Five weeks to the peak: how we recruited thirty people in two Tajik cities at once

01 / Request

Red marker on a whiteboard: 16.11 and the number 30

At 9:10 on Monday Kemal and Olena were standing in the new hall of a fulfilment warehouse near Kyiv. The racks still smelled of fresh paint, some shelves still had their factory film on, and on the whiteboard by the entrance someone had written two numbers in red marker: 16.11 and 30. The warehouse's operations director tapped the board. Two large online retailers were moving their stock to the warehouse, the pre-Black Friday sales peak would start on 16 November, and by that date the warehouse needed thirty people: twenty order pickers and ten packers.

There were five weeks left until the date on the board. The director did not ask for CVs or lists. He asked for thirty people to be at the warehouse on 16 November with work permits, employment contracts and beds in a dormitory. The people were not needed for one peak only: the new clients were staying with the warehouse all year, so the contracts were planned for a year. A month of local hiring had brought the warehouse seven people, and its job adverts had been up for three weeks.

Olena, who runs projects with companies at WORKIN, gave the director the key point straight away: five weeks is the lower end of the visa-free route, and done step by step, in sequence, it cannot be met. Kemal, our Head of Recruitment, added the second: it can be met if selection, documents and filings run side by side rather than one after another. That same day the warehouse signed a contract with WORKIN, and HR began gathering the company's documents for filing using the checklist.

Who is needed

20 order pickers and 10 packers

Deadline

All thirty at the warehouse by 16 November, five weeks

Experience

Warehouse work, reading labels in Cyrillic

Contracts

For a year: the new clients stay after the peak

Housing

A 30-bed dormitory with documents for registration

02 / Choosing the country

Why Tajikistan, with five weeks for everything

The warehouse had no preference on the country, so we started not with a country but with the date. Five weeks rules out visa routes at once: via a D visa the journey takes eight to twelve weeks. That left the visa-free countries: Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkey. From there Kemal compared them on what mattered most in this project: how many approved candidates a partner could deliver in one week, not in a month.

We needed thirty main candidates and six more in reserve, thirty-six approved people in five working days. One partner in one city cannot run that many proper interviews in a week, so we needed two partners in two cities working at the same time. In Turkey candidates speak neither Ukrainian nor Russian, and the warehouse supervisors explain the work in exactly those languages. Our partners in Uzbekistan were just finishing a large recruitment for another project, and in Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan our partners' pools of warehouse workers were narrower at that moment.

In Tajikistan everything came together. We work there with two licensed partners: one in Dushanbe, the other in Khujand, in the north of the country, five hours' drive away across the mountains. Each has its own base of people who have worked in wholesale warehouses, markets and distribution centres at home and in Kazakhstan. In Khujand most candidates speak Russian confidently, in Dushanbe some do, and Sherzod, our Worker Relations Manager, explains in Tajik everything a person needs to understand before departure. Citizens of Tajikistan enter Ukraine without a visa. The warehouse agreed with our proposal the same day.

1. 01

   Deadline

   Five weeks: visa-free countries only, a four-to-seven-week route.

2. 02

   Volume

   36 approved candidates in a week: two partners in two cities at once.

3. 03

   Language

   Russian with the warehouse supervisors, Tajik for terms and documents.

4. 04

   Reserve

   Two partners' candidate bases, a reserve of about 20% of the group.

03 / Calendar

Thirty-five days laid out side by side, not in a queue

A standard visa-free project runs like a relay: first selection, then candidates' documents, then permit filings, then entry. Each stage waits for the previous one to finish, which is exactly how you arrive at the seven weeks at the upper end of the route. Kemal turned the relay into three parallel tracks. Interviews in two cities run at the same time. Every approved candidate goes to a notary for a passport translation that day or the next, without waiting for the rest of the group. And permit filings go in batches of ten as soon as a batch is complete.

We counted back from the date on the board. The last week before 16 November was kept as a margin. Before it we set three arrival dates, one for each group. Before those, three permit decisions, and for each we planned not on the usual term but on the maximum: the law gives the employment centre up to seven working days to decide on issuing a permit, and we planned tickets as if the decision would come on exactly the seventh day. Anything that came earlier became margin, not a reason to change tickets.

1. Day 1

   Request, contract, warehouse documents by checklist, draft employment contract template, search for a dormitory.

2. Day 2

   One candidate card and one information sheet for both partners, first interviews in Dushanbe and Khujand.

3. Days 2-5

   Parallel interviews, two video call slots a day with the warehouse manager, an evening funnel review.

