03.06.2025
Ekaterina Dimova brings over 15 years of HR experience across various industries, including hospitality, retail, consulting, and technology. For the past six years, she’s been the architect of TINQIN’s people strategy. With a focus on scaling culture alongside headcount, she’s helped transform TINQIN into one of the fastest-growing tech companies in Bulgaria.
While the company racks up awards for innovation and rapid growth, Ekaterina keeps her focus clear: build a high-performance culture. She’s restructured HR from the ground up, led onboarding transformations that feel more human than process, and championed digital tools that actually reduce friction. She has contributed to every major talent initiative: from scaling teams to helping secure the Best Employer 2024 award. She is talking to Vagabond Magazine.
When you’re scaling at warp speed, duct-taping old systems just won’t cut it. We knew early on that HR couldn’t just “stretch” to meet new demands, so we re-architected our approach before the real hiring wave hit.
We focused on three key pillars:
This structure let us scale fast without burning out team leads or drowning in admin tickets. We call it scaling with spine.
We wanted onboarding to feel curated, not corporate. Every new joiner meets with HR and their team lead regularly during the ramp-up period. These check-ins are short, personal, and focused on integration, not box-ticking.
Yes, we have playbooks. But the real power comes from making people feel seen, heard, and connected from week one.
Of course we track KPIs. But dashboards don’t build culture. That’s why we doubled down on qualitative feedback loops, role clarity sessions, and frequent alignment check-ins.
The big win? We were recognized as Best Employer 2024 based on Kincentric’s methodology. We not only hit industry benchmarks, we surpassed them – and it was all driven by employee sentiment, not just numbers on a spreadsheet.
No contest – employee referrals. Over 30% of our hires came through internal networks, including me! Referrals aren’t just about filling roles faster. They build instant trust, flatten onboarding, and hardwire culture into the hiring pipeline.
We didn’t leave this to chance. HR built a structured referral program with clear incentives and an always-on communication plan that made it feel rewarding, not transactional.
We didn’t plan it for the award, but we’re proud of what it turned into. The event brought together 400+ colleagues across a dozen activities – dragon boat races, glass art, collaborative challenges – all chosen to trigger teamwork, not just photo ops.
The result? Over 90% of our remote workforce showed up in person. That alone is a win. But what really mattered was the aftermath: 87% of attendees reported stronger motivation to collaborate cross-team. That kind of engagement can’t be forced – it has to be designed.
Hands down: the intersection of HR and AI. Every member of our HR team now uses generative tools for content, decision support, and process streamlining. But what’s even cooler? We’re co-developing AI products with our engineers.
About 150 of our colleagues are working on a digital trust platform, and we’re their first test users. We help refine features like secure contract signing, document verification, and intelligent document handling.
Absolutely. Insurance and HR share one big pain point: document flow. Whether it’s compliance-heavy claims or employment contracts, speed and trust matter.
Our AI-powered trust layer helps us handle sensitive documents (verify > sign > store) with less back-and-forth. We’ve cut our administrative workload by over 30%. That means more bandwidth for real conversations, not chasing paperwork.
Scale up with people. Scale out with technology.
This belief is at the heart of our people strategy. Before introducing more technology, we build strong teams with a shared purpose. Once this foundation is in place, we can bring in technology to scale it out.
We prioritize technologies that increase efficiency or create new growth opportunities. If a new functionality builds trust or removes friction, we go for it. If it does not, we are not afraid to push back on the 20+ product managers working on our trust apps.
In this way, HR becomes an even better partner in innovation and a true driving force for growth. By always centering on our people, we guarantee that scaling out doesn’t mean growing apart.
TINQIN is a dynamic, fast-scaling software development company building digital solutions for the insurance industry. Now part of the Be Ys Group, a major Insuretech player in digital trust and identity, TINQIN combines technical depth with a sharp focus on people. With a team of over 530 IT professionals based in Sofia, Varna, and remotely across Bulgaria, the company invests in top tech talent. The HR strategy is built around empowering engineers, fostering cross-team collaboration, and designing a culture that scales with both technology and trust. In short, TINQIN puts people at the center of its growth model.
