Hiring practices · Hiring principles · October 2026
Hiring principles: Yauheni Aziomka
How BrainRocket's tech-stream program manager selects PMs for his team
"Hiring principles" is a series in which hiring managers talk about how they select people for their teams. The hero of the first issue is Yauheni Aziomka, a program manager at BrainRocket.
Yauheni hires middle- and senior-level project and program managers for backend teams. He considers his main expertise to be not a domain but the ability to work with deeply technical streams: backend development and DevOps.
Today Yauheni's main expertise is working in technical teams. But he started his career in large-scale charity work: he was a project manager at the Red Cross and the World Health Organization.
In IT itself he started in outsourcing, and once he had gained experience he moved to the iGaming industry and found his place in technical streams.
"I came to IT as a non-technical person. In my first days at a new job I wrote down unfamiliar phrases in meetings and then went through them with ChatGPT. I remember it like it was yesterday: the first one was 'table partitioning'…
At the same time I discovered that I'm comfortable in technical streams, and my skills, the ability to drive communication and to build a stream's values through transparency and trust, are in high demand there. There's fairly little that's human in deep backend, so my human-related approach to work matters a lot: it lets me secure the team's support and 'pull off' complicated process stories. The team knows they can trust me."
Yauheni Aziomka, tech-stream program manager at BrainRocket
Risks in hiring project managers
When selecting candidates, Yauheni keeps the main risks in mind
Weak impact on results
When project managers talk about their work, they describe what their teams did, simply because of the nature of the profession. The hiring manager's job is to find out how exactly the person contributed to the team's success: the team may have achieved results even in spite of them.
Yauheni's rule: find out in more detail what the person actually did: whether they really led the team or simply know how to give socially expected answers. This also includes checking for "hot air." Abstract stories with no substance at the interview mean it will be the same at work.
"When someone tells me, without any specifics, about some agile transformations carried out for the sake of the overall efficiency of efficient management methods, that's an ultra-red flag."
Lack of independence
A project manager who lacks independence costs a company a lot, if you count how much time the manager or the team will spend running yet another sync, answering a question, double-checking the person's line of thought. So Yauheni wants to find out who the candidate reports to and what their reporting looks like.
"If they have daily syncs with their manager, then either the manager likes to control everything too much, or the person in front of me isn't the most autonomous."
The flip side of lack of independence is a PM who immediately "salutes" and rushes to carry out tasks without asking a single question. This approach is tested with cases. Examples of cases Yauheni uses in real hiring are below.
Not understanding the technical side
In interviews Yauheni always asks questions about the candidate's technical skills to understand whether the person is really good at what they write in their CV.
"We work in deep tech, and the stream's requirements are specific. At first I wanted to hire only former engineers, but there are few of them on the market, and they're often not that good at management. But we definitely require candidates to want to figure out complex things and to be ready to adapt.
I don't need a project manager to know RabbitMQ queues inside out, but they should understand why their team chose, say, Rabbit and not Kafka. Otherwise it's not a PM, it's just a Jira extension."
Stages of selection for Yauheni's team
- 1Screening with a recruiter
- 2Interview with Yauheni
- 3Meeting with the HRBP
- 4Offer
What guides Yauheni in hiring
Yauheni has a positive attitude toward candidates writing to him directly. If he has open roles, he usually posts them on LinkedIn himself and forwards relevant applications to the recruiter, asking them to schedule an interview.
Cover letters
Yauheni reads cover letters, but he values brevity in them. The best letters in his experience have always been short: a couple of words about where the person worked, a result, and the line "if you'd like to discuss in more detail, I'll be happy to talk at an interview."
"In my experience, the longer the cover letter, the more fluff it has."
The formula for an effective application is a brief message of 2–3 sentences: "Hello, I saw your job posting. I'm so-and-so, I have such-and-such experience, I worked on such-and-such. Here's my CV, I'll be happy to talk."
"I used to think it was strange to even spell such things out, but only until my first job post. Some people don't even say hello in their message, they just send a bare CV without any text. You get something like that and think, 'Guys, why? This person has 15 years of work experience and behaves like this…' After the flood of messages I wrote a guide to applying on LinkedIn, and its first point is 'say hello.'"