4. Days 5, 8, 10

   Three batches of permit applications, ten people in each.

5. Days 12, 15, 19

   Permit decisions for each batch.

6. Days 18, 23, 26

   Three groups arrive, contracts on the next working day.

7. Day 30

   All thirty at the warehouse, six days before the date on the board.

04 / Two cities

Dushanbe and Khujand on the same morning: one card for two partners

At ten on Tuesday local time, eight in Kyiv, fourteen men were already sitting on a bench in the yard of our partner's office in Khujand, their passports in clear plastic sleeves. Nigora, the partner's recruiter, called them in one by one. In Dushanbe, five hours' drive away, the same was happening at the second partner's office. And in Kyiv Sherzod had two video call tabs open on his laptop, along with the table both partners had just received: one candidate card for everyone.

Two partners means two different selection habits, and in a week they would have produced two different groups. So on day one Kemal sent both the same card and the same order of steps. First the passport: valid for more than a year and no previous entry refusals. Then experience: where the person worked, for how long and what exactly they did. Then a short test: read twenty labels with product codes and names in Cyrillic and, from a list, find the right five boxes out of twenty. Then language: listen to three short explanations from Sherzod in Russian and retell them in their own words.

Those who passed the card got a video call with Sherzod. He spoke with each in Tajik for ten to fifteen minutes: about their experience, their family, why they were going and whether they understood this was a job for a year, not one season. Then he went through the terms in the information sheet: job title, pay from the draft contract, the dormitory address, which documents were needed and when departure would be. Under our contracts with partners, candidates pay nothing for placement, and Sherzod asked each person separately whether anyone had asked them for money.

The final word was the warehouse's. The warehouse manager had no time for thirty-six half-hour interviews, so we gave him two slots a day, at twelve and at three Kyiv time, and seven minutes per candidate already screened by the card and the conversation with Sherzod. What was left for him was the essential part: to see the person, hear how they answer and say yes or no. In four days he held forty-four such calls and approved thirty-six people.

05 / Funnel

Wednesday, 18:00: five approved in Dushanbe instead of nine

Every evening at six Kyiv time Kemal held a fifteen-minute call with both partners, Sherzod and Nataliia, our Head of Documents. They looked at one table: how many people came, how many passed the card, how many the warehouse approved and how many already had their passport translation. On Wednesday the table showed a gap. In two days Khujand had produced eleven approved candidates against a plan of nine; Dushanbe had produced five.

The reason emerged within a minute of talking to the Dushanbe partner. Of the twenty-two people who came in two days, nine had passports expiring within a year or still being issued, and several had worked on a market as sellers rather than in a warehouse. The card honestly screened them out at the first step, but interview days were being spent on people who could not travel within this timeframe.

Kemal made three decisions without waiting for Thursday. Before inviting anyone to interview, the Dushanbe partner now asked about passport validity by phone and requested a photo of the data page. The Khujand partner added an extra interview day on Friday in Istaravshan, an hour's drive away, where its base had people with warehouse experience. And the split changed: eighteen main candidates from the north and twelve from Dushanbe, with three in reserve in each city. The warehouse heard about these decisions the same evening, and nobody touched the date on the board.

By Friday evening the table was complete: thirty main candidates and six in reserve, each with a signed information sheet, twenty-eight already with a notarised translation of their passport pages. Among them was Sukhrob from Khujand, thirty-one, four years at a wholesale company's warehouse in Almaty, who found his five boxes faster than anyone at the test. And Umed from Dushanbe, thirty-five, who after working in a warehouse at a big market wanted a steady job for a year to pay for his daughter's college studies.

Reserve candidates had their passports translated just as promptly as the main ones. In a five-week project, a reserve without documents ready is not a reserve but a list of phone numbers.

06 / Batches

Three permit batches instead of one big one

The simplest thing would have been to wait for all thirty packages and file them on one day. But then the first ten, whose documents were ready by Thursday, would have waited for the slowest, and decisions on all thirty would have come on one day, with tickets and rooms to be sorted for everyone at once. So Nataliia filed in batches of ten as soon as each batch was complete.

Each work permit package had the same parts: the application on the prescribed form, copies of the passport data pages with a certified Ukrainian translation, a colour photo 3.5 x 4.5 cm, a draft employment contract certified by the warehouse and proof of payment. We collected the warehouse's filing documents once on day one, made the draft contract from a single template filled with data from the candidate card, and the warehouse's accounts paid the state fee for each batch on the day it was filed. No package was filed without a check: the name in Latin script and the passport number had to match character for character in the application, the translation and the draft contract.

