Global online trading platform business

Find out how we successfully addressed the recruitment challenges faced by an established online trading platform business looking to launch their 16th office globally in the UK.

Overview:

This case study highlights how Reqiva understood and successfully addressed the recruitment challenges faced by an established, online trading platform business looking to launch their 16th office globally in the UK. With an established internal talent team based across Dubai and Europe, Reqiva was selected to work as the company’s UK talent partner, working closely with the C-suite and global Talent Managers to fully understand the company’s market positioning, objectives, culture, and strategic roadmap, with the directive of building a world class, global technology leadership hub from the ground up.

Company background:

Formed in 1999, the company, is a world leading, online trading platform business. They enable customers to trade on currencies, indices, and commodities, 24/7. Today, they have 16 offices globally, with headquarters in Malaysia and key offices in Dubai, South America, and Europe with circa 1,600 employees.

The Project:

Over the last 5 years, the company had experienced unprecedented growth and felt they needed to bolster their software engineering leadership capability to help expand their customer base and ensure the company removed technical and product roadblocks, to enable and drive the next phase of growth. Although well-established globally, the company lacked knowledge of the UK Tech market and needed a recruitment partner that fully understood the challenges in attracting and securing world class tech talent to a tight deadline.

The initial search brief was to focus on securing a global, SVP of Engineering to be based in the UK, acting as MD in launching the office in Reading, Berkshire UK. Alongside this, we were also required to identify and secure a further four VP Of Engineering leaders for the UK, who would support the SVP in delivering the strategic, global technical roadmap for the company, managing specific disciplines and teams based globally.

Key Challenges:

There were three main challenges with this project. The first was that although the business was well established globally, it was not known in the UK and for many potential candidates this posed some level of concern. The seniority and technical demands of the roles also meant that the candidate pool was fairly limited, requiring an extremely targeted approach to candidate engagement and attraction. The client also followed a detailed and lengthy application process requiring significant investment in time from potential candidates at the early stages of the process. This required Reqiva to work in close partnership with shortlisted candidates in order to ensure commitment and reduce the risk of dropouts.

The solution:

Following initial discovery meetings with key senior stakeholders, we gained a detailed understanding of the company’s vision, values, culture and objectives, as well as a clear picture of the technology challenges the company was tackling including the full technical, behavioural and functional competencies that were required to form the leadership team.

From here, we formed an internal project team that would work with the company’s senior Leadership and Talent teams; assigning a Lead Account Manager, Delivery and Research consultants that would communicate weekly with progress and market updates.

We conducted a full go-to-market strategy with the goal of engaging and identifying highly relevant candidates, which included:

• Talent Mapping, headhunting and passive candidate engagement
• Advertising and thorough role promotion across all major online job boards as well as Reqiva’s own website
• Targeted marketing campaigns to Reqiva’s expansive candidate community and database built since 2008
• Social media marketing across LinkedIn and other social channels to promote the opportunities

Following this, thorough video and face-to-face interviews were conducted to assess candidate’s suitability, shortlisting only the top performing candidates based on our selection criteria. We then worked closely with candidates to support them through the complex application and selection process and ensure a smooth transition through to successful offer and acceptance.

The result:

Within 3 weeks Reqiva had successfully identified and secured the SVP of Engineering and within 6 weeks, a further four VP Of Engineering hires had been successfully delivered. Following this success, we were subsequently engaged to support the client on Phase 2 of their growth plan, successfully supporting them in securing Principal, Staff and Technical Lead Engineers for the team in the UK.