Recruiter Wellington Wu leaves 50onRed for EPAM Empathy Lab

While at 50onRed, Wellington Wu decided that recruiting was going to be his career, not just a job.
Now that means he’s leaving the University City startup where he worked for two years. He left to take a job at EPAM Empathy Lab, the international software giant with a U.S. headquarters in Newtown, Pa., plus offices in Conshohocken and Chinatown. The move was about finding more room to grow, he told us.
As a recruiter, “the ceiling is a little bit lower,” he said, “unless you’re really lucky and get [a company] that’s going to blow up or get sold or bought.”
That’s why Wu felt it was time to leave the company. (50onRed’s VP of Product Frank Fumarola also recently left for Facebook, which is growing a small population of Philly expats.)
Wu also liked the new challenge of doing executive-level recruiting, his new focus at EPAM Empathy Lab. (At 50onRed, he focused on software engineers.) The global recruiting team for EPAM consists of about 150 people, he said.
Wu actually did a short stint at design firm Empathy Lab, before it was bought by EPAM in 2012, but left because the commute from his old home in Fishtown to Conshohocken was “terrible,” he said.
Now, he splits his time between the Conshohocken office and Chinatown. (He also recently moved from the city to Drexel Hill.)
EPAM was recently ranked No. 3 on Forbes’ list of “America’s Best Small Companies.” It employs about 175 locally, with the Conshohocken office being the biggest (roughly 90), followed by the Newtown office (roughly 50) and the Chinatown office (roughly 30). The company opened the Chinatown office in late 2013 to accommodate staffers who lived in the city.