Sourcing 60 Senior Embedded C++ experts and other IT specialists in a month time, and more.  

The demand for tech talent is ever-growing. The challenge is that the hiring demand is higher than the pool of qualified experts available. You probably know it firsthand if you recruited Embedded Software Engineers, .Net developers, SAP consultants or Full-stack developers for your team. (Any IT-related professional, really).

The market gap is not breaking news, but the pandemic truly exposed the labour market landscape we are to deal with for years to come. Remote work, taking businesses online, managing and preventing an increased number of cyber-attacks, and more of the same became the new normal for many organisations.

Furthermore, creative solutions, such as upskilling the current employees, are yet to be implemented. Regardless, the industry does not have an easy entrance, therefore similar initiatives can only bring results in the long run. For example, it takes at least 5 to 10 years to become a solid expert in software development. Hiring experts proficient in niche technologies is even tougher.

However, despite the unfavourable situation on the labour market (for hiring companies it is), some organizations manage not only to find dozens of interested and qualified professionals but also to hire them successfully.

In this article, we’ll share the real-life projects of building IT teams at global companies. Without further ado, let’s get to how Seargin teams support large-scale businesses by sourcing the required IT teams under the IT Staff Augmentation model.

Case #1: In pursuit of niche IT experts specialising in
Embedded C++  

When developing top-notch industrial components and devices is the core of your business, sourcing the required IT talent becomes the number one priority for business continuity.

“Our specialisation requires access to the IT talent, who specialise in niche technologies and whose expertise covers both hardware and firmware development. Including Embedded Software Test Engineers, Software/Firmware Engineers with knowledge of C++ and C#, Product Owners, and others,” the IT Manager at a leading industrial automation company explains.

“On one side, our demand for IT talent is ever-growing, as our business takes on new projects. On the other hand, by now, every expert around our site knows, that we are hiring. And we seem to have drained the resources. At least that’s what we used to believe until Seargin, luckily, proved us wrong.”

Seargin is among the 70 other vendors that the client uses to source the IT teams under the Staff Augmentation model.

“Majority of the vendors run job advertisements and wait for the candidates to apply. In a few days, they either let us know they will not be able to provide us with the experts we need. Or they propose the candidates, who are underqualified,” our client explains the challenge.

Solution #1: Evolved headhunting and proactive approach  

More than half of the candidates on the job market are passive candidates, which means they neither look nor consider changing their jobs. The same tendencies apply in particular to Senior specialists with years of relevant experience and full lifecycle projects under their belt. Those are just a few reasons why at Seargin we do not rely on job advertisements (which is, essentially, to „wait and see”), luck or the market to adjust itself.

Our recruiters take another approach. They invest time and effort into learning about the technologies, what IT professionals do on an everyday basis, and what their personal career journeys are. This knowledge empowers them to come up with new, non-standard ways to target the experts, who are qualified for the project.

Widely available sourcing techniques, such as, for example, boolean search, will only get you so far if you have a limited understanding of who you are targeting.

Besides the success our IT Recruiters experience in finding qualified candidates, as a result, they also reach the experts no one else is able to find. That helps tremendously: the candidates are more responsive, and there’s less competition for the candidates’ attention.

To sum up, putting ourselves in the experts’ shoes and discovering the specifics of the IT project helps us come up with creative ways to find qualified experts. Neither during the conversations with IT candidates nor during the sourcing activities, we are limiting ourselves to buzzwords.

Solution #2: Working hand in hand with the IT departments

Although a challenge for many, finding IT experts is just one of the major milestones. The next steps of the recruitment process often conceal pitfalls, that either delay the recruitment processes, or, in the worst-case scenario, lead to dismissing the perfect candidates.

What are those pitfalls exactly? Building a team involves multiple stakeholders, each with an agenda. Take, for example, the HR or Procurement departments, which control the entire process at many companies. But oftentimes people involved focus on different priorities or have a limited understanding of the IT industry, candidates and their roles. This lack of specialisation represents a barrier to the proper evaluation of IT professionals. Working directly with the IT department, on the contrary, is critical to avoid the most common pitfalls.

For example, frequently, the perfect candidate is rejected by an intermediate stakeholder. Because they either seem to change jobs frequently, weren’t employed for some time, or they lack the skills listed in the requirements. For all the questionable reasons.

Now, consider a few things below to understand why cooperating with the IT department is so important.    

• It is, in fact, a common practice to employ IT specialists solely for the duration of the project. That’s why rather than focusing on the years of employment, consider the full lifecycle projects they delivered, and other relevant experiences to tell you the story about the candidate.
• There are situations beyond our control. In any industry, the gap in employment isn’t unusual and can be explained by private reasons, rather than job-related issues. Talk to the candidate to sort out the concern.
• A limited understanding of the technology landscape gets you caught up in pursuing the candidate, whose skills match the requirements in the brief precisely. At Seargin, we work with the IT department closely and invest into technological training. This way, we know what points won’t impact the project, what skills are easy to develop quickly, and so on. Moreover, this approach also helps evaluate the candidate properly and identify their strengths, which might be relevant to the project, but weren’t included in the brief in the first place.

Solution #3: Investing in the crystal ball

Our teams strive to optimise each stage of the recruitment process, avoiding the pitfalls, which frustrate both the candidates and clients. In the long run, the candidate has to accept the job offer and be 100% sold on a new job opportunity.

Have in mind, that people do not participate in dozens of recruitment processes frequently (unlike IT Recruiters), so they often stumble across the restraints later. Going back and forth, in turn, while looking for solutions, often delays the recruitment process significantly, and might discourage the candidate.

