according to you and why is it important to you?

[00:03:48] Amanda: You’re completely right. When I was interviewing for the role, that was one of the questions that came up. They always ask the 30, 60, 90 day plan, of course. And one thing, that I think is really important at any company that you’re at is really defining and articulating how you hire and who you hire just to gain alignment on what’s important for us, at least right now at DeepL, like we are a fast moving, fast growing scale up. So that may change year over year. It is something worth and looking at it again every year, especially if you’ve been here for a couple of years, but me as coming in as somebody new and new leader to the team, I wanted to understand what is important to this company. What are some of the soft skills that they’re looking for when they’re hiring for employees, as well as like the hard and technical skills too, but really defining that articulating it so that you know what you’re looking for. You can set up a very structured process to assess against those things. And really most importantly, gaining alignment across like your hiring communities, your hiring managers, interviewers of what is that we’re looking for, and so they feel really set up for success on how to do that. Yeah, that’s why it was important to me. I think it’s really just defining what your hiring bar is and what’s important to you and then enabling everyone else to be able to do that, like in a structured way.

[00:05:06] Adriaan: Was there anything in the interview process that made you say like, Hey, I think this is something, that could help DeepL?

[00:05:13] Amanda: No, nothing like stood out to me. If I would have joined and they had this all like really well defined and articulated already, I probably would have been great. Like you’re ahead of it. Like, let’s go with this. But like I said, DeepL was really and we still are evolving and growing and changing really fast. So I think it’s even a good exercise to do like once a year when you’re in this kind of fast moving space.

[00:05:36] Adriaan: So let’s dive into that space, right? So you got the job and how did you go about the process of creating these hiring principles?

[00:05:44] Amanda: Yeah. So I did a lot of listening and kind of understanding of what was already working at DeepL. Like the team had been hired before me. They’ve been hiring amazing people already. Something that attracted me to DeepL was how everyone I interviewed with spoke so highly about the culture and like, it’s a very special place to be, and I would see when I join and I wanted to make sure that we were capturing that and I was understanding how they continue to add people and maintain this amazing culture. So that was something I really tried to understand through just meeting with my own team, meeting with my stakeholders, holding kind of interviews around this. Understanding our current way of hiring and what’s the process look like. So I didn’t want to come in and completely change everything, right? I wanted to maintain the things that my team was already doing really well. What I had to add to it was asking some of these pretty basic and foundational questions, but maybe weren’t, again, really well defined or articulated of like, these are the three core things that we look for in who we hire, and these are like the three to five things of how we hire.

[00:06:48] Amanda: So the process of creating the hiring principles is what we call them. Again, was doing some of this internal kind of understanding, research, interviewing. And we interviewed our executive team, including our CEO, to understand, like, what, is that kind of core, the core attributes that he’s looking for, as well as looking at what is some best practices that are happening in the industry too. So we did some industry benchmarking to see how other companies do this. Yeah. We tried to simplify it where we could. We put together our principles, which consist of our hiring standards, is like our first kind of bucket that we defined. Then who we hire, how we hire and how we make decisions. So it’s as simple as that. It’s almost like a charter of this is how we do it here. And we wanted to make it unique to DeepL again, while upholding what are best practices when you’re bringing in talent. And yeah, I didn’t mention this before, but one reason why I think this is so important, like along with defining your bar and knowing what looks good for your own company at this current moment in time is also, it allows you to really set up the structured hiring, which I think I slightly mentioned, but that is like the best way to keep hiring quality high and to reduce bias in your interview process.

[00:07:58] Amanda: So that’s also very important to me, but I think you do need to start at the beginning, start at the foundation and really define who you are looking for.

[00:08:07] Adriaan: Was there anything that you discovered in that process by doing such a deep dive and really focusing on this that you, for example, from the executive team that came through in terms of, Hey, like actually they’re looking for something else.

