[Event Report] We held the 10th offline event, Growth Night vol. 10: "The Most Candid Discussion Ever! How to Build an Engineering Organization: Success and Failure Stories in Hiring and Organizational Development!"
I'm Kobayashi, the community manager for the Growth Leaders Community!
On Thursday, June 5, 2025, our community held its 10th offline event.
Event report article summary below ↓
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What is the Growth Leaders Community?
This community was launched with the concept of "a leaders community for creating growth talent and evangelizing the department known as the 'Growth Headquarters'."
Talent that can grow not only themselves and their own companies, but also companies around the world. We refer to such talent as"Growth Leaders" at our company.
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Event Overview
The theme this time was"The Most Candid Discussion Ever! How to Build an Engineering Organization: Success and Failure Stories in Hiring and Organizational Development!". We welcomed our company's CTO, Chen, and Hajimari Inc. CTO, Mr. Okada, as speakers, who spoke about "hiring" and "turnover rate," respectively.
"8x increase in hiring in one year" and "zero engineer turnover for 7 years"
—they will share their "candid" success and failure stories behind these achievements!
What is the most important thing for attracting excellent engineering talent?
First, in Chen's part, he focused on the "hiring" aspect and spoke about three themes:
・What is the secret to increasing engineers by 8 times in just one year?
How did you optimize the engineer hiring process?
What is the method for attracting excellent engineering talent?
He spoke focusing on these three themes.
Among them, what was impressive was that
Chen, as CTO, performs those tasks himself.
The most important thing is to recognize that"hiring is the top priority task for leadership".
He shared many tips and gritty methods, but all of them lead to significant growth of the engineering organization when performed by the CTO themselves.
As someone who works at Sales Marker, I, Kobayashi, also have a strong perception that our company is"an organization with strong engineers".
I was painfully reminded that this is due to Chen's accumulation of efforts over the years, and even though I am not in engineer hiring, I felt like, "I want to be hired by Chen too!" (laughs)
Also, during the Q&A session, there were comments such as, "You say 'hiring is the top priority task for leadership,' but what percentage of your time do you allocate to hiring?"
In response, Chen said, "It is said that 30% is best," but he also admitted that 30% is difficult for him personally.
The reason why we were able to achieve a "zero" engineer turnover rate for 7 years
Next up is the session by Mr. Okada from Hajimari Inc.
The theme was "The reason we were able to achieve a 'zero' engineer turnover rate for 7 years in the freezing land of Finland".
I thought it was quite a punchy title, but here he spoke extensively about tips for lowering turnover rates while comparing the "cultural differences between Northern Europe and Japan."
I think a "zero turnover rate" is quite amazing.
During Mr. Okada's talk, there was also a scene where Chen nodded significantly at the point that "understanding national character and cultural tendencies" is extremely important.
"It's easy to communicate with Asians, but I initially thought I was disliked by employees from the European region. But in reality, it was just that the way I conveyed my words was wrong. If Japanese culture is one where it's better to point things out 'indirectly,' then Western culture is the exact opposite. I realized that we need to learn these cultures."
Also, as one of Mr. Okada's initiatives, Finland is famous as the "land of saunas", and he said he created a system called the "sauna system", where they hold meetings while taking a sauna together. (The company pays for the sauna fees.)
It's what we call "naked communication" in Japan, isn't it?
There are various ways we think about building this kind of culture at our company as well, and there were many points where I nodded in agreement.
Especially since engineering organizations tend to become multinational groups, it is extremely important for everyone to engage in self-disclosure.
Above all, there were many scenes where Mr. Chen and Mr. Okada were in sync, and I felt envious, thinking, "So there is a common understanding among people who have overcome similar hardships..."
The participants also took many photos of the slides, and we received many comments in the survey saying, "This was very helpful!" I think it turned out to be a very good study session!
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