Building a new team to support a FinTech firm’s market growth

Overview

The accounting software company had recently opened a brand new office In Barcelona, but had no knowledge of the local area, along with having no team to start in this new market. Without a network for them to start recruiting from, and no internal HR team to help them do so, they needed to find an external partner that could support them in building a team from scratch.

Having our own base in Barcelona, we soon found out about them opening their new office and approached them to provide our services in helping them to build a new team of local talent with the language skills and experience they needed to support their long-term plan.

• Our client had only just opened their office in Barcelona and weren’t familiar with the market, nor had a network to be able to build a new team from.
• They had no HR function and needed to quickly build a team from scratch with local talent that were able to speak advanced English.

 

The Challenge

Our team arranged a meeting with our client to get to know the business and understand what their long-term plan was. Their plan was very clear, but also a very challenging with a requirement of at least 6 people to be hired within just 8 weeks, with those 6 people being needed to be on board within a specific order.

We started by meeting them and understanding what was their long-term plan, which was very clear, but had a challenge: timing - they needed to hire at least 6 people within 8 weeks and in a particular order! So, we designed a recruitment plan and a process together and started working with Product vacancies, then Dev & Infra and finally QA testers and Scrum.

 

• Our client needed a recruitment partner that had an existing network of talent within Barcelona that could speak advanced English.
• MA needed to quickly design a recruitment plan and process to fill the 6 vacancies, starting with Product, then Development & Infrastructure and then finally QA testers and Scrum.
• With the new office having no staff, the 8-week timeline provided was critical for our team to deliver to.

 

Our Approach

With the vacancies needing to be filled being across different areas of specialism, we utilised our different consultants who focussed fully on those specific roles and created a dedicated team to work on this recruitment plan. To ensure we kept a unified communication with our client however, we maintained one sole point of contact throughout the process who would act on behalf our team of five.

Our process involved:

• Arranging meetings to clarify specific expectations from both parties for each of the roles needing to be filled by our team. This was critical to ensure we remained efficient of the timeline provided.
• Each of our specialist consultants managing the vacancies on their cluster and providing a shortlist of qualifying candidates in as little as one week.
• Weekly communication within the team to update on engagement with candidates to ensure we always kept our client informed on the pipeline and interview process.

 

The Results

Within 8 weeks, our team had managed to send a total of 32 CV’s to our client within the 8-week period. From those 32 candidates put forward, we managed to achieve a total of 5 successful hires during that period.

• Our client was very satisfied with the services we provided, so much so that they made the decision to maintain us as their recruitment partner and have us act as an extension to their own company and HR team.
• After suffering economic issues at the start of 2020, during which time they had to freeze our partnership, we are pleased to see our client back on their feet and us back as their main recruitment partner for their current growth plan.