Ocado Technology has kickstarted a new recruitment drive to employ many more hardware and software engineers with a humorous video where parents are asked what their children do at work.
Video sees nine parents of Ocado Technology employees try to describe technical jobs like ‘simulation algorithm development’ and ‘spoke software management’
The recruitment drive comes as Ocado Technology gears up to put some of the largest bricks and mortar grocery retailers around the world online using its business model
Ocado Technology today launched a new recruitment drive to hire 300 more employees in areas such as cloud infrastructure, Scala/Java development, and mobile development. To help raise awareness of the exciting careers on offer, it has turned to an unlikely bunch of people to help spread the word: employees’ parents.
The technology firm has created a recruitment video where nine parents of Ocado Technology staff describe what their children do at work. The results, which can be viewed in this video, sees parents struggling to describe what their children in various teams like ‘simulation algorithm development’ and ‘spoke software management’ do all day.
Parents were also asked if their sons or daughters’ jobs involved coding; if they could remember their children’s job titles and if they had any embarrassing photos they could show on the video. Thankfully, they did…
1,000 hardware and software engineers
Ocado Technology currently employs over 650 hardware and software engineers across its offices and is now looking to grow that number to 1,000. Driving this growth is the firm’s plans to expand its platform to other grocery companies internationally, revolutionising the way people shop across the world.
“We’re always looking to disrupt the status quo,” said Paul Clarke, Director of Technology at Ocado. “This includes building almost all of our technology in-house and employing innovative tactics to recruit the world’s most talented software and hardware engineers.
“What we do here is not IT, it’s technology in the true sense of the word. Our technology estate is very broad and deep, that’s why we need world class talent to work on the extraordinary opportunities that exist within Ocado, such as robotics, vision systems, machine learning, simulation, data science and so on.
Why people work at Ocado Technology
A second video has been created, which details why employees like working at Ocado Technology. However, instead of asking its staff to reel off stock answers, the firm turned to parents again for some heartfelt responses, which included:
“It’s the first time I’ve known Joel really look forward to going into work.”
“From the very first interview, she came up with a really bouncy smile on her face. She said: “I really love it!” And what she loves is the people, what she loves is the culture of the company.”
“I sort of get this feeling that it’s a lot of fun.”
The two videos are the first in a series launching this autumn to promote careers available at Ocado Technology.