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IT Consultants for the global IT Advisory Company

“The Big Four” Company

We worked with a company from the so-called “Big Four”, in the Business Consulting department. We were tasked with finding over 20 Business and Technical Consultants (including a Manager) for a team that was to develop a product for calculating credit risk. The recipients of the tool were clients from around the world, mainly from the banking area.

IT Consultants for the global IT Advisory Company

The period of the described project: 2020

Cooperation continues until today.

Challenge

  • Position in-between finance and IT areas. We were looking for two types of people: graduates of technical universities or technology experts who would know the concepts related to credit risk management, as well as experts on those issues who were passionate about new technologies.

  • The difficulty was reaching such people who would combine both expert areas.

  • The candidates had to be fluent in English.

  • Candidates had to be open to frequent foreign travel.

  • Candidates had to be open to close cooperation with demanding clients.

  • For many technical candidates, working at a Big Four company was not encouraging.

  • Due to the importance of the project, three other agencies also worked on recruitment in parallel.

Solution

Due to the prestige and reputation of the company, we decided to narrow down the search to the best economics and technical universities for graduates. Profiles of people employed so far in this team confirmed this direction of search. In addition, we noticed that the largest group are graduates of the Warsaw School of Economics in the field of Quantitative Methods and Information Systems. We sent the potential candidates a message in the style “Your colleagues are already working for us, join them!”.

From the beginning, we assumed that in this recruitment, an elite candidate would not come to us themself, but we would have to find them. This resulted in us not publishing job offers for the position.

Although the Warsaw market is very large, we also decided to go beyond this area from the beginning and contacted candidates all over Poland and Poles abroad. The first conversations took place remotely, the next ones happened in Warsaw. The job offer was interesting enough that the candidates were willing to move to another city for it.

One of the biggest advantages of the offer, apart from the fact that it was a new product and the department was on the rising tide, was the possibility of direct cooperation with the Director. Usually people in the positions of Consultants reported to Managers, and not to Directors. Therefore, in this case a consultant in this position would have the opportunity to peek and learn from the best.

We prepared the candidates well for the job interviews, each of those who received an offer were invited by us for lunch and in exchange they shared their impressions and opinions. Thanks to this, we were able to better understand the position and act even more effectively.

With the partnership approach to recruitment, candidates, regardless of whether they received a job offer or not, recommended their colleagues to us. Sometimes it was just a name, but usually it was an email address or a phone number.

Results

The project lasted several months and was a big challenge, also on the organizational side. Recruitment consisted of three stages, which each had to be coordinated. The number of candidates we sent to the client exceeded 100 and at that time it was our first position on the border between two worlds – IT and finance. As the company specializes in IT, we had serious doubts on whether we could handle the task at hand; furthermore, customer expectations have also evolved over time.

The metamorphosis of communication that we were able to pass on to the candidates was amazing. We collected so much feedback from the candidates during the process that the final briefing was 10x better than the original version. Thanks to that nobody really rejected us.

Among the IT recruitment agencies that worked simultaneously on this position, the company employed the most people from us. We have also been praised and recommended to other departments of the company. As a result, we managed to employ almost 50 people in total.