- Payments player Marqeta has grown its headcount by 50% in 2021.
- As competition for talent gets fierce, recruiters have had to take a flexible approach to hiring.
- Marqeta’s top tech recruiter details how the fintech attracts and interviews candidates.
A banner year for fundraising amongst financial-technology companies has allowed them to ramp up hiring, intensifying an already heated war for talent, according to a top recruiter at one firm.
Camila Tartari Kaul is the senior director of talent acquisition for product and technology at Marqeta, a fintech that sells software that enables companies to issue credit and debit cards. Tartari Kaul, who oversees the hiring for several of Marqeta’s key teams, told Insider the fact that firms now have deep pockets for hiring has forced recruiters to become more agile.
Every aspect of the hiring ecosystem needs to be open to change, Tartari Kaul said, whether that means investing more in sourcing candidates or introducing more flexibility with remote work policies.
Marqeta has also worked to increase its retention of top talent through promoting opportunities for internal mobility and growing its remote workforce to five times its pre-pandemic size.
Global fintech funding totaled $132 billion in 2021, with payments startups receiving $32.7 billion last year, a 124% increase from 2020, according to research firm CB Insights.
Marqeta raised $1.2 billion in its initial public offering in June 2021. And while the company has had a difficult time since debuting in the public markets, seeing its share price drop by more than half, the fintech grew its headcount by 50% last year.
The hiring will continue at Marqeta throughout 2022, as Tartari Kaul said she is currently focused on adding backend engineers, whom she called the “bread and butter” of the company.
Most openings are at the senior, lead, or principal level, which generally translates to candidates with five to 10 years of experience.
The company currently has 58 open positions listed on its careers website. A Marqeta spokesperson said the company is looking to continue its growth and plans to “make significant headcount investments in 2022.”
Here’s what to expect throughout the interview process at Marqeta.
From application to offer
After a candidate either submits their application materials online or is approached by a recruiter, the hiring process at Marqeta begins with what Tartari Kaul calls a “high level” discussion with a recruiter about the specifics of the role, the candidate’s qualifications, and Marqeta as a company.
Next, candidates meet with four or five current Marqeta employees in interviews that assess the skills necessary for the role as well as behavioral questions.
For an engineering role, Tartari Kaul said this stage includes a programming interview to understand how candidates not only would perform on the job, but their approach to interactions and collaborations with teammates.
“The interview is a little bit of a taste of the real job — what it would be like day to day,” Tartari Kaul told Insider. “We are assessing, of course, coding skills and assessing interpersonal relationships as well.”
Candidates’ work and communication styles are further assessed during this stage through a behavioral interview. This stage also includes a technical interview where candidates will be asked about previous projects they’ve worked on, different types of technologies they’ve worked with in the past, and both coding and architectural skills.
A candidate will have a final interview with the hiring manager, followed by a discussion with a recruiter regarding the terms of the job offer.
Specific fintech experience isn’t required for many roles, Tartari Kaul said, so long as a candidate demonstrates interest in the field and an ability to quickly learn new skills. She encouraged candidates to come to interviews prepared with questions and be able to speak about their learning styles.
“There is this preconception that payments experience is a deal breaker to get into fintech. It is not. I think of fintech more as a domain that you have to learn,” she said. “A good engineer can learn a domain. Learning to be a great engineer — that is harder to teach, so that for us is really important, that interest in payments and showing us what are you doing to learn. That is more important than having had experience, per se.”
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