How to build A-player teams: ScaleJet’s approach to eCommerce recruitment

*An interview with Anna Belenok and Oxana Alkhovska, co-founders of ScaleJet.

Anna Belenok and Oxana Alkhovska are the co-founders of ScaleJet, a specialized recruitment agency focused on eCommerce businesses. Founded in 2018, ScaleJet aims to help eCommerce companies build top-performing teams by sourcing ‘A-players’ from around the globe.

Both Anna and Oxana bring extensive experience in eCommerce, HR, and strategic hiring, making them well-equipped to understand and fulfill the unique needs of eCommerce businesses.

ScaleJet’s beginnings

Q: Tell us a bit about yourselves and about ScaleJet.

Anna: “Thank you so much for having us, we are really happy to have this chat. To start with a short intro about ourselves, we’ve been in eCommerce for quite a bit, I would say – starting from 2016, 2017. This is not the industry that we were planning strategically to start working in. It just happened, and it happened to be a perfect match, just because of how fast the industry is moving. 

You really have to be innovative all the time. You just cannot sit back and say, ‘Okay – now I know everything, everything is clear, I can just do the very same list of things forever and be happy.’ Absolutely not. You always have to think of something and really stick to the industry, because otherwise, you’ll be kicked off. It’s just like that.

We started back then and we’ve been working for really huge Amazon brands. Myself and Oxana, we’ve been COOs (chief operating officer) in several Amazon brands, and this was our start – and also how we met. So we met working for a big seller, and we’ve seen, together, how important people are; this is the most crucial part, probably, for eCommerce sellers. It was back then, and it still is. It’s like your bone structure that you are able to build everything with.”

Oxana: “There are some pillars for eCommerce businesses to be able to scale, and normally the eCommerce owners or company management is more focused on the P&L (profit and loss) side of things. But oftentimes, the real issue – preventing them from scaling their businesses – is actually people. That’s because eCommerce is quite a disruptive industry, as Anna mentioned, and there are not too many skilled professionals in the area; there are also a lot of challenges in hiring remote teams. 

We were able spot that need in Amazon sellers but not only. It all started from helping people out there, just giving them advice, and we saw the interest growing – people coming and asking for help. We decided to start our business with that in mind.

For example, when I started back in 2016, I was able to scale the team of a multi-million brand from 4 people to more than 40 people, and really scaling the operations. So, we’ve been there and that’s what we are doing for our current clients. Many of them are well-established, huge brands, but we also work with companies whose businesses are established and growing, but they don’t know how to build teams and how to scale their businesses, or how to delegate.” 

Q: What inspired you to start the agency, and how did your background influence its creation?

Oxana: ״As I mentioned, we started with just eCommerce experience, managing eCommerce sales, operations, working with different departments, and understanding this whole side of the business. Once we were working in senior roles like managing operations of companies or managing marketing or sales, we were there – basically, in the seller’s shoes – and we understood that what it takes in order to scale the business is having the right people. 

Oftentimes, it’s very difficult to understand who you need – what kind of skills the person needs to have, what kind of culture the person needs to understand. Having these in front of our eyes and seeing this demand from other sellers, meeting in events or conferences, we were just hearing the same thing again and again: ‘Hey, I’m struggling with people, how can I make this work? Because I’m doing everything myself. I want to delegate.’

So, we were thinking, how can we help them? At first, it started from sharing some information and really just helping, and then we decided that in order to make this efficient, we need more people – we need to put it in scale for us as well. So that’s where the business started.”

---

Might also interest you:

• Firing up the small business spirit: How to motivate your team without breaking the bank
• How to optimize your supply chain for the holiday season
• From a small business owner to an 8-figure eCommerce expert

---

The growth-centric approach to recruitment

Q: ScaleJet emphasizes a growth-focused recruitment approach. Can you explain what this means and how it impacts your selection process for candidates?

Oxana: “The growth approach means that in order to scale, you need to have forward thinking. Most of the times, not only sellers but all of us as people, we get trapped in the current situation, and we get so deep into it that we can’t elevate our vision. So sometimes we need help, from outside, to look a little bit beyond the horizon. 

This is the growth approach. Sometimes we are approached with a request like this: ‘I desperately need a person here to manage my PPC, or my profits, or my listings – whatever it is.’ And then our question would be: ‘Okay, this is fine, but where would you like to be one year from now? What are the things that prevent you from getting there?’ So sometimes, it deviates to a completely different role that they need. 

This is the most important thing – to have this forward thinking, and then to be able to translate it into strategy for the business, because people management is also a strategy; otherwise you end up hiring everyone but with no impactful results. 

