What was the scope of their involvement?
We had an initial call to discuss the specifics of our work and how we differ from other software development agencies. We’re usually brought in as an augmentation of existing in-house teams, and often as more experienced developers that can take the projects further.
The developers needed to be able to organize brainstorming, gather requirements and basically help the existing team achieve better levels of software quality than they’d had before we stepped in. We weren’t looking for genius coders who couldn’t talk to people. This is how we described the perfect candidate to Bee Talents.
We described how we work and what some of our projects look like so that Bee Talents had enough information to pitch candidates. We needed to prove to them that we were going to give them enough challenges, but also enough support to grow further and have some interesting challenges in their careers.
After that, we started the process of finding candidates.
For them, combing through people is always a case of the same-kind complexity. They have to search through hundreds of LinkedIn profiles, reach out to 20–30, and recommend 10 for us to talk to. They prefer to have contracts that span recruiting 2–3 people, which equate to 2–3 success fees for the same amount of work.
After giving out invitations through LinkedIn, Bee Talent handles the first phase of interviews, basically early screenings focusing on the person’s language abilities. Bee Talents checks how comfortable the person is with using English. They also do the first assessment of the person’s soft skills, looking at whether they’ll fit into the team and work properly with other people.
After they’ve greenlighted all the fields we’re looking for, they’ll send the candidates to us. We handle only the technical part of the interview, after which we make a decision.
What is the team composition?
Our main points of contact are a recruiter and an account person. I know that there are other people on the Bee Talents side doing the initial reach-out, including a language expert.
How did you come to work with Bee Talents?
I trained CrossFit with one of the people who later became a sales associate of Bee Talents. It was essentially a personal connection. I’d also heard about Bee Talents before because they were founded by Aleksandra (CEO), who was already well-known and respected in the development community.
It’s kind of rare to have a recruiter that’s respected among developers. There’s an incredibly low signal to noise ratio when developers are getting lots of offers from recruiters, which are usually completely unfit to their experience and technologies.
Aleksandra had worked for a well-known software company, so she already had the social capital to attract clients. Everybody we talked to about Bee Talents was happy with them, so we decided to give them a chance.
How much have you invested with them?
As far as I remember, their fee is a single monthly salary of the developer we’re hiring. Half or a third of that is paid upfront, and the rest is paid after signing the contract with the developer. This might sound small since other recruitment agencies request two salaries, but we’re a company that pays a lot.
Bee Talents is happy to get a single month’s salary as a fee. For us, the ballpark is €4,500 (approximately $5,100 USD) per person. I believe we recruited two people in 2018 and three in 2019.
What is the status of this engagement?
Our first collaboration was between December 2017–January 2018. The second collaboration was in 2019, and we’ll sign another contract with Bee Talents the next time we’re going to be recruiting.
The project was successful since the company was able to onboard someone to fill the position. The workflow that the team used for the project was effective. The company was most impressed by how the team operated with transparency, enthusiasm, dedication and flexibility.