Audit before the first interview: how we chose a partner in Kyrgyzstan for a retail chain

01 / A waiting room in Bishkek

Eleven people on chairs and a board of vacancies

At 8:50 on a Tuesday, eleven people were already sitting in the waiting room of an agency on the first floor of an old building in central Bishkek. A woman held a folder of her son's documents on her lap. Two young men from Naryn had come in on the overnight minibus and were drinking tea from paper cups. On a whiteboard, vacancies were written up in marker, with cities and job titles.

Kemal, Head of Recruitment at WORKIN, did not walk over to the framed licence on the wall first. He went to the board. He was looking for one thing: whether any vacancy had a sum next to it that the candidate would have to pay. There was none. Meanwhile Azamat, our Worker Relations Manager for Kyrgyzstan, sat down among the people and started talking in Kyrgyz: how they had heard about the job, what they had been told so far, whether anyone had asked them for money.

We had no contract with this agency yet. We had come not to sign one but to find out whether we could. The supermarket chain we were looking for a partner for had never seen this waiting room. Yet what happens in rooms like this decides what expectations people will bring to its stores, and whether they will arrive carrying debts for their place.

02 / The request

New stores, waves all year and a question from the chain's lawyer

Two weeks before the trip to Bishkek, a supermarket chain from Kyiv came to us. It was opening four new stores over the year, and the first was due to open in two months. The HR director set out the task: shelf stackers and packers for the fresh food departments, eighteen people to begin with, then around twenty more in waves. The chain did not name a country and asked us to advise.

Olena, who runs client projects at WORKIN, laid the requirements against our criteria. Timing: waves every two or three months fit best with the visa-free route of four to seven weeks. Language: store managers speak Ukrainian and Russian, and in Kyrgyzstan Russian has the status of an official language and is spoken every day in city supermarkets. Experience: many people there have worked in Bishkek's supermarkets and in retail chains in neighbouring Kazakhstan. Reserve: the country supplies candidates not from one city but from several regions, which matters for a year of hiring. We proposed Kyrgyzstan with visa-free entry, and the chain agreed.

One question remained open. Our regular partner in Kyrgyzstan knows manufacturing trades well and was running a large recruitment for a plant during those months. A chain hiring throughout the year needed an agency that had already recruited for retail and had recruiters not only in Bishkek but also in the south of the country. Kemal decided to bring a new partner into the project.

At the second meeting the chain's lawyer joined the conversation. She explained that the chain is a well-known brand and that its suppliers and contractors all go through vetting. For recruitment abroad she wanted to see the same: who deals with the candidates, on what terms, and whether people pay for a place in her stores. We promised to show the results of the partner vetting before the first interview, and the chain agreed to wait two weeks for them. That time was not lost: Nataliia, our Head of Documents, was collecting the chain's documents for the permit applications in parallel.

Who was needed

Shelf stackers and packers for fresh food departments

How many

18 in the first wave, around 40 over the year

Why Kyrgyzstan

Visa-free route that suits waves, Russian language, retail experience, candidates from several regions

The chain's condition

Partner vetted before the first interview

03 / The shortlist

Three agencies and one licence that did not match the contract

Kemal drew up a shortlist of three licensed agencies: two were recommended by our partners in other countries, and we had spoken to the third before. We started with the paperwork, because it filters fastest. From each agency we requested a copy of its licence to place citizens in jobs abroad, registration documents, a list of offices and recruiters, a sample of the agency's contract with candidates and contacts of employers it had already worked with.

In each licence Azamat checked four things: the name of the legal entity, the period of validity, the office addresses and whether it was in force according to the authority that issued it. The name has to match the company that will sign the contract with WORKIN. The validity has to cover the whole year of recruitment. The addresses have to match the places candidates actually walk into. Separately, we screened the agencies, their directors and owners against sanctions lists.

The agency in Karakol held a licence, but it had been issued to another company owned by the same director, and he proposed signing through a third firm with no licence at all. The other agency in Bishkek held a valid licence, but its price list on its social media page included a candidate fee for processing the application form, and it had no intention of changing that for a single project. We thanked both and went no further. The third agency, with its head office in Bishkek and a branch in Osh, passed the paperwork check in full, and Kemal and Azamat went to see it.

04 / The visit

What we saw in the office where candidates come in

The agency's director, Gulnara, once taught English at a school and opened the agency nine years ago. She did not try to steer her visitors straight into her office, and she did not interrupt Azamat while he talked to people in the waiting room. That is a signal in itself: an agency with something to hide does not like a partner talking to candidates without it.