Being mindful of this, since the early stages of recruitment, our teams get to know the candidates personally to address their potential needs in advance. For instance, the recruiter might start negotiating a relocation package before the expert even thinks about it. Or may speed up the hiring process in case of multiple competing job opportunities.

The IT Recruiter’s superpower lies in foreseeing and accounting for multiple factors to support the candidate throughout the whole process and make it as smooth as possible. Essentially, the IT Recruiters act as personal advisor or a friend, who has been through many recruitment processes.

Connecting with the candidate on a personal level even helps us to predict if they are planning on leaving the project. The experts might also reveal their intentions in advance because they treat the dedicated IT Recruiter as a partner too. As a result, we are at an advantage to keep the project moving without interruptions.

Key results:

Activities aimed at continuous evolving of the sourcing techniques, discovering more about the IT experts, and accounting for various factors makes miracles, i.e. hiring niche IT experts.

„Our company works with Seargin since 2017, and Seargin became a top-of-mind company for us when we need a team of IT experts to deliver specific projects. It’s a beaten road for us,” our client discloses.

Seargin had evolved from one of the vendors into a trusted partner. „Seargin teams go beyond the typical scope of work, as compared to other IT Staff Augmentation companies. Their Recruiters help candidates prepare for the interview, evaluate advanced technical skills, or even often negotiate the contract with the candidate. In other words, they step in, when we need them – as a true business partner does.”

„Our site has a proven track record in terms of business capabilities. Company headquarters assign the majority of the IT projects to our location, choosing us before the sites in other countries. Seargin played an important role in this. Because our site manages to access the IT talent, when other locations can’t build a team for a project,” the client reveals the business impact of working together with Seargin.

„As a matter of fact, we opened two more delivery centers thanks to IT talent capabilities, which allow us to take on new projects, and develop our business.”

As Seargin works with dozens of clients and deals with hundreds of recruitment processes, we have the access to the industry rates, demand and technologies insights. The client frequently relies on our teams’ insights and reports concerning the current market and budget trends to adjust the compensation accordingly.

For Seargin, this is an indication of high respect and trust, and that fact makes us very proud.

Case #2: Delivering 60 Senior-level Embedded systems specialists
in a month’s time

A multinational telecommunication and consumer electronics company works with Seargin to source the IT talent needed to develop and evolve its business solutions.

In the case of Junior- or Mid-level professionals with 2-4 years of experience, paid advertisement does the job and delivers new resumes for the client. That is because specialists at the early stage of their careers apply for the jobs and proactively look for new opportunities to advance their careers.

The situation looks different when it comes to sourcing Senior experts (such as Software Embedded experts with C++, Python developers, and DevOps experts) with over 10 years of experience. Historically, it has always been a challenging task, to say the least.

Besides high expectations towards candidates’ profiles, the client expects some of the IT experts to be qualified to act as business solutions architects.

That’s when Seargin’s expertise and skills come in. The client turned to our team to source the mentioned Senior IT experts.

Always be recruiting Always be closing 

Within a month after receiving the initial inquiry, our team delivered over 60 qualified candidates, who were interested in the opportunities. What’s important is that none of those candidates has ever applied to join the client’s company before. So, the profiles were totally new to the client who has been doing business for decades.

Now pause for a minute to truly understand those numbers within the provided context. And this is the recent project – we’re talking about the summer of 2021.

„92% of the introduced candidates were invited for the interview by the client. Furthermore, every third candidate not only received the job offer but also accepted it. Both the client and my team recognise those results as a success and a benchmark, if you will,” Łukasz Betka, the Account Manager at Seargin, explains.

Łukasz, like other Account Managers at Seargin, coordinates building IT teams and proves that hiring top IT experts does not have to be either difficult or time-consuming.

„At some point, we couldn’t find time for the interviews because of „walls of calls” in the calendar. This is how many candidates we were dealing with. One has to be cautious when working with Seargin – you need to keep up,” Łukasz laughs.

Success factors

In our experience, the success in this and other cases breaks down to similar things.

Working hand in hand with the client

Immersing into the client’s business is truly beneficial. „At times, I feel like I am a part of the client’s team. We have regular meetings, and I frequently join calls even if we don’t have an ongoing project together,” Łukasz admits.

Working closely with the client helps understand the IT project requirements and business needs. All to match the IT talent to the right opportunities, and make sure the teams’ qualifications tick all the boxes for the client, and the client fulfils all the expectations IT experts hold.

Close cooperation with the client plays an important role when it comes to designing the series of technical training for our IT Recruiters. The topics of the training are specific and adjusted to the recruitment processes and our clients’ needs.

Scaling the efforts

Seargin teams have been fulfilling the demand for similar IT experts for nearly 8 years. Our database includes around 7,000 active Embedded software developers with who we have developed relationships at some point.

As you can guess, that helps tremendously. On top of that, our capabilities and scale of business allow us to relocate the experts from one IT project to another. All those facts contribute towards a quick and efficient hiring process. There’s always that one perfect candidate, and there’s always that one dream project suited to the candidate.

To sum up:

Discovering IT candidates with certain qualifications and experiences is a challenge for many. But our and our clients’ experience proves, that niche IT experts are not unicorns – they exist.

Putting the candidates first and honing sourcing strategies and all the steps of the recruitment process can do wonders.

If you are looking for a trusted partner to support your business – let’s chat. We can introduce the IT experts, specialising in the most popular and niche areas in 48-72 hours. Including large class business systems, such as SAP SAC, Salesforce, IBM Cognos TM1, and Workday. And, highly-skilled developers, proficient in Java, Angular, C++, and more.