The first batch went in on Friday, day five of the project: ten people from Khujand who were first through every step. The second went on Monday, day eight: six from Khujand and four from Dushanbe. The third was due on Tuesday, but that morning Farrukh, an approved candidate from Khujand, messaged Sherzod: his wife had gone into hospital to give birth early, and he could not leave now. His package had not yet been filed, so replacing him broke nothing. Sherzod called the first reserve, twenty-six-year-old Daler from Istaravshan, whose passport translation had been ready since Monday. The warehouse approved him on his card, Nataliia swapped the documents, and the third batch went in on Wednesday, day ten.

Farrukh stayed in the reserve for the next wave, and a week later he sent Sherzod a photo of his newborn daughter.

07 / Before departure

Tickets after the decision, not after the interview

We bought tickets only after the permit decision for a specific batch. The warehouse asked whether to buy them for everyone straight away to lock in the dates. But a ticket bought before the decision has to be changed for ten people if anything is delayed, while a ticket bought on the day of the decision simply works. For the first group the decision came on Friday, the fifth working day, and that same evening Sherzod sent the ten people their departure date.

Before each departure Sherzod held a video call with the group in Tajik. Everyone had signed the information sheet at interview; now they went through the journey together: by plane to a neighbouring country, then by bus across the land border, and a meeting in Kyiv. At the border the purpose of the trip is stated as it is: warehouse work under an issued permit. We described preparing a group for visa-free entry in detail in the scenario on a group from Tajikistan for a greenhouse complex, and here we followed the same procedure.

Meanwhile Olena was closing out the housing. We found and checked a 30-bed dormitory twenty minutes from the warehouse in the first week as part of living support: the contract with the owner, documents that allow address registration and residence permit applications, rooms for four. Rooms were assigned in advance by city, so that people from Khujand and Dushanbe lived with people from home, and every room had someone who speaks Russian confidently.

• job title, pay and term from the draft employment contract;
• the warehouse and dormitory addresses, room number and roommates;
• what is in the folder: passport, copy of the permit, the warehouse's invitation, proof of housing;
• the purpose of the trip at the border: work under an issued permit;
• Sherzod's phone number and who will meet them in Kyiv.

08 / Three arrivals

Thursday, Tuesday, Friday: three groups and thirty beds

The first group arrived on Thursday, day eighteen. Sherzod met them at the bus station and went with them to the dormitory, where Sukhrob was the first to find his room by the name plate on the door. The next day the warehouse signed employment contracts with the first ten, and the migration partner began booking them in to apply for temporary residence permits.

The second group arrived on Tuesday, day twenty-three, and the third on Friday, day twenty-six. Each arrival followed the same order: meeting, dormitory, employment contracts on the next working day, certified copies of the contracts filed by us within the 10-day term, then tax numbers, bank accounts and residence permit applications in groups. Address registration at the dormitory was handled by the migration partner as part of our migration support. Umed came with the third group, together with Daler, who had moved from the reserve into the group the day before the third batch was filed.

On Monday, day twenty-nine, the third group signed their contracts, and on Tuesday, day thirty, the last of the thirty started at the warehouse. There were six days left until the date on the board. Nobody wiped off the red writing, but next to it the operations director added in blue marker: 30 of 30. That is where our part ended: introducing people to the work and assigning them to sections is the warehouse's job, and we continue to manage the documents of all thirty.

09 / Summary

Thirty people in thirty days, with six days to spare

Selection

Two partners, Dushanbe and Khujand, one candidate card

Funnel

88 interviews, 36 approved, 30 main and 6 in reserve

Batches

Filed on days 5, 8 and 10, decisions on days 12, 15 and 19

Reserve

Daler instead of Farrukh before filing, no shift in the deadline

Arrival

Three groups on days 18, 23 and 26, all thirty at the warehouse on day 30

When the peak is five weeks away, speed comes not from rushing but from parallel work: two cities instead of one, batches instead of a queue, a reserve with documents ready and tickets planned from the longest decision term. That is how we build urgent recruitment for warehouses, and how a warehouse gets its people before the peak rather than in the middle of it. The WORKIN replacement guarantee lasts at least 6 months from the worker's first shift, provided the agreed working, pay and housing conditions are kept: recruitment of the replacement is not charged again. How to recruit groups in waves for several line launches is covered in the scenario on a Turkish crew for a precast concrete plant, and the worker's whole journey on How it works. More on the pages on mass hiring, workers for logistics, warehouse workers from abroad and packers.

10 / FAQ

Questions and answers