Jeremie Cordes

Why this persona fits the audience

He is the People Ops lead at a 42-person Berlin robotics startup, where he handles hiring coordination alongside onboarding. For open roles, he collects resume packets, runs short phone screens, and keeps notes in shared documents.

• Age: 32
• Location: Berlin, Germany
• Occupation: People Ops Lead, robotics startup
• Income: €68k
• Education: MSc in Industrial Engineering
• Company size: 42
• Years in role: 1.5

“I didn't sign up to be a hiring traffic cop. I want to build systems, not clean up other people's messes.”

Jeremie Cordes grew up in Bremen among engineers and academics, which instilled both his reverence for systems and his intolerance for vague instructions. His MSc in Industrial Engineering at TU Dresden sharpened his functional mindset, but his first job at an automotive parts manufacturer taught him that even well-designed processes fail among people who don't care. At 29, he joined Berlin's robotics scene as an industrial designer before pivoting to People Ops—a career shift he now privately defines as 'the difference between designing systems and wrangling the humans who ignore them.' For 18 months he's been the sole People Ops lead at a robotics startup building humanoid industrial robots. His days are a mix of coordinating hiring (currently 12 open roles) and onboarding (the company doubles every 6 months), plus the Sisyphean task of getting engineers to document anything. His intellectual rigor clashes daily with startup chaos: he cringes when candidates say 'we don't have that here yet' after describing their company's hiring process. His personal Airtable base is starting to rival the startup's internal tools in complexity—his latest addition was a custom script to auto-categorize interview notes. Jeremie's salary is decent but his real currency is time, which he trades for stability. He's deeply conflicted about his role: he believes in the company's vision but despises the inefficiency he's stuck managing. His apartment has no visible clutter because its lack of space forces everything to have a place—and yet his work feels like a puzzle barrel without walls. Recently, he've come to resent the term 'People Ops'—it feels like management by anagram. What he really wants is the authority to enforce process, but the team's culture rewards individual heroes, not system builders. His current project is a hiring scorecard that engineers might actually use—his third attempt—built on the principle that 'if it's not obvious, people won't do it.'

Background & daily life

A day in their life

Jeremie's weekday starts at 6:15am with an alarm set to 'Cimbasso in Blue' from his preferred modern classical playlist. He showers cold, packs a lunch of locally sourced cheese and rye (in reusable containers he washes obsessively), then commutes via a fixed cycling route through Tempelhofer Feld—where he mentally rehearses the day's tough conversations. By 8:30am he's in their shared Kreuzberg office, first scouring emails for hiring updates, then batched-blocking his calendar to prevent 'walk-in' meetings. Around 10am he conducts screening calls (often with engineers hovering nearby making 'that candidate's glasses are probably really thick' jokes). Lunch is a hurried standing affair at his desk, reviewing onboarding checklists. Afternoons are spent wrestling with candidate notes in shared docs, trying to enforce consistency—'Please label your feedback with the category it addresses'—while engineers past his desk argue about robotics papers. By 5:30pm he's exhausted but might bike to a Makerspace to work on a failed but educational 3D-printing project for half an hour before collapsing. If the hiring pipeline is especially volatile, he spends evenings tweaking his personal Airtable base, which is starting to resemble a hiring system in its own right.

Lifestyle

Jeremie lives in a compact, hyper-organized apartment with a wall-mounted folding bike and a 3D printer he bought on impulse. His most consistent routine is a 7:30am cold shower followed by a 20km bike commute to Kreuzberg, where he drinks black coffee at the same café while reviewing candidate notes on an iPad. Weekends vanish into cycling races or trying to assemble IKEA furniture designed for people with smaller hands. He budgets meticulously but splurges on ergonomic office gear, which his landlord now eye-rolls about seeing in the hallway. Social life revolves around two tight-knit groups: ex-classmates from TU Dresden and fellow mechanical hobbyists at a Makerspace. Healthwise, he's durable but neglects sleep due to midnight spreadsheet tweaks. Money habits are frugal but he's willing to pay for tools that save time—though he hasn't found many that actually do.

Work life

As the sole People Ops lead, Jeremie's days oscillate between hiring coordination and firefighting. He spends mornings triaging candidate emails, afternoons conducting phone screens, and evenings updating shared Google Docs that the engineering team half-reviews. The hiring process is chaotic: resumes come in unformatted PDFs, phone screens get scheduled in Notion, and candidate notes live in a shared Notion database that two engineers and three recruiters edit simultaneously. His biggest pain point is the lack of a system that forces structured hiring data entry—Engineering insists on flexibility, HR wants templates, and Jeremie just wants something he can debug. He's tried creating his own templates but they get ignored. The team is talented but gives 'noise' during interviews, requiring Jeremie to mediate between abstract visionaries and detail-oriented operations. He's constructing a hiring scorecard from scratch—his third attempt—but keeps getting sidetracked by urgent onboarding tasks.

Relationships

Jeremie is closest to two people: his university roommate now in Munich and a Danish colleague from his first job. Both serve as sounding boards for his professional frustrations. His mother, a retired languages professor in Bremen, calls weekly but mostly talks about her gardening. He's friendly with coworkers but keeps work relationships professional—his Makerspace friends understand him better. His mentor, a former People Ops leader at an automotive firm, often texts him brutal-but-accurate advice like 'If you wait for engineers to use your system, you'll be waiting forever.' He respects colleagues who value process but gets visibly frustrated when they dismiss documentation as 'overhead.'

How they decide

Methodical but time-sensitive. Researches exhaustively but defaults to action when overwhelmed. Prefers tools that promise interoperability (he's wary of siloed systems) and values vendors who respect his technical literacy. Hates being sold to but responds to clear engineering explanations. Makes major decisions in consultation with his Copenhagen contact, who has a knack for cutting through his overanalysis.

How they sound

Speaks in clipped, precise German with functional English for work. Uses rhetorical questions ('Why wouldn't we just use a standard rubric?') when frustrated. Avoids corporate jargon (hates 'disrupt' and 'synergy') and has an express train of thought that occasionally derails into technical tangents. Pauses before answering questions about tools, as if mentally mapping his response to an information architecture. Uses sarcasm as a stress valve ('Our hiring process is basically a Dungeons & Dragons campaign where everyone wants to play the DM').