If you’re doing everything yourself manually and you hire 10 virtual assistants, it’s going to be better, but maybe you just need one, and maybe you just need a brand manager to put the strategy in place. So this is a different approach. This is, in a nutshell, what the growth approach means to us.

The second thing is that business owners naturally tend to wear too many hats. So we start the conversation: ‘What is the part of the business that you love doing most? Your unique ability, your capacity, things that you cannot live without.’ So ideally, again, looking into the future, this part will stay with you the longest as the owner or business manager; all the other parts – you need to delegate. We start building the priorities: what are the most burning things that need to be delegated? That builds into structure.”

Q: For eCommerce businesses looking to scale, what key qualities should they look for in potential hires to ensure they are bringing on ‘A-players’?

Oxana: “There are some clear indicators. For example, if we are digging into past experience, normally it’s the person who constantly exceeds expectations. Basically, they came with one role and took on more challenges, they were able to grow, they were learning, they were achieving – they were making things better.

If there’s an area that is delegated to the person, that person doesn’t only do what they’re told, but tries to do their best to grow that area of responsibility, to empower others, to share experience. They have a growth mindset. They get feedback with an open heart. 

Overall, I agree with Anna. These are people who are achievers, they’re go-getters, they love challenges – and this is important for them personally, personal growth.”

Remote work and hiring challenges

Q: Remote work has become increasingly prevalent. What strategies do you use to effectively source and manage remote talent for eCommerce companies?

Anna: ״I would say that remote work makes a lot of sense, for various reasons. I’m not even sure that we need to really explain, because we are all working remotely already, and people who are reading this are probably also remote. So I think we’re on the same page. 

If we were to talk about hiring from different regions of the world, that’s actually where we [ScaleJet] really excel, because we are helping hiring worldwide. This is another part that distinguishes us a lot – we help our clients to be very cost-effective too. We advise on the best regions or areas to hire from based on their needs, their current operational setup, their preferences. I’m not even talking about the most important thing, the hard skills, because this is an absolute must – everyone wants the most talented and the most professional person. So these are who we are calling A-players. 

So you can definitely hire from different countries. Having people from multiple nations, from different cultural backgrounds – it’s a great plus for the companies. This is where magic can happen, creativity is born. It also helps push some processes forward. I think that this is a very important thing, that the businesses are on the lookout for the best solutions. It’s really important to take advantage of the times we are living nowadays, with all the possibilities that the modern world is providing us. 

It’s always a good idea to be open-minded and to be on the lookout for the best solutions. If this is something that you truly are aiming for as a business, you’re going to be successful with that because the best solutions are born outside of our current horizon. As Oxana also mentioned, if you have this growth vision, if you are thinking beyond the borders, then the possibility that you will be successful is much higher than when you’re not.”

Oxana: “I want to just add a little anecdote to that. I remember years ago when we were only starting, a client reached out to us and it was a great guy but he was so tired and he said, ‘Look ladies, I need your help. I need to hire someone to supervise my team.’ And we were like, ‘Okay, what exactly do you need? What kind of skill? What’s the goal behind the position?’ And he said, ‘This is very simple. I just need someone to sit in my room and look at five screens, because I don’t have time for anything else, I’m just supervising my remote team.’ And of course, a lot of things have changed from that time.” 

“As Anna mentioned, we can match the time zone, many people can overlap. So if you create a structure where you can overlap a couple of hours just to meet and then people work in the different time zones and they bring in the results, it’s quite simple. We can definitely advise on the solution. Luckily these times where you had to supervise your remote teams are gone.”

Q: What are some of the most common challenges eCommerce businesses face when it comes to hiring, and how does ScaleJet address these challenges?

Oxana: “For eCommerce businesses, and probably for all businesses, the challenge is when you are wearing too many hats. It means that you need to delegate, and delegating is not abdicating. The second one that we briefly just spoke about is creating trust, meaning that you trust your employees, and this is a mutual process – they need to trust you too.

This is very challenging because this world is very dynamic, and a huge percentage of eCommerce businesses fail in the first year. There’s a downside because sometimes people hire employees and then they part ways, not in the best possible way. People go out with hard feelings, and building that trust is where agencies like ours come in. We can really build this bridge. We always share the reasons these companies are great with the candidates. It’s not only employers who are choosing candidates, they need to understand that candidates are also choosing. 

If we are talking about the A-player, it’s very difficult to find the person that will be willing to work with the business if they don’t know anything or they are not quite sure about it. For eCommerce itself, there are so many moving pieces, this is such a disruptive business. Things change so rapidly that people really need stretch themselves in order to adapt. 

