Recruiting for Agile development teams is a little different than filling a more "traditional" role. Agile teams work quickly and intimately with on another. When building Agile teams, fit and skill play equal and integral roles. So, what happens when you need to build not one, but two Agile teams in less than two months? You take the path that offer the most effective and accountable recruiting solution of course.
Take a look inside your wallet. Aside from some family photos, random business cards and a few crumpled bills, what do you see? Chances are some credit cards, right?
Some stats say that more than 72 percent of Americans have at least one. (That’s somewhere north of 165,000,000 credit cards. That’s a lot of credit cards). While they might seem like magic money, and how and when you signed up for them is probably a distant memory, we can assure you a lot goes on in the background to get credit cards into those neat little pockets in your wallet.
One of Yoh's clients, a pretty big company in the pretty big banking industry, recently acquired another pretty big company—the US-based credit card operations of a multinational financial company. So, you know—no big deal. Except that of course it was, and on top of that, they needed to put together three Agile Development teams tasked with creating the necessary processes that would allow the recently acquired credit card company to easily open new accounts for a big-box retailer in Canada. And these teams needed to be put together fast—really fast.
The Dilemma
Each Agile team needed to have eight highly skilled professionals of which included Agile developers, Business Systems Analysts, Quality Assurance Engineers and Scrum Masters. And, all three needed to be complete and ready to go within four weeks’ time. This meant 24 talented individuals needed to be found, vetted, recruited and on-boarded in a fraction of the time that it usually takes.
The Strategy
It takes a team of highly specialized recruiters to build a team of specialty or niche talent. The Agile recruiters used on this project needed to know the in's and out's of prospective candidates just as much as which traits they didn't have.
The search parameters extended to the local and national levels. Recruiters looked for candidates that best matched the client's specifications and conducted several rounds of interviews; including video interviews with some of the more far-flung candidates. With extensive technical knowledge, Yoh's recruiters made sure that only those individuals who would truly meet the needs of the position were brought on.
The Impact
Two Agile development teams were assembled and working together within two weeks and the third was buttoned up within the month. At no point during the intense recruiting process was efficiency sacrificed for effectiveness. The agile teams our recruiters created nailed it: four months in, and the processes they’d developed had helped the client open more than a million new accounts.
