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Case Study

Premium Tech Recruitment

Strong experience in large-scale,
international tech recruitment
in Europe and the US

Learn More Download Executive Summary

DevsData LLC is an IT recruitment agency with
access to the top talented software engineers.
We’re all about premium quality and flexibility to client needs.

Below you can find the case study about how we found 26 top-notch tech specialists for a Norwegian client.

Project Overview

An international fashion corporation decided to undergo a radical digital transformation in order to outrun its competitors. The transformation had to touch many areas and aspects in order to be successful – including marketing, people structure, business processes, and logistics. We assembled a core technology team (Machine Learning, Software UX/UI, and operations) for several company departments.

Type of specialists

Machine Learning Engineers
Big Data Engineers
Full Stack Software Engineers
Data Scientists
Back-End Engineers
JavaScript Engineers
UX / UI Designers
Product Managers

Relocated to Oslo, Norway

and sourced from countries like

GERMANY
USA
CANADA
UK
POLAND
SWEDEN
PORTUGAL

The problem

The company was facing a significant drop in its revenues and profits year by year due to strong competition from companies like Zalando (a huge, well-known fashion marketplace, especially in Europe) and other startups in the clothing/fashion industry.

In order to cope with this situation, our client decided to invest $9m into the creation of a fast-paced innovation lab that is responsible for performing a radical digital transformation of the company.

There was a need for the creation of a unified online e-commerce platform that would bring together all the brands owned by the client. For the time being most of the sales were happening offline in brick and mortar stores. Thus, the company decided to switch to online sales and leverage modern marketing tools across its brands.

The challenges

In order for the project to be successful, we had to make sure that the people involved were of the top-notch. Thus, our first step was to assemble the team of highly skilled professionals who would be involved in this project. Therefore, we have performed a wide-scale international search (Europe + USA + Canada) to find top of the top talented individuals. We created the core Machine Learning, Software and UX/UI teams for the operation, as well as being involved in the search for experienced operations and business managers that were relocated from London, UK.

Importantly, in the majority of cases, recruiters just relocate people from Eastern Europe. But this search was different. We sourced people also from countries like the United States, Canada, Germany, and Sweden, which was very challenging, yet very fruitful for the client.

The outcome

Our team has built several brand-new, critical IT systems for the client totally transforming its day to day operations and exceeding business expectations set for the 1st year of the transformation.

One of them is an advanced BI tool that helps the managers from the marketing department to undertake informed decisions regarding the pricing strategy in the sales cycle based on the suggestions from a Deep Learning NLP model and the historical sales & pricing data. Another example would be an intelligent tool for the logistics department thanks to which the managers have gained access to a bird-eye view and are able to operate the fleet and transportation in a more effective way, eliminate waste, and, as a result, save significant amounts for the company.

Document

Nikolai Fasting

CEO OF SYNCANO. INC. EVP of Varner Digital Transformation

Tom runs a unique IT consulting firm, DevsData. I have the pleasure of working with him as business partners on a big-scale digital transformation project for Varner Group – a European fashion group with 14 thousand employees worldwide. DevsData has assembled the core Machine Learning, Software, and UX teams for the operation (26 people in total). I can personally guarantee their dedication, ability to understand the business needs and to track down those exceptional individuals (we’re very picky) wherever they are located.

Nicholas Johnson

CEO OF ORANGE CHARGER LLC; MENTOR AT YCOMBINATOR

I interviewed about a dozen different firms. DevsData LLC is truly exceptional – their backend developers are some of the best I’ve ever worked with. I’ve worked with a lot of very well-qualified developers, locally in San Francisco, and remotely, so that is not a compliment I offer lightly. I appreciate their depth of knowledge and their ability to get things done quickly.

Jonas Lee

PARTNER & EXECUTIVE VP OF VERUS FINANCIAL LLC;
INVESTOR & SERIAL ENTERPRENEUR

DevsData demonstrated a strong degree of proactivity, taking time to thoroughly understand the problem, business perspective and continuously suggesting performance and usability enhancements. Their app exceeded my expectations. I’ve worked with DevsData on numerous projects over the last 3 years and I’m very happy. Being both responsive and honest in communication, their team is a true partner.

