Seven Step Recruiting Goes International!

Seven Step recently delivered an international recruiting program  for a high-profile U.S.-based technology company that is expanding their consulting services to Europe. The client needed to recruit over 100 consultants in several countries but hadn't set up an operation in Europe yet. Due to the delivery timeline with their clients they had to prove capability to recruit in these areas quickly.

Seven Step deployed a team of sourcing experts and recruiters to source and screen IT consultant candidates across Europe. At first, we were concerned about the language barriers, but it turned out that communication with technology candidates in Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Poland was actually not too much of a hurdle. The candidates needed to be fluent in their native language and conversational in English, so other than learning local terms and cultural differences regarding phone screens, our calls were welcomed and we were able to network quite effectively.

How did we do it? It wasn't overly complicated. We set up Skype and Xing accounts for each recruiter. We used social networking tools to find potential candidates. We emailed and cold called like mad.

In one month's time we were able to source over 4000 technical candidates , including hard-to-find experts in Cisco and Microsoft technologies. We spoke to 500 of the candidates and we qualified 100+ for the client.

The client now has a database of over 3000 candidates who are available for referrals, 500 that have had at least a touch-base conversation, and 100 qualified applicants to start placing into the business.

In pursuing this project, Seven Step gained valuable experience in using US-based recruiters to network and source overseas. Maybe now we can reverse the offshoring trend and bring more jobs back to the US!