IT staff recruitment: how did we find a Blockchain Developer for an American company in just 2 weeks?

Our technical recruiter Mary managed to find a blockchain developer for an international fintech company in two weeks. The case was not easy — the specific conditions greatly narrowed the circle of potential candidates. During the search process, we convinced the client to optimize the selection stages, abandoning the big test assignment, and also to make a choice in favor of other search regions where it was possible to find an experienced professional within the salary range preferred by the client.

How did we manage to do this and why should you not be afraid to think outside the box and try various experiments in tech recruitment? Look for answers in our new case below.

The task and difficulties

Recently, a large fintech company approached us with a request to find a middle+ blockchain developer. The company's head office was in the USA, but the development office was located in Abu Dhabi, and it was important that the requested IT talent could quickly relocate there. The position had a number of points that made the request quite difficult:

1

Many candidates were wary of relocating to the UAE, whose mentality and culture are quite specific and very different from their home countries.
2

In addition to experience with Ethereum and a specific stack (Solidity, web3.js, truffle), the potential candidate was expected to have a confident command of English from B2 (Upper-Intermediate) and higher, since the work was supposed to be in an international team.
3

As one of the selection stages, it was proposed to perform a big test task, which negatively affected the duration of the processes, and also repelled most tech talents.
4

The customer wanted to consider developers from the CIS countries, but there are quite a few blockchain professionals in these regions, many prefer not to advertise their experience, so there were difficulties with finding and forming a pool of relevant candidates.
5

The designated salary fork did not quite correspond to market realities — the amount of up to 10 thousand dollars did not motivate experienced professionals to change their current jobs and move to a complex and specific region.

Nevertheless, the customer offered pleasant bonuses — medical insurance for the employee and their family, assistance with moving and finding housing. In addition, the product was interesting and non-standard. We decided to give it a try and started searching.

How we've filled the job opening

One of the key problems we encountered shortly after the start of the search was that the professionals found with relevant experience and the technology stack needed by the customer were not ready to relocate to Abu Dhabi — many were confused not only by the specifics of the country, but also by the salary fork of up to 10 thousand dollars. Middle blockchain developers received about the same amount at their current jobs, and the salary of many senior professionals was even higher — it turned out to be difficult to get them interested on the terms that the customer offered.

Those IT talents who were not against continuing the dialogue were “lost" at the stage of completing the test assignment: it took too much time to complete it, which affected the willingness of candidates to be selected.

Having generated statistics on the job opening, including the number of refusals, and analyzed their causes, we came out with the results to the customer: we had to discuss what points could be corrected and how to build further work processes.

The importance of the principle of partnership in IT recruiting is not just words, and each case gives an opportunity to see how true this is. To effectively fill the job opening, the importance of coordinated actions, the ability to openly discuss controversial issues with the client and together look for possible solutions plays a vital role. In this case, we recommended simplifying the recruiting stages for this position by removing the test assignment: due to its large task, it really took up a lot of time resources from candidates, which affected their motivation to participate in further selection.

Also, after analyzing salary forks on the international market for blockchain developers, we suggested changing the search strategy and persuaded the client to consider blockchain developers in other regions — Pakistan and India. There were several reasons:

1

Many people are wary of these markets under the influence of stereotypes, but there are talented tech professionals there: this is due to the high competition between candidates — therefore, most of them are constantly improving their professional skills, increasing their expertise and doing everything possible to be competitive.
2

Salary forks are somewhat different from the CIS region, which allowed us to remain within the framework of the request indicated by the client.
3

When building a motivation strategy, we focused on the possibility of gaining work experience in an international interesting project. In these markets, there is a particularly high demand among candidates for job openings in international companies, so such an emphasis helped to interest several talented blockchain developers.

Changing the search regions and shortening the selection stages bore fruit — soon we found a middle blockchain developer from India who accepted the offer. The specialist was attracted by interesting tasks and work in an international project, in addition, he was focused on vacancies with relocation and reacted positively to the prospect of moving to Abu Dhabi.

Success factors

The principle of partnership
The client was ready to compromise and listened to our advice: together we found effective solutions that allowed us to fill the job opening with a strong specialist.
A competent search strategy
Having experimentally established that it would be difficult to find a specialist in the CIS in a short time at the request of the customer, we suggested looking in other regions — India and Pakistan. Despite the specifics of working with these markets, a large initial selection of relevant specialists, we have formed a pool of finalists, one of whom was offered by the client.
Lucky Hunter expertise
We helped the customer identify bottlenecks in recruiting processes and correct them in order to successfully fill the job opening: we conducted market analysis on the blockchain profile, determined the salary fork, optimized the selection stages by removing the test assignment.

Do you need to find blockchain developers? Contact us, and we will do tech staff recruitment for you!

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