[00:08:20] Amanda: We landed with three core attributes of who we hire. So three buckets. And the first one is really what came from our CEO, Jarek. So the first one is growth mindset. That was something that continued to come up and that’s what he really grasped on to. And I think because we are going through this moment of change and we want to take more risks and really be the most innovative company in our space, that’s what he continued to come back to is that the people we hire need to have this kind of growth mindset, rather than like a fixed mindset per se. So that was number one of what we came up with of who we hire. The other one was again, as we’re continuing to grow, we are in a space where we did need a little bit more subject matter expertise in some areas. So typically in a startup, you hire a lot of generalists that can do like anything and everything, right? And, that has served us really well. But as we continue to grow and build out our go-to-market team, you may need to specialize potentially in different verticals or specialize in the company size that you’re selling into or the customer support functions and whatnot. So we really started to see that there’s certain roles that do require a different level of subject matter expertise and kind of commercial awareness.

[00:09:37] Amanda: So that is number two of who we hire. And that’s where you get a little bit of flexibility too in your hiring process because engineering hiring might look very different than sales hiring and we didn’t want to make it so structured that they couldn’t have enough flexibility. And then the third one that was also very important to our CEO and our leadership team was values alignment. So the third bucket is like our culture and values alignment. Yeah. And those are just the three that we’re sticking with for now. So we again wanted to keep it as simple as possible. So it’s really easy for our hiring communities to absorb, and then be able to enable them to assess against these areas.

[00:10:15] Adriaan: So you defined these three core values and principles, so to say.

[00:10:22] Amanda: So then, so the second piece of the hiring principles was how we hire, right? And so there’s like three or four kind of principles there. One was structured hiring. So then we had to go and build that. So that would be like the immediate next step, which I’ll get into. But we also had like inclusive interview process was important to us. Exceptional candidate experience was important to us. And yeah, that, that might be the rest of like how we hire. And then the last piece of it was like how we make decisions. So that was like hiring manager accountability in the decision making, but also always having a debrief to make sure we’re able to make more diverse decisions by having all of the input from the different interviewers.

[00:11:03] Amanda: So the next step then when we all felt really good about the hiring principles, we like shared it out to the company and then was just like, okay, how do we build this into our actual process? At the time we were also beginning an implementation of a new ATS. So we were like, this is perfect timing. Let’s make sure that everything that we revamp from this process and get aligned into our systems and make it come to life through our ATS.

[00:11:33] Amanda: And so what we did was we took those three core areas that we know that we want to hire, which again, were growth mindset, subject matter, expertise, and values alignment. And we, aligned them to a certain stage of the interview process. And so we were setting up our new stages that were structured across the entire company. And we kept them pretty high level. And then allowed flexibility within the stages. So to give a practical example of what that may look like, we have the beginning, which is like the kind of screening stage and that’s where like application review, recruiter screen and hiring team screen belong. And then we move into like the panel stage. And that is where we put our practical interviews and our culture and values kind of assessment. And then we moved to debrief and offer. So it’s very kind of high level to start, and there’s flexibility within the different stages that you have.

[00:12:33] Adriaan: Because did you also change the overall recruitment process in terms of stages, or that was set and done, but you just layered over?

[00:12:39] Amanda: Again, I tried to take the best of what was already happening, so for some groups, this was not very, there wasn’t much of a difference when we aligned this, but for some others, there was just some moving around and reducing of some steps that maybe weren’t needed throughout the hiring process and just making sure that there was alignment that each of these different kind of core things that we look for and who we hired was for sure covered off on. So how we did that was we put the growth mindset piece into the hiring team screen. And in order to do that, you actually have to break down growth mindset and find the attributes.

[00:13:19] Adriaan: And that’s the second stage in the recruitment process.

[00:13:21] Amanda: Yeah. And then we aligned the subject matter expertise piece to the practical interviews. And so a practical interview in sales may be a case study that they do or a presentation, and then a practical interview on the tech side may be like a machine learning interview or a live coding challenge. And so that is like the subject matter expertise piece. And then every single interview wraps up with the values alignment interview. And that’s where you can actually start to cross-team interview a bit. It doesn’t have to be someone from your own team assessing the values piece.

[00:14:01] Amanda: And so that was part one of like, okay, where are we going to make sure that each of these areas is assessed in each interview process. But we also had to build what that actually looks like for an interviewer. So we had to translate, okay, growth mindset is what’s important, but what does that actually mean?

[00:14:19] Amanda: Yeah. And so we pulled out five or six attributes, behavioral attributes that may lead to a growth mindset. So that may be like learning from mistakes or failures or being open to feedback. And then for each of those six attributes, we created a handful of questions that you can ask in an interview. And then we translated that to a training that every interviewer has to take. So we wanted to make sure that everybody felt really comfortable and confident assessing for growth mindset in the hiring team stage. That also then meant that we set that up in our ATS. So it was like, again, very easy to use and brought to life systematically with a feedback form that actually you have to assess the growth mindset attributes.

