a Senior FS Engineer with a significant working experiece in world's biggest AAA studios
Hired a specialist from Unity :)
- really young company (exist for about a year and 5 people onboard)- technically heavy project (the AI gaming platform will enable players to write code and AIs that control characters)- expectation to hire a person who worked in world's biggest AAA studios - long and technically complicated hiring process (similar to FAANG companies have)
during these search we interviewed a huge number of skilled specialist who worked on the world's famous games (e.g. the last of us, call of duty). So do not be afraid to reach people from really famous compnies or projects - usually they are even more open for new interesting ideas
it was a request to hire a specialist from a company with world-famous brand to the new born startup, and we handled it :)
Frontend Tech Lead (React)
time per hire - 12 days, we hired specialist from one of the biggest world animation studio
the person should be mature and skilled enough to handle the environment with no frontend expertise in the team / no strict vision in terms of frontend + external interviewer, no benefits :)
do not be afraid to consider candidates from companies with a world name; even the company you're hiring for has been around for less than a year. Actually, especially if they are so young. Because you have a lot of freedom, responsibility and challenges to offer such skilled professionals
network (that actually helps us to close this role that fast), support with shaping the hiring process and fully managed offer creation and negotiation process
Senior/Lead AQA
We interviewed 7 people and they were experts in one technology (f.e. Java or Python) but none of them were a perfect match. These interviews helped the client to realize that they don't need a person who deeply knows one technology but the person who worked with lot's of technologies and knows them on a high level. Then we had an additional meeting to syncrinize, adjustet the search and interviews on our side, and filtered the candidates even more than we did before. We managed to find 4 candidates that were pretty good matches and here the client had a choice who to hire as all of the past the technical and cultural fit interviews well. Eventually we hired a person who is not only a good professional but also responsible and interested in the product. He has the community of QA Engineers that he build by having a youtube channel and a group in telegram that shows us that he is passionate about his work. Also, he volunteers by gathering FPV drones.
As the company had only 2 junior/trainee-level QA specialists that tested the product manually and didn't have automation testing before, the person needed to be mature enough to be fully responsible for creating a reasonable strategy for automation testing, implement the strategy, do all the work by themselves and be responsible for the result. Also the person should increase the quality of the product pointing out the areas where developers should do better. The candidate had to have experience with setting up the processes from scratch, experience in web and integration testing, experience with different type of projects (embedded and fintech would be a big plus but not mandatory) to be able to use such wide experience. The important part was also soft skills, the client wanted to find someone who is truely interested in what they do, who is initiative and not only do the task that were assigned to them. From the very beginning the tech stack didn't matter but after interviewing 7 Senior/Lead level AQA specialist we understood that the tech stack really didn't matter but what was important it's the range of technologies the person had experience with.
1. A good hire might take some time but eventually it pays you back. 2. It's okay to change the requirements or add some new ones during the interview process, you just need to communicate it in time. 3. What life the person leads can tell a lot about their soft skills. 4. Gathering data and have a retrospective meeting about it are important
We are flexible and adaptive to new or additional requirements. We take into consideration not only hard skills, but also soft skills and motivation of the candidates. We are not about quantity we are about quality. We initiate additional discussion with the clients when we see some bottlenecks. We don't present to the client the candidates that are not suits the requirement - we value their time and we don't push the client to lower their expectations, we can only tell them that it might take a bit more time to find such candidate.
Sales Manager
We managed to hire the perfect macth out of 3 candidates. Time to hire - 1 month
The team had expertise in Europe and they wanted to scale to a LatAm market, that's why we needed to find the person who has experience working with this market and morover has their database of potential clients. In addition to that, they would like the person to start the office there in the future. One of the bottlenecks was the budget that was $1500 per month+bonuses that was quite a challange to find experienced sales manager that will meet the budget.
Providing good candidate experience increase the chances of accepting offers. The candidate came from free Linkedin posting.
We show the client only relevant candidates - all the candidates we presented worked on crypto and fintech products.
Senior Ruby Engineer
363 contacted candidates, 54 recruiter screens and 25 presented candidates led to 1 job offer ( time to offer– 130 days). Being one of the first positons opened with the client, it also helped build trust between the client and the agency and better the recruitment process on the client side.
It was the classic case of when the client did not have 100% understanding of what exactly he wanted from an ideal candidate. We made 3 changes to the requirements from the pure Ruby backend engineer with DSL experience and algorithmic knowledge through Backend Full Stack Ruby on Rails Developer (BE + Depovs) to Full Stack Ruby on Rails Web Developer (backend and frontend). Also, as
However changes in the hard skills requirements did impact the top of the sourcing funnel drastically. at the end of the day what mattered the most was the candidate's attitude (overall work ethic and willingness to learn), so as soon as the client mentioned which qualities he did not like in the previous candidate and together we formulated the qualities the ideal candidate should have, we were able to find such a person right away
We are persistent enough not to give up when facing hardships and flexible enough to keep asking ourselves and the client, what can be done better
Product Owner with background in building mobile apps, international markets, product growth and know something about plants (as we were hiring for other role initially) who would be able to become a CPO in a shoet-term perspective
hired a right person for another project without using any additional resources (same hiring team, same search, no extra time of Appvillis team to discuss the role)
Early stage of the company, connection with office, niche request in terms of relation with plants + the specialist who we hired for this role went through the process for PLNT app but the team decided they will be a better fit for another product. So we had a little hard offer negotiation to make all this happen and communicate in the right way
You should know your client and what people they are looking for (always keep eyes on their open vacancies), it's benefitial for both
We know our clients and we're here not only to find a person for a custom role but we also are able to understand what people may be a good addition for your team and suggest you to meet them. That creates a lot of extra value in terms of consulting, networking or even another hirings
Middle Python Developer
Time to hire - 3 weeks. They hired a candidate from 5 interviewees. Although the budget was up to $4,000, we hired a candidate with a wish of $2,500. A week after the accepted offer, the candidate has already started working.
The client's product was working, but it was developed by volunteers and in a hurry. The task of the Python developer was to make a high-quality, secure product that could be scaled and covered with tests. Toboto rewrite the product from scratch into a high-quality version. In addition to technical skills, a developer must be responsible, not micromanaged, and able to work independently. Soft skills were also important, we were looking for a motivated person who would be passionate about the product and its idea, as well as who would be pro-Ukrainian in his views.
It is worth posting vacancies on dow, this is where the candidate came from, he himself responded because he liked the project.
We helped the client with the offer (we created it ourselves, the client approved it and sent it to the candidate). They also organized a meeting between the candidate and the client on the first day of work.