Yauheni Aziomka, tech-stream program manager at BrainRocket
Résumé
In a résumé, Yauheni looks first of all at the technologies of the projects the candidate worked with. Whether the candidate can later explain at the interview what their teams did and why they chose that particular database or framework.
Yauheni looks at achievements in a CV with a degree of skepticism: according to him, you can write anything, but verifying it is hard. So he likes to discuss the results from the résumé at the interview, especially numbers: how the candidate calculated them, with what formulas, and so on.
"Most often, phrases like 'improved ROI by 30%' are an unverifiable story. But they're a good hook for a conversation."
Red flags in a CV
Large volume (several pages)
For Yauheni this is a sign of weak motivation: the candidate didn't even try to highlight what matters for the role and just sent a generic, one-size-fits-all CV.
A 100% match with the job posting
In Yauheni's view, a résumé generated by a neural network that uses literally every word from the job posting looks forced and silly. And it doesn't show the candidate in the best light, since they didn't even bother to edit it.
"When I see a CV that matches the job posting word for word, I feel awkward, even a little ashamed reading it."
The interview with Yauheni
Yauheni determines a candidate's grade based on the results of the interview: he needs both middles and seniors on his team.
Yauheni's criteria for assessing candidates at the interview
- Technical knowledge
- Understanding of the technology stack, technical breadth, speaking the same language as the team
- Working in a changing environment
- Adaptability, the ability to reprioritize, working under uncertainty
- Structuring
- Working with knowledge bases, maintaining work regulations. A systematic approach to storing and presenting information
- Planning
- The ability to build a roadmap and manage a backlog. Experience with tactical (sprints) and strategic (quarters/year) planning. Task decomposition
- Metrics
- Metrics (lead time, cycle time, TTM, etc.). How do we approach evaluating work?
- Working with the team
- Hiring, team building, developing employees, resolving conflicts
- Independence/proactivity
- Willingness to solve problems, propose changes, implement changes
- Do I want to work with this person?
- Thoughts, feelings, impressions, gut feeling
Red flags at the interview
Big words with no specifics
The main red flag for Yauheni is abstract stories about agile transformations and "the company's happy future."
"I have an assessment metric for this: 'hot-air guy.' If the whole answer is some huge abstract flourishes, then the candidate is either a complete junior or everything is very bad. I keep files where I note important things during interviews. At moments like that I just write 'air capsules' and end the interview somewhere around the thirtieth minute."
"We" instead of "I"
When a candidate talks about what their team did, but you can't tell from the story what they did themselves.
"There are ultra-self-organized teams that, combined with a strong lead, practically don't need a project manager at all. Would leading such a project be an achievement, even if the team's results are indisputable? Hardly."
Skills claimed in the CV don't match reality
If a candidate lists an ambitious skill in their CV but can't back it up in practice, that's a big red flag. Yauheni always asks questions about the candidate's technical skills to understand whether the person is really good at what they write about.
"I've seen this more than once: candidates list some ambitious things as skills, like 'proficient in MySQL,' and when you ask at the interview how to write a join, the person gets lost. It gets awkward."
Green flags at the interview
Sensible clarifying questions
The highest level is to show an understanding of the work context with your question.
"For example, one candidate asked me how we deploy: on a schedule, in 'trains,' or when ready, and how we roll out: to everyone at once or as a canary (to a small share of users first). From that one question it's clear that you can talk about CI/CD with this candidate, because a project manager in a tech stream must understand how exactly their teams ship code."
Examples from their own practice
Yauheni always finds real experience more interesting to discuss than abstractions from cases.
"It's not required, but if a candidate has dealt in practice with situations similar to what we're discussing in a case, let them tell us! That gives the conversation substance."
Experience automating work with AI
AI takes on a huge amount of routine, so Yauheni always asks applicants how they use it.
"Ideally I want to hear how a candidate connected Claude Code to repositories and hooked it up to Jira, Confluence, Slack. Maybe built a couple of their own pet projects.
