Ruby on Rails Developers – Case Study Kilpatrick Executive Search

BUCURESTI - 9 noiembrie 2012

Comunicat tip General in Afaceri, IT&C, HR

In June 2012 Kilpatrick Executive Search was engaged by an IT company to source Ruby on Rails Developers in Timisoara. The company was new on the market and had plans to organize a big Development Center in Timisoara, so they needed to hire several candidates, ranging from junior to senior profiles.

Ruby on Rails Developers – Case Study Kilpatrick Executive Search
 With this approach - both as territory to be covered, but also as seniority of profiles - we came to a list of over 250 candidates coming from more than 80 companies. 

Silvia Mancos - Senior Consultant

This type of project involves mapping and approaching all the candidates suitable for the job in the companies chosen together with the client but also in other companies which have this profile in their organization.

The project was managed by two Kilpatrick Executive Search Consultants, both with previous experience in IT projects. The main strategy for the identification of candidates was direct search, while the approaching, attraction and selection was done either via phone discussions, or face to face interviews. Due to the nature of this project and the type of profiles searched, the technical testing and also the negotiation and hiring of the candidates was done exclusively by the client.

After a first briefing with the client, we established first of all the profile of the candidates, with the main technical and soft skills requirements, and also set the initial strategy for the identification and approaching of candidates. Due to the fact that Timisoara is still a very small market for candidates with a proven Ruby on Rails experience, our initial strategy was to target candidates from all over Romania, Moldova and Serbia, and approach all candidates that had been working either in a corporate environment, or in personal project/ as freelancers, with Ruby. With this very large approach (both as territory to be covered, but also as seniority of profiles) we came to a list of over 250 candidates coming from more than 80 companies (with just under 20 of them involved directly in Ruby on Rails development and the big majority of them being located either in Buchrest and Cluj, or in Serbia and Moldova). Unfortunately over 70 percent of the identified candidates were not interested in our offer, the main reasons being the resistance to relocation, the resistance to full-time jobs (a big number of experienced Ruby on Rails Developers choosing to work either as freelancers, or part-time/ project-based/ remote) and their salary expectations (too high for our client's budget). Still, with all these obstacles, we provided a list of 8 interested candidates, but after the first tests, interviews and negotiations with the client, none of them was hired. This situation required a rethinking of the recruiting strategy and after another meeting with our client we decided together to switch to profiles with experience in Web Development and a good knowledge of Object Oriented Programming and Model View Controller pattern, candidates with this type of profile being easier to teach and convert to Ruby on Rails. 

This new strategy gave us access to a far more larger pool of candidates and so by the end of this new approach we came up with a list of 19 interested candidates, suitable for junior, experienced and senior roles. After advanced negotiations (both in terms of salary offers) with the majority of them, 2 candidates from the list were hired and so the project was successfully delivered.

Also our client now has a deeper understating of the Romanian Ruby on Rails and Web Development market, having received extremely useful information regarding the experience level of professionals with this profile from different companies and regions of Romania and a salary benchmark for each level of seniority.

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