Mindset Map: Hostinger’s in-house tool giving us new lens on talent
Success in the workplace depends not only on hard skills and experience, but also on the combination of personal values, attitudes, motivation, and ways to adapt. Moreover, the same qualities and outlooks can have very different impacts depending on the company, role, and team. To help align each candidate’s and employee’s potential with their role and create the conditions for them to thrive, at Hostinger we use Mindset Map – an advanced internally built tool that supports personal growth and meaningful conversations around it. Here’s how it works and helps our people to succeed.
Mapping human potential
The idea of Mindset Map is simple. It’s a 174-question personality assessment that explores the traits that shape our performance, adaptability, and learning at work. The questions are designed to reveal how a person thinks, solves problems, and approaches challenges, while offering insights into their motivations and working style. Used both during recruitment and throughout an employee’s journey, it creates a shared starting point for reflection and career conversations.
As the name of the tool suggests, it is a way to better understand and map different mindsets to unlock the potential behind them. Ultimately, it is about putting the right talent in the right place, helping people succeed in roles where they can make the greatest impact, while contributing to the growth of the company as a whole.
“When we started developing Mindset Map, the goal was not to create another personality test or a tool for putting people into boxes. We wanted to better understand what makes people thrive at work – how they think, learn, adapt and grow. By developing this tool in-house, we could focus on the qualities and ways of working that are meaningful in our environment, while keeping the tool useful throughout a person’s journey at Hostinger – from recruitment to career development. For me, the biggest value of Mindset Map is the awareness it creates on both sides. It helps us better understand how people think and ask better questions. At the same time, it encourages both employees and candidates to look at themselves from a different perspective – to become more aware of their strengths, blind spots and how they can make the most of both in their everyday work.” says Justas Kupčinskas, People Culture & Research team lead at Hostinger.
That’s why Mindset Map is more than just a hiring tool. It provides a comprehensive way to identify mindset patterns, track their development over time, and connect these insights to help individuals find the paths for their self-realisation. In this way, the tool supports both hiring and long-term development – from the interview stage and onboarding to career development and transitions between roles within the organisation.
Different mindsets – different strengths
Importantly, there are no good or bad answers, and no high or low scores in the assessment. In other words, Mindset Map is not an exam that candidates need to pass to get hired, nor a test that determines their next step at Hostinger. Instead, it is one input into a broader picture, while hiring and career decisions continue to take into account skills, experience, values and the interview process as a whole. To eliminate bias, the results are processed by AI and are intended purely as a source of insight, not as a basis for making decisions.
Nor is Mindset Map a culture-fit assessment: after all the goal is not to bring together people who all think alike but to understand and value the differences they bring. At Hostinger, we certainly see diverse mindsets as an asset – different ways of approaching problems and challenges come with different strengths. Mindset Map helps us recognise, understand and make the most of them.
As Lauryna Vilutytė, Talent Aquisition Lead, explains: “Mindset Map gives us an additional perspective that we simply wouldn’t get from a CV or a traditional interview. It helps us understand how candidates approach challenges, what motivates them and which ways of working come naturally to them – but just as importantly, it gives candidates an opportunity to reflect on themselves and ask whether the role and environment feel right for them. I see it as a conversation starter rather than a verdict. It helps us create deeper dialogue with candidates and makes the recruitment process more transparent for both sides.”
Mutual benefit
Assessment tools have long been used by leading organisations to gain deeper insights into candidates and employees. But rather than relying on standardized personality tests or third-party solutions, we designed our custom assessment around the qualities, values, and ways of working that matter most in our company.
This means the insights Mindset Map provides are not just about personality in general, but about how individual abilities and preferences can translate into our specific working environment. By connecting personal characteristics with what we value as an organisation, the tool helps us have better dialogs with candidates and within teams and create more opportunities for growth.
The assessment also works in the other direction: it gives applicants a better sense of what it is like to work at Hostinger and the principles that we uphold. By comparing these values and ways of working with their own dispositions and motivations, candidates can get a clearer picture of what to expect if they joined us. This makes the process more transparent.
Finally, Mindset Map is not about assigning people a permanent profile. People’s ways of thinking and working are not set in stone – they evolve as we gain experience, receive feedback, learn new things and encounter new challenges. The assessment offers a snapshot of where someone is today, while the more important question is where they can go from there. In that sense, Mindset Map is not used to define people, but to give them a better understanding of themselves and create an opportunity for continued learning and development.