Azamat spoke to everyone in the waiting room within half an hour. Aizhan, twenty-six, had spent six years at a Bishkek supermarket on the till and on the shelves, and had come because a friend went abroad through this agency and came back without debts. The two young men from Naryn had found the vacancies through the agency's messenger channel. None of the eleven had paid the agency or heard that payment was expected. Two asked whether it was true that nothing would be charged for the paperwork, and Azamat told them that on WORKIN projects that is exactly how it works.

Then Kemal asked to see where candidate files were kept. The cabinet with application forms was locked, and there were no candidates' passports in the office: the agency copies them in front of the person and returns the original the same day. There are four recruiters in Bishkek and two in Osh, plus two regional coordinators working in the Issyk-Kul and Naryn regions under contract with the agency. We asked for those two to be added to the list of recruiters working on our project and for the same rules to apply to them as to staff.

The next day Azamat went to Osh while Kemal stayed in Bishkek to prepare the contract. The branch is smaller, one room with two desks, but the order is the same: vacancies with no sums for candidates, copies instead of originals, a log of visitors. Ermek, the recruiter there, showed how he records everyone who comes in: name, phone, how they heard, which vacancy. That log later became the basis of the funnel described below.

1. 01

   Waiting room

   Conversations with candidates without agency staff: how they heard, what they know about the terms, whether anyone asked for money.

2. 02

   Board and adverts

   Vacancies with cities and job titles, and no sums for candidates to pay.

3. 03

   Candidate documents

   Forms in a locked cabinet, no passports retained, copies made in front of the person.

4. 04

   Recruiters

   Staff in Bishkek and Osh, regional coordinators under contract, all on one list.

05 / Trial interviews

Sixteen conversations in which we listened to the recruiter, not the candidate

An office shows how an agency looks. A trial interview shows how it works. We asked the agency's recruiters to hold ten interviews with real candidates for the chain's vacancies, following our script. Azamat sat in the room next to the recruiter, and Kemal watched a live feed from the next room so that his presence would not affect the conversation. They were assessing the recruiters, not the candidates.

Our interview script is the same for every country. The candidate shows their passport to the camera, and the recruiter checks the face against the photo and the details against the application form. Experience is asked about specifically: which shop, which department, what the person did in the morning when deliveries came in. The terms from the information sheet are explained honestly: position, pay from the contract, housing, term. Entry history for the last 180 days is checked straight away, because visa-free entry allows no more than 90 days within 180. And at the end everyone hears that nobody has the right to take money from them for a job.

The first round went well, but not perfectly. The recruiters checked passport and experience in all ten conversations and said the line about money to everyone. Yet in three conversations nobody mentioned the term of the employment contract, one recruiter simply assured the candidate that the housing was good instead of giving the address and the number of people per room, and entry history was asked of only six candidates. That evening Kemal went through every gap with the recruiters, and Azamat gave them our list of conditions for candidates so that everyone would say the same thing.

The second round of six interviews took place the next day, and every point of the script came up in every conversation. A candidate from near Osh was answering slowly in Russian, and the recruiter switched to Kyrgyz on her own without waiting for a prompt. For us that was the best sign of all: the recruiter had grasped not the form of the script but its purpose.

06 / The contract

Terms we put in writing before the first application

Kemal drafted the partner contract alongside the trial interviews so that it could be signed on the last day of the trip. The main rule comes first: on WORKIN projects candidates pay nothing for a job, not to the agency, not to its recruiters and not to its regional coordinators. This is a rule of WORKIN's contract with the partner, and a breach of any clause about money gives us grounds to terminate.

The second key decision concerns what the partner is paid for. Not for application forms, not for interviews and not for filing documents, but only for a person who has actually started work in Ukraine. That way it pays the agency to bring people who will genuinely travel and stay, rather than simply more people.

• candidates pay nothing for a job: no fees, commissions, application charges, deposits or loans for paperwork;
• the agency does not retain candidates' passports or other documents;
• before departure every candidate receives full information about the work, pay and housing and signs an acknowledgement;
• the agency is responsible for the authenticity of the documents it passes on;
• the partner is paid only for a person who has started work in Ukraine;
• every Monday the agency sends a funnel report in an agreed format;
• WORKIN has direct contact with every candidate, not only through the recruiter;
• regional coordinators work under the same rules and are on the list;
• if a worker leaves of their own accord within six months, the partner finds a replacement at no charge or refunds part of its fee.