[00:15:05] Amanda: Same thing happened for the subject matter expertise and the practical interviews and then also the values culture and values interviews at the end. So we have our core values that then we translated into behavioral attributes for each one. And then again, there’s interview questions that help you assess each of those behavioral attributes. So again, it’s really helping to enable the teams understand what does that, what do we mean by those certain values? Or what do we mean by growth mindset? How do you actually practically bring that to life?

[00:15:42] Adriaan: And how, because this sounds like a really structured, thought-through process. How do you roll this out across the company and manage the different stakeholders who might have to do things differently or get new input? What if they don’t even agree with the principles?

[00:15:56] Amanda: Yeah, it’s still a work in progress, I will say. So there’s some…

[00:16:01] Adriaan: How long ago?

[00:16:02] Amanda: We launched the principles in June, and then we launched structured hiring at the same time as our new ATS, which was September 1st.

[00:16:11] Adriaan: Wow.

[00:16:12] Amanda: And again, some groups were already very structured before. Some groups were less structured. So we do have to take a bit of a customized and personal approach with each of the different groups.

[00:16:23] Amanda: What I would say is that it’s been received quite well in general. I think everybody understands why structured hiring is important and the benefits of it. Again, everybody wants high-quality hires and an unbiased process. So all of that, in theory, makes complete sense.

[00:16:42] Amanda: For teams used to doing things a certain way or wanting more flexibility, we’ve offered that within the panel stage. If they want to add an extra interview, they need to have a clear purpose for it and ensure it aligns with our principles. So some teams may have two or three interviews in the panel stage, while others might have up to four.

[00:17:00] Amanda: I would say for teams needing more convincing, we leaned on data. Industry studies clearly show why structured hiring works to improve quality and efficiency and reduce bias. DeepL is a very data-driven and research-oriented company, so using those insights helped secure stakeholder buy-in.

[00:17:24] Adriaan: Now that the system is in place, what does your recruitment team think about it?

[00:17:29] Amanda: It’s been a bit of a journey, but I think the team wasn’t resistant—it was more about ensuring they felt equipped and supported. We wanted them to feel confident in enabling hiring teams to succeed.

[00:17:42] Amanda: We made it a collaborative effort from the start. I’m speaking as if I led everything, but that’s not the case. The entire DeepL TA team played a massive role. One of my TA leads spearheaded the hiring principles and structured hiring initiatives. We had cross-team project groups where everyone contributed.

[00:18:18] Amanda: We also emphasized the “why” behind these changes. Leading with the purpose and benefits of structured hiring helped gain support. Even though it’s a work in progress, embedding these principles and processes across teams will be a core focus next year.

[00:19:07] Adriaan: Does the recruitment team check if hiring managers follow the process?

[00:19:20] Amanda: Yes, they act as true talent partners. They advise and align hiring managers on the process from the very beginning during the intake phase. This includes defining what the process will look like and who assesses what.

[00:19:39] Amanda: Our ATS reinforces the process by limiting excessive customization. Everyone follows the same high-level stages, with flexibility allowed only in specific areas, such as the panel stage.

[00:20:14] Adriaan: That makes a lot of sense. You’ve got to watch what can and can’t be adjusted.

[00:20:21] Amanda: Exactly. Even with the best intentions, too much customization can lead to messy systems. We wanted to avoid that, especially with a brand-new ATS.

[00:20:32] Adriaan: Was it a blessing or a curse to launch a new ATS alongside the structured hiring process?

[00:20:38] Amanda: It was such a busy summer! In hindsight, it was the right move. I didn’t want to set up an ATS based on old processes that were going to change anyway. But it was a lot to manage at once. Everyone was exhausted by the end of summer.

[00:20:57] Adriaan: And you continued hiring through all of this, right?

[00:21:00] Amanda: Oh, yes, we never stopped. So, while it was the right timing, it was definitely intense.

[00:21:03] Adriaan: How many employees does DeepL have?

[00:21:06] Amanda: At the time of launching the principles and structured hiring, we were just under 1,000 employees. Now, we’re just over 1,000.