As managers we do an insane amount by hand! Creating 50 hypothetical tickets from a description in Slack is already a very substantial amount of time. Naturally, you can't sacrifice security, you need to spell out clear restrictions, but if a candidate doesn't use AI at all, then for me that's, if not a red flag yet, then already a pink one."
An honest "I don't know"
If Yauheni sees a candidate start to bluff when answering about technologies, he will definitely ask clarifying questions. But he considers honesty and the ability to calmly admit a lack of some experience (as well as to talk about one's failures) a good quality.
"If a candidate honestly says they haven't worked with something, I'll make a note: 'needs to catch up.' That's not an automatic rejection. But lying is definitely a red flag."
Cases at the interview
For Yauheni, a case is first of all a reason to talk with the candidate, since there's no perfectly correct answer to a case question. Yauheni looks at how the applicant thinks: whether they dig into the context, whether they ask questions and what decisions they make.
Examples of cases from Yauheni Aziomka
Case 1
It's December 20, we're launching an important winter promo and expect significantly more users to come to our product (and, accordingly, bring us money). Your team developed the functionality for this promo, and you've gone live in different regions.
You tested, deployed, everything's fine. And a few hours later the support team sounds the alarm: registrations aren't working in Italy, and there are suspicions it's because of this very Winter Promo. What will you do?
How Yauheni evaluates the answer
According to Yauheni, a good move is to first find out how important the region is and compare the damage with the benefit of the promo. Then you can think it through: will a rollback bring more benefit or more financial damage? If the effect is −10x from registrations being impossible in one region versus +100x from the rest, then you can probably fix it without a rollback. But if there are serious reputational or regulatory risks, it makes sense to roll back everywhere, fix it and then release again.
"Cases are a field for the candidate's creativity and a chance to show their knowledge. For example, when answering the story above, someone once asked me: 'How do you even release on the 20th, don't you have a code freeze?' That's a very good question, and it helped me assess how deeply the person was immersed in the context."
Yauheni Aziomka, tech-stream program manager at BrainRocket
Case 2
We're doing quarterly planning. The second quarter is ending, and we've more or less planned the third. You've even managed to decompose some things and have a rough idea of what to do.
And suddenly, in the first week of the new quarter, three stakeholders from different areas come to you, each bringing a big task, at least a month of work: "Here's the thing, this needs to be done." Your decision?
How Yauheni evaluates the answer
First Yauheni does a "sanity check": whether the candidate will flatly refuse the stakeholders and whether they will make the decision alone (a candidate's independence in decision-making is good, but a PM must understand where the boundary of their authority lies). Beyond that, he expects the project manager to gather the facts (business value, why the task was brought to this particular stream), discuss them with the stakeholders and drive the decision that's made. Calling three VPs onto one call is a bad idea: in his experience such calls never end well.
The offer and probation period
The last stage of selection for Yauheni's team is a mandatory meeting with the HRBP. He tries not to attend it himself, so that the candidate is assessed by people with different perspectives. If he has doubts about something after his own interview, he asks someone from his team to go.
The probation period at Yauheni's company is long: 6 months. Among other things, this approach makes it possible to correct a potential mistake in the candidate's grade.
"Over the first months it becomes completely clear who's who. If we hired someone as a middle and a full-fledged queen showed up on my team, they'll get what they deserve: it matters to us that the person isn't bored. And if my senior isn't a senior, there will be an individual performance improvement plan or we'll part ways."
Yauheni Aziomka, tech-stream program manager at BrainRocket
Negotiating at the offer stage, in Yauheni's view, is possible and necessary. If a candidate can argue for their request politely and clearly, then even if the company has a tight salary range right now, a compromise can almost always be found. For example, Yauheni has made offers below the compensation the candidate asked for, but then during the probation period they reached an amount that suited everyone.
"What you shouldn't do is get defensive right away if you're offered a salary that's not what you expected. The offer amount is a reason for a conversation."
This is the first piece in the "Hiring principles" series, in which hiring managers talk about how they select people for their teams.
Adapted from the original article in Russian on newhr.org. Read the Russian version.