The recruitment process experience was top notch: super fast, very informative, the opportunity seemed ideal, with the company being the size of company I like, mutual ambitions I was aspiring for, and it both fit my salary expectations as well as what their salary band was, which is not common nowadays...
However when I was setup for a follow up call with the hiring manager, the whole situation started to spark some concern. After asking what the role of the hiring manager would be, I was told they would be a "freelancer" acting as the CIO.
Even though the job opportunity was for someone quite senior (as I am...) the hiring manager turned out to be someone substantially less experienced than I was in this space (with maybe 3 years of relevant experience, where I have 20+ years, the job spec asks for 8+ and 10+ years of experience on a few key responsibilities).To be clear, I have no expectation for the hiring manager to be someone with a lot more in-depth technical experience than me. However, I could see they were struggling with some of the basic concepts of a Salesforce implementation development lifecycle, and that anybody this "senior" should have been perfectly comfortable discussing, so this raised some red flags.
They seemed to struggle to understand how Salesforce as a platform is supposed to operate and where the value is, they struggled to understand the difference between agile and scrum! We went from a job description where several "admins and architects" (that's a broad diaspora...) as well as "program managers" and their teams would be reporting to me, to a situation where even the thought of a couple of small scrum teams were too much to ask for, and something they were aspiring to get to at some point, but not today.
I am not sure what the particular situation is with this company, but I am certain their is a huge gap from what the job requirement as described on their "Head of Sales Business Systems" job spec are, and what the reality of what they have going on is.
I am not sure what to think, most likely, I would guess, the founders at Personio are either completely fooled by what the capabilities and skills of this "freelancer" are in this space. Someone, whom I assume would have a reasonable set of conflicts of interest between staying engaged and billing vs finding a competent team of people to build out.
Alternatively, this is just a bogus posting to virtue signal to your investors that you are growing and maturing. Or it is just the case of a startup with over inflated job titles, but it does seem like an unreasonable space for a company with an $8 billion+ valuation to be playing in.