Our partner is one of Europe’s Top 10 Banking Groups, providing financial products to individual customers, entrepreneurs and companies. The Bank is a leader for change in the financial industry and is famous for introducing ground-breaking products.
In 2018, our clients decided to launch a completely new innovative platform for mobile users. An implication of this bold project required tonnes of work in front-end, back-end and QA testing.
After the project’s first scope estimation, it quickly became clear that the in-house development teams didn’t have sufficient velocity to carry out all the tasks. In addition, there was a time pressure. Our client knew that they needed to act rapidly to gain the advantage of the market opportunity. To succeed, they set out to form a cross-functional team in just one month, what at first seemed to be unrealistic task.
At Scalo, we love challenges and making the impossible possible. When we got word of the bank’s challenge, we didn’t waste time pondering, we accepted it.
The first thing we did was launching multiple recruitment processes in different IT hubs. It resulted in building a preselected list of highly qualified software engineers in just a few days.
The next phase embraced verification of competences of all the candidates in a flash in order to select the right candidates. We chose to run assessment centre workshops, the recruitment method typically used to select the best candidates for top management positions.
The software developers found it a bit odd, but agreed anyway to join the recruitment workshop. We gathered them all one day in one place to monitor how they would manage a certain task and solve hypothetical problems in software projects. This simple idea allowed us not only to verify their technical knowledge, but also their soft and social skills.
Before month’s end, we delivered to our clients a list of verified candidates list.
When we introduced the candidates to our client, they were shocked how perfect they fit into the project. Our partner promptly picked 10 specialists to join the project and kept only one person on the reserve bench. Our acceptance rate was an exceptional 92%. After just 1 month, our client gained a highly qualified team who were ready to start coding.