Growing the company, growing the team — location-independent

Last week we gave you a little recap on our journey as a young company so far. If you didn’t know before, you’ve known it since then: For start-ups, success and learnings come hand in hand. Also, you probably remember that for 2019, we’re not planning on taking it easy on ourselves.

Clearly, though, growing Frontastic with the speed and the quality we’re planning to, won’t be possible without a whole bunch of new, talented, and fun colleagues. So, right now, we’re proud to kick off the New Year with the successful recruitment of a pretty diverse group of skilled, internationally-oriented people from various professional backgrounds.

These days, in almost any industry, finding good people of almost all professions isn’t an easy task. Especially in the IT sector, it has proven to be very difficult to find the tech and IT geniuses we need. And if that’s true for established companies, you can probably imagine how hard a task it is for a newly-founded company without any track record as an employer.
Yet, coming back to my first point: Company growth needs people. A bit of a vicious circle, you think?

Well, a bit of creativity, and the strong will of all founders to create a flexible working environment for themselves and future employees, has delivered a solution almost on a silver platter. The idea: Setting up their start-up as a truly location-independent remote native company (read all about that here).
Now, why’s that a success factor for growth?

At face value, the main advantage of being location-independent is that you can recruit people from all over the world. Logically, the talent pool to recruit from worldwide is naturally much bigger and much more diverse than when you’re limited to a certain geographical region. With the growth ambitions we put in place for ourselves, we just can’t waste precious time recruiting in a region where talent is scarce already. We need to grow the team, and we need to grow the team now!

But not only does the set-up as a remote native company improve our chances of actually finding a new colleague that fits the bill, but it also naturally adds diversity to the team on all levels. You just can’t get around hiring people from different cultural backgrounds, with different mother languages and diverse views of the world.

This diversity, in turn, has already proven to open up the company to new perspectives and fresh thoughts, bringing value in the shape of new ideas and surprising ways of getting things done.

Additionally, the positive feedback Frontastic receives from applicants is a clear proof point for our setup. Obviously, the mentality and flexibility Frontastic offers aligns much better with future employees’ requirements and lifestyle than more common, location-bound business models do.
Furthermore, the strong employee identification and self-motivation arising from this freedom and flexibility strengthen the company’s growth fundament even further.

Logically, as we grow the team internationally, there are also challenges along the way.
The questions the Frontastic team has to constantly ask themselves, aren’t easy fixes either, and can quickly become deeply philosophical, too: How do you create a culture, a company DNA, and a sense of belonging in a remote native company? How do you digitalize coffee machine chit-chat? How do you get to know each other beyond work, as people and humans? How and what do you communicate with all of your colleagues, especially as the team becomes bigger and more spread out across the globe? How do you handle time zones? And labor laws in various countries?

Honestly? We don’t have all the answers. And as in any true start-up, we follow the rule of trying out a lot of things, failing fast, and then trying out a few more things until we have a solution that works. For the moment. And as we grow? Then we’ll work on different solutions whenever we need to. Exciting times!

But back to what’s on the table at the moment: In 2019, the Frontastic Development team is happy to have found already 2 new colleagues. Frontend Developer Sanja Mandic is going to join the team on February 15, 2019, being based in Ireland. Also, we’re excited to welcome another Fullstack Developer (we like a bit of secrecy, too) from the German Ruhr Area coming on board in the middle of the year.

To make sure that the systems infrastructure can handle scaling up as Frontastic grows, the Dutchman Raymond Schaeken will start as System Engineer at the beginning of February 2019.

Also, on January 1, Nina Jonker-Völker joined the Frontastic team. With longstanding national and international experience in Marketing, Sales, and eCommerce, she’ll strengthen and develop Frontastic’s marketing capabilities further as Head of Marketing, being based in the Münster area, Germany.

In addition to those positions Frontastic already succeeded to fill, the start-up is actively seeking to further expand its team.

Especially the teams the areas Customer Happiness, Backend Development, and UI/UX/Frontend-Development are planned to grow in 2019.

Does our story resonate with you and do you have the mindset we need to keep growing? Then don’t wait any longer and send us your application via our job site now, so we can get to know each other!