Recommendations

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Recived (13)

Axel Haugan

Co Founder & Chief Experience Officer at GoGood

February 19, 2021, Axel was a client of Tom’s

DevsData is doing a great job recruiting several highly experienced engineers and designers for multiple roles in front-end with React, back-end with C#, search specialists in Solr, and UX designers.

They designed a great process that met all our expectations, and I was thoroughly impressed with their internal recruitment scrutiny, the understanding of the technical nature, and accuracy, which allowed us to review a number of highly qualified and experienced candidates. Their team did an excellent job of identifying and comprehensively analyzing the abilities and skills of potential candidates.

DevsData not only created a high-level mechanism that let us reach the best, top-notch candidates but also they helped us throughout the whole recruitment process in a holistic way.Their professionalism, involvement and understanding of their client’s needs allow me to state the high quality of the company’s work. As a bonus they are a nice group of people and you can’t really ask for better representation and support to build a solid product development team.
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Andi Williams

Director - Digital Services at True Group, Inc.

February 4, 2021, Andi was a client of Tom’s

We have been working with the DevsData team on a mobile project for nearly a year, and I have consistently been impressed with their scope of knowledge and experience, professionalism, and ability to get the job done. The team offers innovative ideas, produces strong deliverables, and delivers on time. Most importantly, everyone has a great attitude, and I really enjoy working with them! Thanks Tom, and the DevsData team!
Read More
Karim Butt

Co Founder & CTO at GlossGenius

December 7, 2020, Karim was a client of Tom’s

DevsData reached out to us, as we’ve been looking to grow our engineering team in Europe and Poland. Communicating efficiently and professionally, DevsData made a strong impression with their understanding of the recruitment challenges we were facing.

They have designed a custom made recruitmentnderstanding, challenges we were facing. They have designed a custom made recruitment process, specifically tailored for our hiring needs. I was thoroughly impressed with the level of detail and technical nature of their approach - this allowed me to focus on a smaller pool of applicants. Their recruitment team had a solid technical u so we were sure we could trust them throughout the entire process.

DevsData has been extremely responsive and resourceful in helping us identify some great candidates. I find the company exceptionally professional, diligent and productive with an excellent understanding of the market and clients’ needs.
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Pawel Chrzan

Co Founder and CEO at wellbee

November 6, 2020, Pawel was a client of Tom’s

Tom and his team showed great dedication to us as client and allowed wellbee to launch an Alpha stage of our online therapy product in under 1 month from absolute scratch. I need to congratulate them on the very good UX and UI design and good communication skills of the whole team.
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Paweł Rzymkiewicz

Engineering Manager at Appsilon

March 23, 2020, Paweł worked with Tom but at different companies

I've had an opportunity to work with Tom over extended period of time in a very intensive recruitment project for Pioner Labs. He made an impression on me as a very high-energy person that worked around the clock to find top contributors and send them our way. I was especially impressed by his ability to continue to find world class candidates months into the recruitment. In our collaboration Tom has shown dedication and commitment. One thing that stood out and continues to impress me is Tom's impossible response time (usually just seconds after I send a message his way).

I definitely recommend working with Tom to everyone that is building a team made of top tier individuals.
Read More

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Premium Tech Recruitment Partner

6 Reasons to Choose
DevsData for IT Recruitment

Deep technical understanding - we have worked as software engineers for many years in tech in different projects.

Hands-on managerial experience with international IT projects and business understanding.

We did it before. Recruiting for a brainpower first.

Super high client satisfaction.

Genuine passion for coding and being up-to-date with recent tech can make or break the project.

Ethical and transparent.

No-BS approach.

A reliable way to eliminate weak candidates very quickly.

Technical background of recruitment team members

There is an issue that most of the so-called tech recruitment firms or freelancers face, namely - their recruiters have absolutely no technical background. Not at all.

They can just recognize keywords on CV whether it is "Java" or "JavaScript" or something else (and - you have guessed - they do not really understand the difference).

They lack a deep technical & computer science understanding of what these things actually mean, and what is really the most important for specific clients' needs.

Here at DevsData LLC, the founding team as well as a majority of our employees have worked as software engineers on many international projects (or UK-based and US-based startups, as well as corporations) over the years experiencing many different technologies first-hand, vastly different project organization, managerial techniques, workflow, and various tools and methodologies.

