Recruiting niche talent was the key to powering this client’s digital growth ambitions

Operating and enhancing a market leading data and digital ecosystem needs committed, innovative people with the right mix of entrepreneurial initiative, creativity, commercial acumen, and technical expertise and experience.

Finding talent that aligns with a client's culture and possesses the right skills is a challenging task. This was particularly true for this client as we were seeking permanent engineers in a market where contract roles are predominant. Often, top-tier talent is drawn to contract work due to its flexibility.

Time was an additional challenge. The team responsible for the initial build were rolling off and embedding the intellectual property in-house with an operations team that included technical leadership and engineering capability was a priority.

Davidson’s Technology Recruitment team met with the client to understand the client’s operating model, commercial motivations, time constraints, decision-making process, and the profile of the ideal candidate.

The team quickly understood that the type of candidates the client was looking for were not those who would be identified through a keyword search. The search would require leveraging networks developed over multiple years—in some cases decades—proactive, out of the box thinking, and educating and enlisting staff across Davidson nationally to ensure the largest number of people possible were reviewing their networks for suitable talent.

A candidate pack outlining the key skills, the client’s core values, value-creating strategies, business model and the key benefits were shared with those prospective hires identified by the Davidson team.

The momentum of decision making was maintained by regular structured reviews of applicants, recruitment status and progress. This ensured that the talent identified was not lost to faster moving recruitment processes in other organisations.

Davidson’s transition approach included the identification and recruitment of both contract and permanent staff.

The client was delighted with the quality of the applicants and over 95% of those submitted for consideration were progressed for interview.

Over the five-month engagement, 15 staff were recruited—8 contractors and 7 permanents—a mix of engineers, developers, and technical leads.

Of the 5 technical leads recruited, 2 were female. This met the client’s diversity and inclusion targets and was consistent with their overall business sustainability goals.