Q: How does Adyen attract tech talent in a tight market according to Nienja Blom?
A: Through a combination of employer branding, events, blogs and a presence at major tech events. Nienja emphasises that Adyen is well known in the Netherlands and Amsterdam, but that globally there is still a lot of work to do on brand awareness. What works particularly well is the Adyen Formula: a set of values that is not just on the wall but genuinely lived throughout the organisation. Nienja says you can wake up an Adyen employee in the middle of the night and they will be able to recite the formula.
Q: Why does Adyen work with 360 recruiters instead of sourcers and coordinators according to Nienja Blom?
A: Because end-to-end recruitment creates clarity about responsibility and personal contact with the candidate. At Adyen, the recruiter handles the full process themselves: from sourcing to hiring, without agencies, sourcers or coordinators. That asks a lot of recruiters, but also gives them a real seat at the table. They are market experts who push back on hiring managers and think strategically, not just execute.
Q: How does a recruiter at Adyen become a true strategic partner for the business according to Nienja Blom?
A: By working closely with the HR business partner and being willing to say no. Nienja advises recruiters to approach the business as one front together with their HRBP, jointly steer on headcount and budgets and challenge the business when they want to hire someone who does not match what the team actually needs. Sometimes you need to pull a candidate because you already have enough people with the same profile in the team. Those are not always the easiest conversations, but they are the most valuable ones.
Q: How does Nienja Blom from Adyen use AI to improve the recruitment process?
A: At multiple points in the process. Adyen works with an AI Companion so recruiters no longer have to fill in scorecards after interviews. AI is also used to compare scorecards and identify trends and patterns: are candidates being assessed correctly, is there misalignment, do the engineering rubrics need sharpening? Nienja says she can no longer imagine working without the AI Companion and that it saves her a significant amount of time.
Q: Which parts of the recruitment process can be automated according to Nienja Blom from Adyen?
A: Mainly the middle process. Scheduling, process flow and sourcing can largely be automated, with a human touch at the moments that matter. What Nienja consciously wants to protect: the personal contact moments remain, both the initial conversation and feedback to candidates. The goal is that automation creates space for debriefs, retrospectives, alignments and quality of hire: the analyses that genuinely contribute to a better recruitment process.
Q: What is the biggest challenge for Nienja Blom from Adyen when hiring tech talent globally?
A: Setting a consistent global bar. Adyen hires from multiple tech hubs including Amsterdam, Bangalore, Chicago, Singapore and San Francisco. What is considered senior in Amsterdam must also be considered senior in Bangalore and Chicago. That requires shared engineering rubrics, a mixed interview pool and a structure in which Amsterdam plays a central role as the connecting time zone. Adyen is currently testing a model where every interview consists of one local and one global interviewer.
Q: How does Nienja Blom from Adyen use data to improve recruitment decisions?
A: To test gut feeling against facts. Nienja's ideal use of data is not primarily tracking KPIs but checking whether her instincts are correct. If she feels the conversion ratio is fine but the data shows that thirty candidates are needed to make one hire for a particular role, that is a signal to adjust. That data also gives her concrete pushback to share with the business: this is the average, this is what we are aiming for.
Q: Why is data hygiene a challenge for Nienja Blom from Adyen and how does she approach it?
A: Because operating globally requires shared definitions of what you measure. Nienja uses time to hire as an example: what exactly do we mean, from which data point do we measure and how do we compare that globally? Adyen has already made major progress compared to three years ago, but the work is not finished. The current focus is on further cleaning the data and ensuring that everyone globally is working with the same definitions.
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