How to find a Senior DevOps engineer for a UK startup in just 2 weeks?
Over the years of the agency's existence, we have accumulated a lot of cases, interesting experiences and now we have come to the point where we are ready to share them.
Who we were looking for?
A year ago, we were approached by a young British startup for help. They asked us to find an experienced DevOps engineer for their fintech project in a limited period of time. The candidate supposed to be responsible for the whole infrastructure of the project and had to have five years of experience in the field, and experience with the following technologies: Postgresql, Ruby on Rails, Docker, Linux, AWS, and, of course, perfect English for written and verbal communication.
Where did the difficulty lie?
To begin with, 5 years of experience is quite a lot. Often, while working in the same field, specialists change technologies, try new things - not everyone is ready to devote many years to one stack. Also, those 5 years of devops can be devoted not only to AWS, which we are looking for, but also to other clouds - Azure, for example.
Second, the candidate is supposed to work mostly on its own and build most processes from scratch, which demands high level of responsibility and seniority.
Thirdly, perfect, fluent English is not as common as it seems it should be, so it reduces the recruitment funnel as well.
But it's Ruby on Rails, of course, that narrows the funnel the most, because it’s not that common in this field.
Finding a candidate who fits the requirements is only the first part of the work. The other big part is to motivate the candidate to change a job and consider your position. Working in a startup has lots of benefits, personally we really love working with them. They’re usually flexible and quick, have highly motivated team and allow to work remotely from different locations and so on. But definitely not everyone is ready to work in a startup and some candidates prefer working with a well-known brand.
What was done?
First of all, we thought about the "selling" points of the job and found things that might make candidates think about changing company since we knew that we’re going to search candidates that are not looking for a new role at the moment. For example, startup culture is love or hate. It both narrows the funnel and plays the role of a selling point since some people love working in a fast-growing and flexible environment with opportunity to have a huge visible impact on a product.
Then we made a search strategy: we thought in which countries and regions it would be better to search first, taking into account the salary range and the requirement to speak English fluently.
We gave priority to the LinkedIn website, because that is where you can usually find candidate that are not looking for work, but with good international experience. In addition, we’ve used our database and found the most relevant candidate for this role and successfully filled the position.
Recruiter's work, contrary to popular belief, does not end at the stage when the client is ready to make an offer. It is important to emphasize the stage of the offer, we continuously worked with the candidate, not just "keeping in touch" - we worked through expectations, moderated the terms of the offer together with the client, and worked with the candidate's motivation to accept it.
In sum, we worked on this position for 2 weeks, the first two candidates were presented to the client on the 3rd day and one of them got the offer straightaway. All in all, we’ve contacted 139 candidates, 4 of which made it to the technical interview and the role was filled with the first candidate who had most relevant experience in an international company.
Key success points:
We made a correct portrait of the perfect candidate. Thanks to that we managed to show first candidate who successfully went through all the recruitment stages. Sourcing strategy was also the key since we didn’t waste time on the channels that would not be useful.
And, of course, our recruiters’ experience was crucial. Due to their professionalism the right candidate was found just in 3 days, interviewed and motivated to change a job and accept an offer.
Last but not the least, it is our partnership with the client who was open to our recommendations and feedback.
P.S.
Do you need to hire a senior engineer in a limited period of time?
Contact us 😉 We know how to find even the most specialized candidate and motivate them to accept your offer!
