Growth through Insight

At a glance: our client

Industry

Technology

Service

All service lines

Business size

Mid-cap (Fast growth)

Target Country

Pan-Europe

Service lines used:

Across three projects, our client used all four of our service lines.

Talent Intelligence

Intelligence gave our client thorough data on where a possible talent pool would be located

Talent Mapping

Through Mapping, we identified over 600 suitable profiles that fit our clients' requirement

Talent Search

With Search, our client was able to hire for roles they needed immediately, with no extra fees

Talent Pipelining

Talent Pipelining gave our client a market map of pre-qualified candidates, ready for future hiring needs

Read how our services can help

Filling bigger boots

Due to the nature of their business, continued growth was impossible without a bigger Development team.

As such, they were considering a new location in Europe, where a swell of relevant developers with the required skills could be based and provide an additional option for ongoing hiring.

Our client went from little understanding of where a new Developer team could be based to a fully-operational hub with it’s first team of hires, plus market maps and a talent pipeline to use in the future, inside 12 months.

Deep understanding of client’s vision and plan

Having understood our client’s thinking and the requirement in full, we discussed a Europe-wide Talent Intelligence project, focused on the identification of where a relevant-sized talent pool may be located.

They were open on the sector/industry that future hires could come from.

In terms of potential locations, beyond talent pool size, the following factors were also important considerations in focusing our research activity:

No more than a 3-hour flight from the UK (to allow easy access to/from for UK employees and the SLT)
No more than a 2-hour time zone (to allow for co-working with colleagues in London during the UK working day)
No countries where leadership values would not align with company values.

Impactful insights to help shape strategic decisions

We embarked on a research project to generate and collate secondary data from the public domain, focusing on the Java Development market across 12 agreed European countries.

We considered talent pool size, labour costs/cost of living, flight times, time zones, language capability (ie, the prevalence of English as a second language) and a range of human rights factors (LGBTQI equality, Democracy Index, Press Freedom Index, etc).

Through our Intelligence report, we advised our client to consider five shortlisted options and, following a period of reflection, we were requested to deliver a second, ‘deeper dive’ Intelligence project, this time providing insights around hiring activity, the competitor landscape, educational establishments, local infrastructure, co-working hubs, ‘new arrival’ case studies, etc, within seven cities across two of the countries on our initial shortlist.

Understanding a ‘new territory’ talent pool

Our second Talent Intelligence report highlighted two specific cities, one in each of the two countries of interest, that were both rich in Java Developer talent, cost effective, had growing ‘co-worker hubs’ and highly regarded ‘feeder’ universities for tech talent.

Once a final decision on a location had been made by the SLT, our client was keen to commence the process of hiring Java Developers, both for immediate opportunities within the first sub-team and for future vacancies as the new hub grew.

A full briefing session with TA, HR, senior members of the Java Development team took place, allowing us to ask numerous scoping questions that would be invaluable during our search.

Initially, via a Talent Mapping project, we identified over 600 relevant Developer profiles from a range of target organisations within commutable distance of the new hub.

Candidates for both immediate and future hiring

Through a combination of our Talent Search and Talent Pipeline solutions, approaches and candidate engagement commenced, profiling those both interested in new opportunities in the ‘here and now’ and those interested in a career move in 6/12/18 months’ time.

Profiles and CVs were shared with our client on a weekly basis and, following a robust recruitment process, successful candidates were placed into one of two buckets – “hire now” or “hire later”.

A number of offers were subsequently made to those in the “hire now” category and the new hubs’ first sub-team of Java Developers was quickly assembled.

Upon project completion, our client took ownership of a local talent map and a pipeline of already qualified/”hire later” candidates, both for future use, plus a range of market insights on perception, pay & reward, competitors, etc.

Case Study

Our client, a fast-growth global financial software development company, was finding it increasingly difficult to recruit Java Developers for their Engineering group based in London.

There was a perception that the UK talent pool for this particular skillset relative to our client’s operation was shrinking, despite recent efforts to access a wider audience by offering remote working, not to mention expensive.