[00:21:14] Adriaan: And the TA team?

[00:21:22] Amanda: Around 20 people, with most in Europe and a few in Tokyo and Austin.

[00:21:31] Adriaan: You’ve done something similar at Uber, but that took 12 months. Here, you managed it in 6–8 weeks. How?

[00:21:49] Amanda: The biggest difference was scale. Uber had over 20,000 employees when we launched globally, compared to DeepL’s 1,000. At Uber, we worked with external consultants, and the stakes were higher since it wasn’t something we’d revisit annually. At DeepL, being smaller and more agile allowed us to move faster.

[00:22:23] Adriaan: Do you share your principles with candidates?

[00:22:28] Amanda: We don’t share the full principles explicitly, but they’re reflected in our new careers page, which we launched with our ATS. We outline the high-level structured hiring process so candidates know what to expect.

[00:22:38] Adriaan: Does the hiring process differ across roles?

[00:22:42] Amanda: Yes, but only in certain ways. We keep the high-level structure consistent: starting with screening, moving to the panel stage, followed by a debrief and offer. However, there’s flexibility within those stages depending on the role.

[00:23:06] Adriaan: It’s still early days, but what’s your general take on how well this has landed within the organization?

[00:23:14] Amanda: It’s been really helpful in driving alignment. It makes the process smoother and more efficient. For example, we’ve seen fewer requests to add unnecessary steps or interviews. Our time-to-hire has already improved slightly, but it’s still early to draw conclusions from the data. My overall feeling is that it’s making things easier for everyone.

[00:23:47] Adriaan: What advice would you give to other TA leaders who want to create a hiring philosophy?

[00:23:56] Amanda: My biggest advice is: don’t overcomplicate it. Start simple and focus on what’s most important for your company at its current stage. You can always refine it later. Think about your company values—they’re usually a great starting point because they’re relevant across all roles.

[00:24:29] Amanda: Also, align your hiring philosophy with structured hiring practices. This helps ensure consistency and reduces bias in the process. Engage your leadership team early to get their input and buy-in, as their alignment is critical for success.

[00:25:50] Adriaan: If someone were starting from scratch, what would your step-by-step advice be?

[00:25:56] Amanda: First, look at your company’s values. Use those as a foundation to define the high-level attributes you want in all employees, regardless of role. Next, think about structured hiring—do you have a process in place? If not, build one that aligns with your principles. Finally, involve your team and leadership throughout. They need to be part of the process to ensure buy-in and adoption.

[00:27:03] Adriaan: Once you’ve defined values and a hiring structure, how do you ensure alignment across the company?

[00:27:11] Amanda: Start by training your teams and enabling them with the tools and resources they need, such as interview guides and clear expectations for each stage of the process. Share the “why” behind the principles—it helps build understanding and acceptance. And lastly, use your ATS or other systems to enforce consistency and track adherence.

[00:27:32] Adriaan: You’ve launched a new careers site, implemented a new ATS, and finalized hiring principles—what’s next?

[00:27:40] Amanda: Good question! First, some sleep and rest! But seriously, we’re winding down the year and reflecting on all we’ve achieved. My team will gather in Cologne soon to review our progress, share lessons learned, and start planning for next year.

[00:28:04] Amanda: Our company strategy for next year includes themes like “customer first,” so we’ll look at ways to improve our candidate experience. We’re also finalizing our first formal diverse hiring strategy. While we’ve been doing well organically, we want to be more intentional and consistent in this area.

[00:28:45] Amanda: Beyond that, I want to ensure that what we’ve launched this year—structured hiring, hiring principles, and our new ATS—really sticks. Adoption and maintenance are key priorities. It’s easy to launch something and then move on without embedding it fully. I want to focus on making sure these processes are well-adopted and iterated upon as needed.

[00:29:42] Adriaan: That sounds like a great plan. Amanda, what’s the best way for listeners to connect with you?

[00:29:52] Amanda: LinkedIn is the best place. You can find me as Amanda Johnson at DeepL.

[00:29:56] Adriaan: Great. Thank you so much for your time. This was incredibly insightful, and I really enjoyed our chat here at your WeWork in Amsterdam. Let’s do this again soon!

[00:30:05] Amanda: Thank you! Bye.