CEO of Genesis on Hiring and Company Culture: How the Company Selects Talent | Ukrainian News

Genesis regularly ranks among Ukraine’s top employers and in 2025 posted the highest number of job openings in the Ukrainian IT sector — 1,618, nearly 500 more than in 2024.Landing an offer, however, is not easy. Mandatory stages include a test assignment and an interview to assess "values fit." At the same time, the company also receives a fair share of negative feedback, often linked to the fast pace and heavy workload.We spoke with Genesis CEO Volodymyr Mnogolyetniy about how the company balances a demanding hiring process, intensive work, and employees’ willingness to stay for the long term.How Genesis builds its HR brand (and whether it does at all)Genesis has topped DOU’s and others's rankings of best employers for several years in a row. Is developing an HR brand part of the company’s annual strategy, or is the focus elsewhere — with a strong HR brand emerging as a byproduct?You can’t build an HR brand for a large company without substance behind it. If the rule for opening a great restaurant is location, location, location, then the rule for an IT company is people, people, people.Our strategy is to bring the most talented people together in one place and not get in their way. We give them the opportunity to work with brilliant peers and grow quickly.The fact that this has also resulted in a strong HR brand is a nice side effect. Today, it serves as our "student record book" — something that works in our favor after a while.Genesis is a product ecosystem. How accurate is it to talk about a single, unified HR brand?We’re a company that helps founders build companies. That’s why there is the Genesis HR brand, as well as the HR brands of each individual project. These are different channels used for hiring. Each product decides for itself whether it wants to leverage the Genesis brand — and most choose to do so.Does being ranked the top IT employer in Ukraine affect your business in any way?Our HR brand doesn’t affect our customers because we’re an export-oriented company. Our revenue comes from apps used in the US, Europe, and Africa. People there haven’t heard of Genesis as a brand, and they don’t care where our products were developed.That’s what sets us apart from outsourcing companies, where clients may be reluctant to take on wartime risks. We don’t face that issue, which allows us to keep hiring in Ukraine during this difficult period. We create 20–40% of new jobs in the country’s IT sector.Read alsoAlive AI: how FinalSpark makes a computer out of human brain neurons – interview with the CEOHow to get into Genesis — and whether burnout is a riskGetting into Genesis isn’t easy: the hiring process includes multiple stages, a mandatory test assignment, and bar-raising. Has it always been this way, or did this approach emerge as the number of candidates grew and screening became more important?I operate on the principle that as long as a CEO can personally hire people, they should. When Genesis had up to 300 employees, I tried to conduct at least a short final interview with every candidate. At some point, that became physically impossible, but we decided not to abandon the approach. That’s how bar-raising came about.We borrowed the term from Amazon — they also have a final interview to assess how well a candidate fits the team. So we identified a group of specialists who, in effect, replace me at this stage of the process.We bring together the most talented people in one place to do unique things. That’s our entire business model. Bar-raising is essential to that model.What role do test assignments play in hiring?We use test assignments because anyone can learn how to perform well in an interview. Senior candidates especially are almost impossible to filter out at that stage alone, as they have extensive experience going through interviews.Working at Genesis is also demanding. Former employees often say there’s a heavy workload, fast-paced processes, and occasional overtime. How does that align with the fact that so many people still want to join the company?Like in any normal company, overtime does happen at Genesis. But it’s not a systemic issue, and I don’t have a goal of making everyone work 100 hours a week. At the same time, I see the world this way: talented people tend to work a lot. My metric is simple — I look at burnout rates. Do people leave projects en masse? That’s not happening here.If a candidate says in an interview that they always close their laptop at 6:00 p.m. and don’t respond to work messages because their personal time starts then — would that be a red flag?I’d ask a simple follow-up question: let’s assume that’s true 80–90% of the time. But what about overtime situations — when a project deadline is approaching or when a product goes down? Would you stay and help, or not?We would never require an employee to answer a call at two in the morning. But if a product goes down, we do expect them to pick up the phone. If someone is so indifferent that they wouldn’t — then they’re probably not a fit for this industry.How many hours do you work yourself?It took me a long time to shape my schedule. I work seven days a week. I don’t promote this to anyone, but it’s what works for me. On average, it comes out to around 60–65 hours a week — a bit less on weekends, a bit more on weekdays.What matters isn’t the number of hours, but the fact that my schedule makes me a happy person. It’s flexible: I can combine work and personal matters and don’t feel constant pressure.It’s worth understanding what makes you happy at work and trying to build that for yourself. Those things can be radically different for different people.How Genesis grows founders — and whether it sees them as competitorsWould you join Genesis if you were just starting your career today?For someone at the beginning of their career, Genesis is the best possible choice. We have examples of people who joined in junior roles and grew into business leaders. I don’t know where else in Ukraine you can find success stories as striking as those of Vika Repa (CEO and co-founder of BetterMe) or Anton Pavlovskyi (founder of Headway).Our superpower is recognizing when someone is performing exceptionally well and has the potential to become a founder, CMO, or CPO. We identify these people, and they usually grow within the company. We don’t hire CEOs from the outside.How do you work with founders? Do they have KPIs?In most cases, no. We try to stand by founders "in both good times and bad," and if someone is talented, we’re ready to work with them systematically. If a first project doesn’t work out, that’s not a red flag. A red flag is when something is wrong within their team. When we receive signals about that — from employees or from other CEOs — we step in and try to understand the root cause.How do startups from the ecosystem that grow into large businesses affect the Genesis brand? Do you see, for example, Skelar as a competitor?We don’t have competitors. We’d be genuinely happy if Skelar became ten times larger than Genesis. It’s like a university: you send people out into adult life, and if some of them end up more successful than you, that’s a great outcome.But doesn’t that dilute the original brand? How strongly do you hold on to Genesis itself?We do not hold at all. I believe it’s good for all ecosystem projects to maintain a connection with Genesis, and most of them do. But do we push for this to be mandatory, or insist that people "remember it was Genesis"? No. That’s not important to us.What key HR initiatives are your priority for the next three years?Right now, I’m less concerned about the HR brand and more about how the IT industry as a whole will evolve. The war has hit education particularly hard, and the future of IT largely depends on today’s students. So whether the industry will exist in 20 years is a question I don’t have an answer to. But it’s definitely a challenge. Genesis invests over $1 million every year in supporting universities, but we’re a private company — and a private company can’t replace the state.Read alsoScala developers have the highest salaries in Ukrainian IT. But why are there so few of them?

"We create 20–40% of jobs in Ukraine’s IT sector." How Genesis builds its HR brand — an interview with the CEO

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