PIN-UP: "Professional growth and development of the holding company’s specialists is one of the key tasks of the HR team"

In an industry where growth often outpaces structure, PIN-UP Global is working to balance both, and fast. Between 2022 and 2024, the international iGaming holding has expanded its team by 355%, closing 2024 with over 4,000 specialists across multiple markets. 

In this interview with Yogonet Gaming News, Oksana Izmailova, Chief Human Resources Officer at PIN-UP Global, offers a detailed look at how the company’s HR function has evolved into a growth engine, from automating hiring and onboarding to grooming in-house talent through targeted mentorship and internal internships.

Izmailova shares how process clarity, digital tools, and a culture of continuous learning have allowed PIN-UP to meet rising demand while remaining agile. As the company looks ahead to 2025, she also offers a glimpse into what’s next on the roadmap for one of the industry’s fastest-scaling workforces.

PIN-UP Global keeps showing rapid growth. From 2022 to 2024 your growth rate is 355%. Today, your global holding company brings together over 4,000 specialists. What allows you to recruit and hire new people so quickly?

Indeed, PIN-UP is growing extremely rapidly. In 2024 alone, the number of specialists increased by 1,500 — reaching a global total of 4,000 by year’s end. Naturally, such growth, which is 58%, is a challenge for the HR team. We realise that growing and scaling is one of the main functions of HR.

In a short time, we select specialists, conduct onboarding, and adapt processes and approaches. Moreover, of course, we work hard on the growth and development of specialists within the holding company.

In order to grow so rapidly without losing quality, completely all processes must be transparent, business-oriented and clear, and their implementation must not take a lot of time. And of course, we work on automation on a daily basis.

Could you give an example of one of the processes to make it clearer to our readers how it works in PIN-UP Holding?

Let’s take performance review as an example — it is an evaluation of an specialist’s work, which can be conducted every six months or a year. In our holding company, the performance review is a comprehensive process. Let me explain what I mean.

It consists of an evaluation of results for the previous period, an assessment of soft skills, and an assessment of management skills, if the specialist holds a managerial position. Each block is analysed according to the 360 principle: the assessment is given by the specialist himself, his manager, colleagues and subordinates. 

After completing the performance review, the specialist is given new business tasks, goals for developing professional, managerial, and soft skills. Everything is recorded in writing in the specialist’s profile, which can be accessed at any time in the personal account on our corporate platform.

The entire performance review process is focused on eliminating blockers that prevent the specialist from further professional growth and improving the necessary results.  Accordingly, as you can see, the performance review process is very detailed, highly objective, and easy to perform. It is automated, clear to every participant, and business-oriented.

Answering the first question, you mentioned that the holding invests a lot of resources in the growth and development of specialists. Earlier, I read in an interview that you have your own training programmes. What other opportunities do specialists have for growth?

Indeed, the professional growth and development of the holding company’s specialists is one of the key tasks of the HR team. About 90% of the necessary training is provided using internal resources. At PIN-UP we develop a culture of continuous learning. We have launched and are developing our own LMS where we produce training courses in four languages.

Also, we have an internship system. The first type of internship that PIN-UP Global offers is Swipe and Work. It was originally designed and implemented for the contact centre. This division employs many specialists who would like to try themselves in new functions.

They are mostly young, ambitious, know our product and our customers very well. This is how the Swipe and Work project came into being, which was later scaled to the entire holding and allows a specialist to try his or her hand at a different function for one working day. 

For example, someone works with answers in chat rooms. But he/she wants to try his/her hand in the quality control department. The person submits an application, works there for one day accompanied by a colleague. After that, the specialist decides whether he/she would like to try to move to this department or not.

Moreover, if a person is interested in how his/her supervisor works and whether he/she could cope with such a function, he/she can also apply for it. This type of internship in the holding company is in high demand. It is an excellent tool for retaining specialists and internal growth. People are less likely to burn out, and we are building up a talent pool.

You said that Swipe and Work is one type of internship. Am I right in understanding that there are other options?

Yes. The second type of internship is longer. It starts when a person has already made a definite decision to transfer to another department. For example, a specialist has worked in sales, but wants to try his/her hand at recruiting. Internship lasts from 1 to 3 months. During this period a person combines the current functionality with the new one and gradually gets trained in the profession. At the end of the internship, if everything went well, he/she moves on to the new function. 

For such long-term internships there should be a quality onboarding process, as well as a mentoring system. This is something we as an HR team are also constantly working on. On the one hand we have automated onboarding, and on the other hand we are building a mentoring school.

We train people how to work with interns and train them from junior to middle level. And this function is especially important for teams where it is difficult to find specialists. For example, it is very difficult for us to find go-developers on the market. There are very few specialists with such technical competences.

And right now, we are developing mentoring programmes that will help us to create such professionals on our own. Also, for example, there are a few smm specialists on the market who understand our iGaming field. Accordingly, we have introduced an internal school where we train smm specialists to the required level. The situation is similar in the anti-fraud team, which actively recruits people from the contact centre and trains them for the required tasks.

At the beginning of the interview, you also said that process automation is very important for this growth. Tell us more about how HR processes are being automated at PIN-UP Global?

We are actively implementing new automation and artificial intelligence tools to speed up our sourcing and selection processes. For example, we automated the onboarding process on the basis of PIN-UP TEAM, which allowed us to reduce the amount of manual labour, optimise business processes and improve the efficiency of integrating new specialists. And we also launched HR ChatBot, which is an assistant that instantly answers frequently asked questions from specialists at any time.

We have a really cool department that deals with automation. For example, they constantly do process audits and see what can be improved. They describe each process and turn it into a policy. The information then goes to our internal corporate platform, where every specialist, using a chatbot, can get the data they need. But that’s one example. 

That sounds very good. Is there already a plan for 2025? How are you going to surprise the market?

Of course there is. But I won’t tell you about it. I will only say that we will continue to grow and scale. We will launch new training courses, a library and a knowledge sharing function. We will adapt our chatbot to be able to give answers on more personalised information. And much more, which I will be able to tell you about already after the implementation. So onwards and upwards to new heights.