Over the last five years our client TravelBird, (an online travel provider of inspiring travel experiences, with different offers available every 24hrs,) has grown from a team of two into a 700 person organisation. 

Many of the company’s hires have been made internationally, since this suits TravelBird’s unique requirements; the company has autonomous teams responsible for organising travel offers in different countries (all based from their Amsterdam office), and their preference is to hire native speakers to work in those teams.    

I wanted to know how the company managed to achieve such incredible growth, the role recruitment has had on this growth, and how they’ve managed to keep the unique TravelBird culture intact throughout.

To discuss these issues and more, I caught up with Jeranne Koekkoek (VPHR at TravelBird).

You have recently been named one of the top successful tech companies to watch by Wired. What do you attribute your success to?

The success of our company is primarily dependent on our product and service that we provide for our travellers. An essential aspect of every business is your people, or, in our case our “birdies”. In order to create and sustain a successful company and product you need employees who are willing to take things to the next level and strive to perform better every day. Having such a culture is unique. As such, we are incredibly focused on finding the right employees. 

How would you describe TravelBird’s culture?

We have a very open and friendly culture.

The founders of TravelBird, Symen Jansma and Dennis Klompalberts, had the ambition to create a company culture where they would like to work themselves. As a result they have created a flat and non-hierarchical structure. Everyone at TravelBird gets a lot of freedom and responsibility to set up new projects for which they can take full ownership.

We aim to empower our employees to do these things, and try to avoid bureaucracy to preserve innovation. 

TravelBird has grown at an extremely impressive rate since its inception (from 2 to 700 people in just 5 years). What are the key factors that have enabled this growth?

We work according to the Cell Structure developed by Eckhart Wintzen. This means we have several autonomous “cells” working within each country. We’re active in 17 European countries with a corresponding country cell for each one, as well as additional ones such as Finance/Legal, HR/Recruitment/Operations, Tech and CRM, Product & Design.

Each cell is lead by a country or “cell manager”. There is a lot of knowledge sharing in our company. Managers from different countries, as well as marketers, editors and account managers come together to help each other.

Because of this structure we are very scalable, and are able to set up new autonomous markets very quickly. 

Angela Ahrendts recently wrote a blog about her hiring principles where one of the four areas is about how the candidates view themselves in the world or as she puts it ME vs WE. Is this something you look for? And what are your hiring principles?

ME vs WE is very important if you want to find out if people are ‘real’ and if they are willing to collaborate – if they think of the bigger picture or if they're solely in it for themselves. It is very similar to our strict policy of hiring based on cultural fit. We are all working towards the same goal – to inspire our travellers on a daily basis.

We are looking for people who share that same ambition and enthusiasm within their role.

Our team is very diverse, which means that a travel advisor, an online marketer, Python developer and a data scientist all have to share the same DNA – they must like to get things done and be motivated to inspire our travellers in their own way. It’s amazing to see what people come up with, and the ideas that have been brought to life within the organisation. 

How do you safeguard TravelBird’s culture when growing so quickly?

Although we’re not a startup anymore, we work very hard to maintain our culture, which resembles one of a startup (i.e. an open and can-do mentality).

The structure that we have created with the cell philosophy leads to a lot of freedom and a startup feel in all cells and, therefore, within the whole company.

Maintaining this is an important part of our recruitment strategy but also within the company’s strategic plans – to empower employees within their own role is a constant goal.

It’s hard work, don’t get me wrong, but it can be done if you make it your number one priority.

Looking backward, what are the biggest lessons you’ve learnt over the last five years?

It’s all about trial and error; you have to be open to new things and understand that sometimes your choice wasn’t the right one. It takes a lot of perseverance and positive attitude in order to try things without fear.

And, from a recruitment perspective, always strive for a cultural fit; you can teach certain skills, but you cannot change a personality.

Looking forward, what do you think TravelBird will look like in another five years? 

In five years' time we will keep on inspiring travellers and our ambition is to make TravelBird the number 1 go-to-website for travel inspiration.

At the moment our focus is to keep improving ourselves and therefore we strongly invest in the people and markets that we are in today.

Furthermore we’re continuously optimising our product for our travellers and we will expand into new markets later on, which we, of course, need more talented people for.

We have great ambitions, it’s amazing to see how it all started and I’m very excited of the road that’s ahead of us. 

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