Most of the people we are working with, both our clients and our candidates, need to learn new things constantly, on top of the time that they spend for work. This is the most common challenge that eCommerce businesses are facing in regards to their employees or team members. 

Other than that, with artificial intelligence rising, a lot of manual work can be replaced right now and you need people who are thinking strategically, not technically. Strategic thinkers are rare; these are the growth mindset people, and this is, again, where we can come in with the knowledge to really distinguish between those who are decision-makers, and those who are probably good at managing things, but not taking strategic decisions. So this is also something to note.”

Success stories and lessons learned

Q: Can you provide an example of a particularly successful placement you’ve made and what made it so successful?

Oxana: “The most successful hire for us is when candidates stay for a long time. We have a lot of stories, but I think that the most successful story is when we hire the 15th or 20th team member for the same company and all the previous ones worked out and stayed.”

“I’m so happy we have all these reviews that clients are sharing, but also we have candidates who come back to us and say, ‘Hey, thank you so much for recommending this company to me, it was my dream to work in a company like that. I was struggling so much before, and now I’m so happy I found this dream job.’

Maybe you were expecting to have some particular story of us hiring a COO, bringing the company to trillions of millions of dollars. But this happens eventually, when you have these teams and the companies are able to scale. 

One of our clients, I will not share the name because it’s confidential information, but I had a call with him just today and he was saying, ‘With the team that we hired last year, we were able to scale 50%.’ And it’s not a startup company, it’s an 8-figure company already, which is not that easy to scale.”

Q: In your experience, what are some common mistakes eCommerce businesses make when it comes to building their teams, and how can they avoid these pitfalls?

Oxana: “We all make mistakes, right? There are no people without mistakes. What really matters is how we learn from these mistakes. Normally, when somebody is seeking our help, that means they’ve already made some mistakes. Open-mindedness means sharing with us: ‘Hey, it doesn’t work for me,’ so we can dig deeper into that, and understand where the issue is. Once we solve the issue, we solve the whole thing – we solve the process. 

These mistakes, they have a root cause, so the issue is either coming from lack of time to properly screen and hire candidates, or lack of knowledge, because oftentimes they think to themselves, ‘Hey, hiring is not a big deal. I trust my gut feeling.’ That feeling is great, but there are many, many ways to get information, and then you make a final decision; the more sources of information you have, the better decision you’re making, the better analytical process is in place.

These are mistakes – not really understanding the need, hence rushing into a decision; not seeking help, doing something when you’re overwhelmed: ‘Hey, I need someone – that’s it.’ And the majority of agencies, from my perspective, are really willing to help these owners, but when you receive a wrong input, you cannot deliver the right output.

Sometimes the input is so wrong that the output is wrong, and then we have frustrated clients that say, ‘Hey, you know what? This is the wrong person.’ And then we have to go back to that mistake and understand why the candidate was wrong.

Sometimes we have these issues, which is why we provide a replacement guarantee. I have to say this happens really rarely with us, but sometimes, you know, it’s not the right fit. So what we do, then, we meet with our clients and we try to understand what was wrong – why this seemed like a good match and then it didn’t work out. In the end, we discover that the expectations were in some field that we didn’t pay attention to, so this is the thing.”

Building and scaling teams

Q: For companies that are growing from 2-3 people into a bigger team – what would be your recommendation? Which roles should be hired when growing, and what is the logic behind it?

Oxana: “What happens is that there is a moment where the business starts growing exponentially, and it’s not possible anymore to manage everything– it’s possible, but it will cost a lot; every mistake now costs a lot. So the problem with these kinds of clients is that the change happens so rapidly, and they don’t have time to adapt. So oftentimes they’re scared to hire people because they were used to managing everything by themselves, so it’s a big part that we work with. 

There are two ways to address this. Normally, what works best from our experience is delegating tasks. There are two types of tasks: one is business-critical and the second is not business-critical (but takes a lot of time). So normally, everyone takes the first step. It’s where you say two people, maybe, join the company. They’re usually technical – virtual assistants, or just technical people, managing some day-to-day job. 

But then, there is a point that the business owner or business manager needs to understand: what are the things that are business-critical but they’re not the experts in? They need to be honest with themselves and say, ‘Hey, I manage my finances, I’m just scared to delegate this part but I am not the best in that,’ or, ‘I’m managing my PPC on Amazon and that costs me thousands of dollars but I’m not the expert.’

