Golang Developers for Research and Development lab

The biggest start-up in the world

Employer is a company whose products are known and used worldwide by 600 million users. The company currently employs over 4,000 engineers, of which 250 work in the company’s elite Research and Development (R&D) department. One of such departments was opened in Poland and we were supposed to strengthen this department by recruiting, among others, a Golang Developer.

The period of the described project: 2021

Cooperation continues until today.

Challenge

The employer only employs the best of the best, i.e. award winners of mathematics and IT competitions, people with work experience in Silicon Valley or outstanding programmers with documented successes. Therefore, the pool of candidates was relatively small.
The recruitment process had five or more stages, so it is longer than 99% of other recruitment processes.
In addition to programming skills, knowledge of English was very important, enabling free communication in this language.
Soft skills were as important as technical, because cooperation takes place in global teams, including the ones from Silicon Valley.

Solution

As the IT recruitment agency and outsourcing company, we had two long meetings with the IT Director, who told us about the company and its challenges, including the ones in the position. We collected a lot of valuable information, and also showed him some sample blank CVs to check the criteria by which he evaluated them. After this conversation, we came to the conclusion that we must focus only on the best technical universities in Poland and/or the best companies from their sector.

We studied the stories of several current employees of the company, checked where they worked before and on this basis we selected organizations that can employ the people we are currently looking for. This list included the world’s most desirable IT company. We carefully examined all of these organizations, checked the notes in previous interviews with candidates from these organizations and also reviewed entries and Internet forums. Through this we learned the pros and cons of each of these companies.

In the case of candidates from other companies, we were looking for people from the best universities, as well as among the Olympians, people who gained distinction in competitions, award winners or the top users of Stackoverflow and Github.

We went to the Meetup group of Go language programmers – Golang Warsaw.

We were looking for candidates all over Poland, because the offer was so unique (distributed systems, hundreds of millions of users) that it could persuade people from other cities to relocate.

Results

At the beginning, we assumed that the elaborate recruitment process could be a problem because in the meantime, candidates may receive offers from other companies and accept them instead. In the end, it turned out that there were not many equally attractive offers in the Polish IT market and none of the candidates resigned during our recruitment process.

Due to the fact that we had very specific criteria, we found fewer candidates than we usually do in other recruiting processes. Because every candidate was selected carefully, each one of them was invited to a job interview. The recruitment was successful and resulted in further commissions.