Strengthen your engineering team

We run a cultural filter and a technical filter, then bring you candidates. You interview them and you decide. On projects where we already know your team, we barely have to ask anything. Where we do not, we ask about everything.

Most clients start with one engineer or two. That is what we usually suggest.

The first two weeks are yours to judge. If the person is not a fit, you do not pay for them and we bring you someone else. The second round takes two to three weeks, usually less, because the other candidates are still there.

What clients worry about most is whether the person will fit, and it is the right thing to worry about. We filter for it before you see a single CV. Our interviews follow two hiring methods we have worked with for years: Hiring for Attitude, by Mark Murphy, and the A Method from Who, by Geoff Smart and Randy Street.

English and communication weigh as much as the technical side in those interviews, and sometimes more. We look for the same balance in how someone works: knowing when to ask a question and when to resolve something alone, and moving without being pushed.

Once one of our engineers is working with you, we know your team, and the next match gets easier.

Those two meetings are where problems get found while they are still small.

We look for risks early. We help the engineer communicate when that is where the trouble is. We handle raises, so compensation never lands on your desk. And we give feedback in both directions, to our engineer and to the manager they work with.

We also end up with suggestions about how the work is organised. Three that came out of these meetings:

• A client’s team was putting in long hours every week. We suggested setting up an on-call rotation.
• Tickets were hard to follow, so we worked with them on how those were written and managed.
• A team that had never run retros started running them.

We do not move engineers between clients. Whoever starts on your product stays on it, learns how your business works, and after a year or two is usually the person who knows the system best.

Engineers leaving us is the other case, and it does not happen often. When it does, we put someone else on your product and we carry the cost of bringing them up to speed. The handover is our problem.