SumUp employer brand: applicant experience
This is a pilot article of a series in which I will be looking into employer branding of different companies. A brief company overview is followed by a description of my experience as a potential candidate on the company’s career page. Your feedback will help to refine the concept.
Whether you’re actively job hunting, benchmarking employer brands, or improving your company’s career page, this analysis of SumUp provides actionable insights from one of Europe’s fastest-growing fintechs.
Key findings:
- Strong authentic content with comprehensive hiring process documentation
- Technical issues with search functionality and mobile experience
- Outdated content on some channels like Medium and in the Handbook
- Limited transparency around compensation and remote work policies
- Overall positive impression, supported by €1B revenue and global growth
The company’s fintech success makes it an attractive employer, despite areas needing refinement. Here are the details.
Basic company information
(data collected: 21.01.2025)
| Founded | 2012, Berlin |
| Industry | Financial Technology |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom |
| Company Type | Private |
| CEO | Daniel Klein |
Financial & Funding
| Revenue (2023) | €1B |
| Latest Funding | €1.5B in Debt Financing (May 1, 2024) |
| Total Funding | $4B |
Workforce
| Number of Employees | 3000+ (career page) |
Digital Presence
| Monthly Website Visits | 6.564M, Dec 2024, -6.93% (SimilarWeb) |
| Career Page Performance | 45/100 mobile, 51/100 desktop |
| Career Page Accessibility | 87/100 mobile, 83/100 desktop |
Social Media
| 146k followers | |
| 71.4k followers | |
| TikTok | n/a |
Content & Updates
| Career/Engineering Blog Posts (6 months) | impossible to determine (no dates besides og:updated in the source code), engineering blog on Medium (0) |
| Press Releases (6 months) | 3 |
Apps & Reviews
| Apple App Store | 4.5/5 (2,834 reviews) |
| Google Play Store | 4.6/5 (118k reviews) |
Customer Satisfaction
| Trustpilot | 4.1/5 (24,054 reviews) |
| Google Reviews | 2.9/5 (498 reviews) for SumUp Services GmbH |
First impression of the career page
We see a nice video, showing diverse teams working, and a button for open roles if you want to dive in immediately. This is followed by some classics: mission, vision and purpose.
They also mention benefits but without details.
They list three values: Founder’s Mentality, Team First, We Care. Ok.
The final call to action is a bit… well, the old-fashioned “Want to become SumUpper?”. There is no mention of becoming a part of a family, which I find good.
There are plenty of subpages to explore and a lot of channels - from Medium to YouTube. A lot of content.
The vibe I got was: “We help the little guy, the merchant down the road,” which is something I can regularly observe paying by card in Berlin.
Digital experience and access
We can dive into the jobs immediately, but the header photo with a title on the job page is distracting. A valid design choice, but I would prefer to immediately see the jobs.
There is no filtering based on my current location, so I see all their roles.
Search initially (!) works really fast and well. All the required filters are available. A click takes me to the job, but if I go “back”, I again first see the header image and the title, instead of the job list directly.
It looks like they use Greenhouse, a proven applicant tracking system, which means a good application experience. A few data points and you are done. Your salary expectation is optional. Fields also differ depending on the position (e.g. for a designer a website/portfolio is mandatory).
They do not offer job alerts.
Mobile experience is unfortunately underwhelming: for example, when I use search, I need to scroll down to see the results.
Unfortunately, my usual CMD+click option doesn’t work on the page, so I always need to right-click and “open link in new window”. This is annoying.
The search functionality needs another look from the developers. Sometimes it stopped working completely, for example, showing these results for “Germany”:
Content authenticity and transparency
We are greeted with one employee story on the landing page (Margarita, Engineering Manager). She exists, I checked on Linkedin. There are a couple of more statements on other subpages (for example, Derek from HR). He also exists.
There is really a lot of material to read: you can learn about the company’s history, its DEI initiatives and its sustainability program.
Each location has a detailed page. On the Berlin page we see more details on the benefits (but only vacation days with a clear number) and even some photos of the office. I can access prefiltered positions from the location page (#anchor to the bottom), which is a nice touch. But since I searched “test” for the purpose of this article a few minutes ago, I see one QA position. (i.e. ?search=test is really persistently following me around!)
At the bottom of the page, we find “Featured roles”, but it is the same pre-filtered embed, so no positions are Featured in the literal sense.
They also published a SumUp Handbook (with an interesting URL: /wtf-handbook/), which “is a growing collection of articles written by a variety of SumUppers that describe how we work.” That is a nice (and risky?) idea, but I am missing authors and dates. Unfortunately, their Tech Radar seems to have been last updated in 2022.
Value proposition - why should I join?
They mostly go straight to the point and make me feel I want to try and join them. So the copy is doing it’s work.
I initially liked the simplicity of their values at the main page, but they also break them down more (Culture page), which is maybe a step too far in the direction of Amazon’s leadership principles?
They explain the hiring process in detail, but I am missing the career progression. The uniqueness of their offer for me is that they are one of the largest fintechs in the city/country.
The main pitch for joining is okay, but nothing to write home about:
True, money should not be the main motivator, but there is no sign of salary ranges and career (and salary) progression. Benefits are not described in detail.
Considering some good metrics on the business side (growth in card payments, good reviews, revenue growth, profitability, strategy), they could leverage that more.
On to job descriptions…
Unfortunately, when I wanted to put my “test” result from above to a good use, the Software Test Engineer - Hardware Tribe Role was not available anymore.
I opened three different job descriptions for analysis:
- Data Analyst - Online Payments (7757239002)
- Data Engineering Manager (Streaming) (7556681002)
- Payroll Partner (German Market) (7771191002)
There are tiny formatting consistency improvement potentials (for example, not all start with About the team; “great” vs “excellent” fit for the position; different footers). But only people writing an article like this one would notice.
The team context is the best for the Engineering Manager position, providing a lot of details:
The required experience and skillset are well described and seem realistic for all the positions.
The “Why you should join”-part expands on the benefits offered on the landing page, again, being the best for the Engineering Manager & Payroll Partner with a 2k learning budget, and 30 days sabbatical. These two details are somehow missing for the Data Analyst role. “Numerous other benefits” also seems a bit out of place because it vaguely implies more is there but probably is not?
Hybrid/remote is not mentioned, but the future Payroll Partner needs to be on-site. (Or maybe “office-first” in “Why you should join?” is somehow explaining it? Unclear.)
In all three cases they encourage us to apply even if we aren not a total fit. There are no descriptions of daily work, onboarding or what being successful in the position looks like. It would be great to add links back to the hiring process material.
All in all, job description classics without surprises.
Verdict: positives and what could be done differently
SumUp invested a lot of effort into their career pages and it shows. It feels authentic and not too polished. If you were to apply, you could prepare yourself for the interviews well just by browsing the career pages.
Job descriptions feel solid, as expected. As a candidate, I would go for SumUp, but at this point, a great job description would have a bigger chance to convince me that I am looking at my dream job compared to the general career page.
The main room for improvement would be to review all content and prune it. It is great to show ambition with a lot of content channels, but rarely updated pages (for example Medium and the Handbook) are not a very good look.
The end result now feels like there are a lot of former topic champions who left or stopped driving the topics forward. But it is an easy fix because removing is always easier than adding.
I would also suggest having another look into the search functionality, mobile experience and finding a solution to have ATS and career page synced so that applicants are not faced with “not available anymore” errors.
The business seems promising and a quick win would be to leverage that more. Work-from-home/Hybrid/Office expectations could be communicated clearer.
But all in all: if you are looking for a job, go for it.
(Remember, your feedback will help to refine the article concept!)
