VIKTOR KUSTEIN: For skilful people there is always more than one opportunity

Viktor studied the Faculty of Law at Masaryk University. During his studies, he and his colleagues co-founded GrowJOB Institute. As a consultant, he participated in changing dozens of Czechs companies, and he helped some of them to expand abroad, mostly to German-speaking countries. He worked with Bileto from the end of the last year, since the beginning of June he and Eva Krausová have formed new department called HR 2.0 – Human Relations.

You and Eva are now in charge of HR 2.0 – Human relations. Could you tell us what is the aim of this new department?

Primarily, we take care about people, both inside and outside. The aim is to make the work for any of Rockaway´s projects even more attractive and interesting both for employees and new applicants. This entails an incredible amount of things: firstly, setting up the company culture and working with employees on its improvement, educational opportunities, various events and also backing the whole recruitment process.

Software developers of all Rockaway projects joined

That is an incredible scope for just two people. What were the first activities you have focused on?

It is probably no surprise that first of all we started searching for new software developers. At the same time we realized the value of ours. That is why we try to join software developers of all Rockaway projects. And so ROCdevs platform developed. Its aim is to provide the software developers in Rockaway the opportunity to exchange experience, discuss important decisions and also help them to educate themselves. Boys from Bileto were the first to accept this idea and organized a seminar at Amazon Web Services. Full Rockaway movie theatre was a proof that we go the right way, both for them and for us.

Our role is to be the connecting line with Rockaway management, to bring together the requirements, enforce fulfilling needs of software developers, and not only the educational and technological ones.

I feel that many companies consider IT guys to be just blue-collar workers with the most expensive shovels and nobody takes care of them very much. We do not want to be such a company, quite the contrary.

ROCdevs is a great thing. What do you plan to do with it?

We are going to provide some space for software developers, so that they can say what they miss. It is not about ordering them something, quite the opposite – to give them space and voice.

In terms of attracting new people we plan in cooperation with HUB a hackathon called Rockaway hack4society. It will be focused on non-profit sector. We want to solve their problems, specific issues which non-profit organizations have to deal with, and which we can improve via technology. There will be actually three hackathons – in October in Prague, In November in Brno and in December in Ostrava.

Working on company culture is challenging task

Besides software developers, what do you focus on?

It is crucial to start working on company culture, mostly in E-Commerce Holding – 17 various projects which were put together to create third biggest player on the market. Just in one year. It is a big challenge – internal communication is being set up, people meet and get to know each other, and at the end there should be a unified subject with global impact.

However, we naturally spend most time on recruitment.

How many people do you currently need for Rockaway?

Well, we are searching for 20 people just for E-commerce Holding. Altogether, there are 50 requirements on my table at the moment, which is quite a lot.

That is really a lot. In what aspects does Rockaway differ from other companies you worked for?

It is fragmented here. Each company is a bit different. There are more companies within one and each has specific requirements. On the other hand, this can be seen as an advantage, because a person who proved to be good, but did not find a place for him or her in one project, can go into another project. People here grow very fast – just as Rockaway. It is not important where we find the talent, so actually three of our receptionists got a better offer within the group.

That sound lot like in McDonald`s.

It is something a bit different. CEOs do not start as cashiers here. For skilful people there is more than one opportunity in Rockaway. It is important for us to set up internal communication, so that employees know about other Rockaway´s projects. There is a large space for internal market with job positions.

So I now have quite a clear idea about your way to HR. How did you actually get to Rockaway?

I have never studied traditional human resources and I actually think that it is good for Rockaway. Within my activities for Growjob Institute I collaborated with more than 80 companies, and a big volume of work concerned creating company culture. In ten years I gained a lot of experience not only in the development of employees, but also in recruiting people to key positions.

My cooperation with Rockaway started in September 2014 when I started as a consultant in Bileto and I was at first in charge of personal development of people. After that I helped Přemek (Přemysl Rubeš, CEO of Bileto) with setting up company culture, and we gradually discovered that the most important aspect is organization of the development, and so I placed scrum into Bileto. And I succeeded. Finally, I was in charge of on-boarding new people in Bileto. After a year´s cooperation I got the offer from Rockaway.

What do you like doing when you don´t do HR2.0?

I relax and spend time with my girlfriend. I really love cooking and reading, not just books about HR, but generally about people and relations among people. I am interested in solving conflicts among people, so from fiction  I enjoy mostly war literature.