The chain's lawyer received a partner file from us: a copy of the licence with the result of the validity check, the list of offices and recruiters, the trial interview record and the contract terms without the commercial part. What our own contract with a company looks like can be seen on the WORKIN contract page. The lawyer asked two follow-up questions about the regional coordinators and approved the start of recruitment.

07 / The funnel

A hundred and forty-six responses and twenty-four approved candidates

Before the audit Gulnara described her funnel in words: adverts, calls, interviews. We asked her to turn the words into numbers and track them weekly. Every stage has an owner and a recorded reason for drop-out, and the report arrives on Monday before lunch. It is not control for its own sake: the report shows how many people need to enter the funnel for eighteen approved candidates and a reserve to come out of it.

Candidates came from four sources: the agency's messenger channel, referrals from people the agency had already placed abroad, the regional coordinators, and former employees of Bishkek supermarkets who were looking for retail work themselves. Referrals produced only a quarter of the responses, but that source had the lowest drop-out at interview. In the second wave the agency deliberately asked people from the first wave to recommend friends.

Most people dropped out at the phone call: some had passports expiring before the end of the project, others did not want to share a flat with colleagues or were only looking for work in Kazakhstan. At the office interview, those with less than six months of retail experience dropped out. Only people the recruiter had already checked against the script reached the video interview with Azamat, so at that stage he talked not about passports but about working in a store and living in Ukraine. The chain's HR director watched the interview recordings and approved candidates as a group.

08 / The first wave

Eighteen people from information sheet to store

Each of the twenty-four approved candidates received an information sheet in Russian and Kyrgyz: the address of the store and the housing, the position and wage from the contract, the term, which documents to gather and Azamat's direct number. The sheets were signed over video, and before each signature Azamat spoke to the candidate alone, without the agency's recruiters. The question was always the same: had anyone asked for money for this place? All twenty-four said no.

Nataliia had gathered the chain's documents using our checklist during the audit, so the work permit applications went in as soon as the agency handed over the candidates' packs: copies of passport data pages with a certified translation into Ukrainian, photographs and draft employment contracts certified by the chain. The chain paid the permit fees from its own account. The law requires a decision within seven working days, and the permits for eighteen people were issued within that term.

The group entered Ukraine in the seventh week after the first meeting with the chain, in two groups of nine a day apart. Azamat met both at the border and took them to flats we had found near the first stores as part of living support. We had checked the housing documents for address registration and for temporary residence permit applications before arrival. The chain signed the employment contracts in the first few days, we filed the copies within the 10-day term, and the residence permit applications went in batches of six.

That completed our part of the first wave: training in the stores and assignment to departments are run by the chain. The six reserve candidates stayed in the agency's funnel with their documents ready and became the first candidates of the second wave. 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; finding a replacement is not charged again, while state fees, the migration partner's services, travel and living costs of the new worker are paid by the company. The partner's obligation to find replacements at no charge stands behind that guarantee on our side.

1. Week 1

   The chain's request, the choice of Kyrgyzstan, the lawyer's question about the partner.

2. Week 2

   Shortlist of three agencies, paperwork check, the chain's documents.

3. Week 3

   Office visits in Bishkek and Osh, two rounds of trial interviews, the contract.

4. Weeks 3-5

   First-wave funnel, weekly reports, candidate approval by the chain.

5. Weeks 5-6

   Information sheets, candidate packs, permits for 18 people.

6. Week 7

   Entry in two groups, housing, contracts, residence permit applications.

09 / Outcome

A partner who can be trusted with a year of hiring

Shortlist

Three agencies, two did not pass the paperwork check

Licence

Valid, issued to the same entity that signed the contract

Offices

Bishkek and Osh, talks with candidates without the agency

Trial interviews

16 in two rounds, every script point covered in round two

Contract

Candidates pay nothing, the partner is paid only when a worker starts

Funnel

146 responses, 24 approved, a report every Monday

First wave

18 people in week seven, 6 in reserve

A partner abroad is the first link in a chain we answer for to the company, so we vet it before the first interview rather than after the first complaint. The chain's second and third waves are going ahead with the same partner and the same weekly report. What we do when a partner breach does surface in the middle of recruitment is covered in the scenario about a uPVC window plant, and how we select people for customer-facing roles is in the scenario about language screening for a retail chain. The whole path from request to handover is described on the How it works page. More on the pages about workers for retail, packers and mass hiring.

10 / FAQ

Questions and answers