Quantity & Quality: Investment fund asked us to find 10 tech specialists

A Middle Eastern-based investment fund approached us with a project to hire 10 technology professionals of various specialties. They required an agency with demonstrated capability to source large numbers of highly-qualified tech professionals. They were referred to us based on the scale of our research capability and long experience in the tech sector.

The client was transitioning from a traditional outsourced IT organizational structure to an in-house one. Since there was not enough talent in their own market to build their IT team their strategy was to pull together top talent from within the Asia region.

All candidates would need to be well-experienced within large-scale financial institutions and open to transferring to the Middle East.

In addition, the interview process presented certain logistical and organizational challenges, as at later stages candidates would need to travel to the Middle East for final interviews.

Finally, because the interview process typically involved a 6-8 week lag between prelim interviews and final interviews, the pool of submitted candidates needed to be large enough to withstand candidates dropping out mid-process.

To begin we dedicated a team of 8 to begin mapping target firms throughout the Asian market and identifying candidates within.

The pool of candidates would need to be significant to ensure coverage of all the roles. Our target markets were predominantly HK, Singapore, Australia, and Japan.

We designated project heads within each office and arranged periodic in-house interview sessions for visiting client representatives. Successful candidates would then be sent to the HQ for more intensive interviewing.

To mitigate some of the logistical and emotional challenges the process would present to candidates with families, we advised the client to fly the families out with the candidates. The client agreed that this would maintain or even improve interest on the part of the candidates and would have the added benefit of getting buy-in from key influencers to the candidates.

In the end we completed the project over the course of 5 months.