Recruiting: A Numbers Game

A single successful hire requires engaging hundreds of prospects and narrowing a funnel that starts out very wide

The Challenge

A US client was expanding its technical team and wanted to hire a full stack engineer who could complement its developers in the US and other geographies. The desired time difference was no more than five hours, requiring a location somewhere in the Americas.

The somewhat generic job responsibilities included:

Participate in software development lifecycle.
Lead technical discussions, and collaborate with cross-functional teams (e.g., security, DevOps, data, compliance and product).
Work individually and in a team to deliver projects and product support.
Partner with other functional teams in different regions to ensure successful delivery of solutions.

Some candidate requirements were:

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science.
7+ years hands-on development of full stack software.
Experience working in Cloud with high transaction volumes and availability.
Experience in developing End to End technical architectures and delivery of very large-scale platforms.
Understanding of OOP, MVC, microservice architecture concepts
Experience with container (Docker) and Orchestration (Kubernetes) and CICD.

Realizing that finding such talent outside its local market would be extremely difficult, the company came to Looi Consulting for help.

The Plan

Looi Consulting analyzed the rough requirements, interviewed the hiring manager, and produced a detailed job description, tailored to the needs of the role. As candidates were sourced and we received feedback from both candidates and interviewers, we would revise and propose changes to the job requirements or clarifications on the responsibilities. These modifications often helped the company understand its needs better and accelerated the search.

The work collaboration requirements suggested a nearshore location, somewhere in Latin America. The most developed markets for software talent are Colombia, Argentina, Uruguay, and to a lesser extent Central America and Brazil. Since most development teams favor Agile-like development methodologies, online meetings are frequent and serve as a main source for communicating project requirements, status, and resolving issues. Thus, a limiting constraint is proficiency in business English, both written and spoken.

Looi Consulting’s recruiters used a mix of passive and active methods to find candidates. Within just two weeks, we:

Considered 344 prospects
Reached out to 94
Engaged 14
Rejected 4
Reviewing 4
Interviewed 3
Presented to client 0

Despite the effort, none proved acceptable.

The Solution

Looi Consulting refined the requirements and cultivated its network with the candidates. Even though zero of the 344 initial prospects proved successful, we engaged them, built trust and rapport, assessed their technical skills and aptitude, and developed further leads from them. For example, some prospects might not be interested in a new role at the time of contact, but had friends or colleagues who might. Also, once a particular organization was known to do a certain type of engineering, we could target other staff in it for interest in an exciting new opportunity.

In any case, we build on the relationship and keep track of their skills, experience, interests for future reference. We view recruiting as a long term process that requires patience, a very deep and wide pipeline, and constant active listening to clients and workers.

Timeline

Over another 2 weeks, we found several candidates who were a better fit for the role, screened them carefully for technical skills and team work, then prepared them for the interview with the client. Candidate preparation is important since most technical staff rarely look for new jobs and are often unable to articulate their own capabilities without some help, especially in a foreign language. We help them showcase their true talents to assist in making the match!

Candidates Considered

Contacted

Engaged

Rejected

Interviewed

Presented

Success!

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One Full Stack Engineer Hired!

A full stack engineer who met most of the requirements and even exceed some was successfully found.

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Onboarded in Two Weeks

We were conducted the due diligence process consisting of employment verification, security background checks, and other activities, without difficulty.

Results

The company had a daunting prospect: how to find a strong full stack engineer when the search space is a vast continent where they had no recruiting assets, had no network, and didn’t speak the main language? Looi Consulting stepped up to the task and over a period of 4 weeks presented 3 strong options for the company. It selected one and is now on the way to further augmenting its staff with more nearshore engineers. In addition, we have expanded our network of interesting technical staff, built lasting relationships, and deepened our understanding of the talent and players in the region!

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