The tech is not just a
keyword on paper to look for.

We understand that tech tools, frameworks, and languages are interconnected together, and there are groups of frameworks/modules that work well together for a particular business use case using a specific programming language.

We understand the similarities and connections, as well as differences, between specific technologies, and how hard (or easy) will it be for a specific engineer to learn technology X assuming he/she is already well-versed at Y.

Apart from the thetech perspective, we have also been involved in IT projects as tech leads and managers. As a result we understand the business side, client’s objective, KPIs and what to look for in a good engineer apart from pure thetech knowledge and acumen

Our experience shows that soft skills are not less pivotal than the tech side in the case of smooth communication and avoidance of conflicts among team members.

Another point that we firmly believe in, apart from the knowledge of technology and soft skills, is that the most essential thing to actually look for in an engineer is brainpower – the ability to solve complex, abstract problems, and to do it quickly. It does not mean “knowledge of algorithms”, but quite the opposite. During a recruitment process we give a series of problem-solving challenges that do not require knowledge but require thinking and determination. And surprisingly, the vast majority of the candidates, even senior engineers, cannot even solve the simple challenge. Some of them do not even try but give up at the very beginning. And yet they want to charge $140/h for software consulting. That is just one of the examples how poor the level of skill set of the average software engineer is.

Tech changes literally every day, doesn’t it?

Combine all the above with making sure that the person is really up-to-date with the recent tech frameworks, modules, and tools, as well as having a genuine passion and motivation for creating high-quality software, and you will likely get an engineer that builds your system vastly faster than you would expect.

And those are the kinds of the engineers that we are after, and are well-connected with – by having a network of people from the best European computer science universities that worked for the most demanding clients like hedge funds and banks, as well as ambitious startups..

Transparency and ethicality - does it even exist in the IT recruitment?

What we have also observed is that there are recruiters and agencies that are neither very transparent, nor ethical.

Many friends of mine were instructed by a recruiter during an interview to say that they actually had the required experience, even if they had no idea what it was about. Or they were told they could learn transparency X in a few hours, whereas the job posting stated that a deep, or even expert, understanding of transparency X is needed.

In DevsData, we thoroughly test the candidates and introduce the ready-to-go transparency team to our client.

And the value the engineers we recruit bring to the project is what makes our clients reach out to us again.

Competent shortlisting - that's how we save your money, time and energy.

One last tip that allows us to streamline the recruitment process is to weed out weak people quickly at the very beginning of the process.
If you ever recruited internationally – you know what is the issue here.

As a result, we can focus valuable interview time on the specialists that are sharp, knowledgeable, and overall promising - to test them better and make sure they are really a good fit for the client.

Rigorous, multi-stage recruitment process

with an approval rate of under 1%

To deliver what we promise, we came up with an extensive, multi-stage, rigorous recruitment process, tailored to a particular tech position, that we continuously improve. As it is our secret of success, we do not want to disclose every detail, but it involves stages like:

Approximate
Approval rate

0

Recruitment stage
20% of the initial candidate pool

1

CV prescreening
10% of the initial candidate pool

2

An automated problem-solving algorithmic challenge
5-10% of the initial candidate pool

3

Quick non-technical conversation
1-2% of the initial candidate pool

4

1 hour thorough technical interview with one of our engineers - live coding
<1% of the initial candidate pool

5

The followup, longer calls with our engineers and business team to assess if candidate's experience is relevant to the project

The essential thing is to eliminate weak candidates very early in the process not to waste time on inferior talent, people without necessary acumen, brainpower, or CS fundamentals.

Skills and traits that we check:

Non-technical skills/traits *

Communication and organizational skills
Drive and passion
Personality
Behaviour during difficult or unusual situation
Business understanding
Presentational skills
Ability to think abstractly and finding generalized solutions for specific class of problems
Intelligence and brainpower
Reaction time

Technical skills

Is the person up-to-date with the very recent tech changes?
Computer Science foundations
Awareness and knowledge of security aspects
Deep understanding of and experience in the programming domain(s) stated in a CV
Algorithmic problem-solving skills

* Non-technical skills are also checked for the engineering roles.

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