Background
New Context Services is a Lean Security company based in San Francisco that builds secure, scalable infrastructure for enterprise clients.
In 2014, New Context's consulting services were expanding quickly and the company needed to double its team of Sr. DevOps and Security engineers to fulfill existing and upcoming contracts. This case study will outline how I helped them to:
- Double their engineering team
- Build an Applicant tracking system in Salesforce
- Give the C-Suite real time dashboards that gave an overview of the recruiting pipeline
Problem
The competition for Sr DevOps engineers in San Francisco in 2014 was incredibly high. Everyone needed (and still needs) Sr DevOps Engineers to build and maintain their infrastructure. The challenge then was to find incredible engineers who aligned with the company values and culture at a time when everyone else was also looking for their services.
I also knew that if we were to be able to recruit DevOps engineers, we would have to offer something different from what other companies were offering. The following three core values made New Context unique and also helped me to identify and target candidates
- Remote working
- Committed DevOps practioners
- Interesting projects and clients
Because New Context was a consulting company, it's ability to generate additional revenue and grow was dependant on it being able to hire new Engineers. Additionally, any time that other engineers used interview candidates was time that they could not be billing the clients. As a result, executives were extremely interested in the process and reporting of the hiring process.
Persona
I started by identifying a user persona that I would target and reach out to on LinkedIn.
- Working for companies with good DevOps practices (Apollo Group, Cerner)
- Working in cities with limited DevOps opportunities (Phoenix, Kansas City)
- Had connections to existing team members
Process
Once, I had a target persona, I set out to design and recruiting process and work flow that:
- Responsive and agile to business needs
- Minimized time required of existing engineers
- Respectful of candidates time
- Cost effective - recruiting can get expensive
Product
To track each step of the hiring process, I used Salesforce to build an applicant tracking system because:
- C-Suite was already spending a lot of time in Salesforce
- Easy to generate forms for engineers to give feedback
- Build in capability to create hiring dashboards and reports
Results
After six months of recruiting we were able to:
- Hire 16 Sr DevOps and Security Engineers
- Each hire cost roughly $1600 per hire
- Hire and onboard all engineers on an average of 3.5 weeks per hire