That’s where these links come in place, when the business owners understand how they can delegate the task. It’s when they understand the KPI and put these control points in place where they can actually control the result, not the process. When we’re talking about the positions, it’s actually that – summarizing the business critical areas that you’re still managing but not the best at. You need to find someone who is better than yourself.”

Q: Cultural fit is often cited as crucial for team success. How do you assess cultural fit during the recruitment process, and why is it so important? And how does it work with remote recruits?

Anna: “I would say that the silver lining that goes through everything that we are sharing here is that it all starts with a very clear definition. If we don’t have a perfect understanding of what should be done and why, this is not going to work. We only strive to achieve really outstanding results, I would say, for our clients.

Here, again, it also starts with a clear understanding: ‘Okay guys, so what is really important to you?’ Sometimes companies have their core values on their website, which is also very important and they are there for a reason… However, you cannot just stick to that and think that you need to find someone who will say, ‘Okay, this is important for me too – that’s a perfect match!’ That’s not how things are done. Any kind of automated software could do that, and this is not a human-based approach.

We are able to make those matches based on communication, on understanding clearly what the company is about, what this group of people is like, what their goals and aims are, what they are sharing, what’s important to them. Sometimes those could be details that other people would not even pay attention to, but for these people it’s important. 

Sometimes it could be cultural, sometimes even religious; we are all people from different countries, and for some people this is extremely important. These are key things to keep in mind, and apart from that, making this match happen is something that you can only get through a meaningful conversation. This is not something that you can assess with any kind of online test or assessment. We do not believe in that. 

I think Oxana will be all in on this point. No test will be able to tell you what the person really has in mind, what their thoughts are, and what’s important for them. You really have to conduct those in-depth interviews. Only when you see, ‘Okay, guys, you’re talking the same language. Maybe sometimes you’re using different vocabulary for that, but still, you are sharing the same vision and the same vibes… this could be a great match.’ We have this in the process, absolutely.” 

Oxana: ״I would just briefly add on this. We often compare hiring people with playing chess, where figures have different roles. Sometimes you need to be very agile and sometimes you need to be more of a thinker, but you need to share the same values in order to stick to the team. Sometimes it’s not taken into consideration, and if you are aiming to hire people just like yourself, maybe in the long run you will lose – because you will only reinforce one side of things.”

Anna: “Whenever you are hiring someone or whenever you’re looking for a job, I hope that the majority of people understand during the hiring process that these are the people that they’re going to meet on a daily basis – you’re gonna face each other all the time, so you have to be comfortable with each other. If you’re not, sometimes the job will still be done, of course, but if you’re striving for the best possible output, why not make sure there’s a cultural and intellectual fit?”

Trends and tips for the future

Q: Looking ahead, what trends do you see emerging in the eCommerce recruitment landscape, and how can businesses prepare for these changes?

Anna: “This environment, the way it was dynamic almost 10 years ago and the way it’s dynamic now, are completely different levels of dynamic – and it’s getting even more dynamic. Adaptability is extremely important, and people who work for these companies need to be highly adaptive themselves. They need to be resistant to changes, and be strategic thinkers.

If you don’t have that vision in mind and you’re doing things just for the sake of doing, eventually you’ll lose track of the industry and you’ll be kicked out. So, the ‘trend’ is high adaptability and strategic thinking. You really have to be a pro master at chess – you have to think many steps ahead, and also keep in mind that you can’t always know what the next moves will be.”

Oxana: “I think there’s a big need for automation right now in eCommerce businesses. Not only automation, though; sometimes, businesses need another pair of eyes. Just to have external audits of one of their functions, even though they have great people out there. A part-time or one-time consultancy can help them see what else they’re missing.

This is something interesting that is popping up right now because, as I mentioned, things are changing rapidly, so things like software that are more and more adaptable, everything that now can replace video creation with AI, things like that – anything that can be automated needs to be automated. And in terms of hiring, people are also looking for solutions to automate their processes. 

Unfortunately, as of now, we don’t see good results with that. Trying to make the process automated with software or tests, so you input information there and you receive a great candidate as the outcome – this is something that we know is kind of in our minds, but it doesn’t work like that yet. So these are the things.”

---

Have article ideas, requests, or collaboration proposals? Reach out to us at editor@8fig.co – we’d love to hear from you.

• 8 eCommerce strategy tips: Lessons from building a global art brand
• Firing up the small business spirit: How to motivate your team without breaking the bank
• How financial technology is transforming online shopping
• BFCM: The ultimate guide to eCommerce sales [2024]
• Seasonal or regular: Discover your seller type