How to recruit three Senior C++ engineers for an HFT company within a month?
We continue to share our recruitment cases, stories of challenges and success with you.
Who we were looking for?
Some time ago we were approached for help by a HFT (high frequency trading) company. The task was to find Senior C++ developers with trading, multithreading, concurrency and low latency systems experience. Candidates supposed to be very good at computer science and, of course, in C++ programming in order to go through all the hiring stages and work efficiently in such a challenging field.
Besides that, it was really important to our client that we, as a recruitment partner, understood all the specifics of the trading sphere, and had a successful experience of recruiting such specialists.
What was the difficulty?
There were three main difficulties in this case.
The first was the field itself. HFT is a fairly narrow market, which consists of highly qualified specialists. The number of people employed in it is dozens of times lower than in web development, for example. Besides that, HFT companies often have non-compete agreements between themselves. This makes the task much more difficult, because it narrows down the list of companies where the ideal candidate could get the necessary experience for the vacancy.
The second difficulty was that there was no remote or hybrid option in the position. It was strictly an in-office job. These days, IT professionals often prefer remote work more and the popularity of office jobs is declining.
And the third difficulty: specific requirements and high standards of the desired candidates. There’s a lot of C++ developers and a lot to develop on C++, but only few of them are relevant to that project.
What we did and what was done.
As you already know, if you read our previous case (link to article), the first step (after the first job opening discussion with the client about the vacancy) is to figure out the selling points of the position, that can be really decisive and important for some candidates. In the case of this job, we underlined the following points.
The first one is the field. It turned out to be both a difficulty and a selling point. HFT is demanding, it's a challenge, it's an opportunity to improve professional skills and work with the smart and motivated people. Furthermore, the company gives the possibility to work with the most recent technical stack and hardware.
The next one is the compensation. Objectives, stack and development are undeniably important, but none of this takes away from the importance of compensation. The company offered a competitive rate, brilliant offices and plenty of benefits (compensation for sports, medicine, courses, and so on).
Strategy, Results and Figures.
We had quite a few relevant candidates in our database because we were already working with trading companies. Our database was the first source of candidates. We also actively worked on recommendation system, because this is absolutely necessary in such narrow areas as HFT or, for example, blockchain. And, of course, there was also a lot of sourcing in social networks, programming contests and so on.
The very first two candidates that we showed to the client from our database received an offer. Five days later we showed another (sixth in a row) candidate who also received an offer. All of these offers made, except the first, were accepted by the candidates! In one month since we’ve started searching candidates for this role we found another great C++ engineer who received an offer and accepted it. So, in total, we reviewed 311 candidates. Of these, 39 candidates were shown. 4 offers done, 3 accepted and all of them went through the trial period successfully.
What are the reasons we succeed?
Firstly, we think that our experience in recruiting such specialists in this field was crucial since we already knew the market well and had relevant candidates in our database and so we could show the first candidates straight away.
Secondly, it is the expertise of our recruiters, who knew how to get a specialist interested, how to interview and communicate with such candidates.
Thirdly, it is important to emphasize the role of our client and our partnership since our customer paid attention to our recommendations and offered a lot of benefits for the candidates and was ready to wait until all the candidates settled the things at their previous roles and collected all the necessary documentation.
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We can help you to fill tech position with best talents in a short time even for the very demanding role and field!
