Case Study

We doubled an ambitious team in 12 months

Marque and Type Dark (11)

About Strategic Blue

Strategic Blue deliver efficient pricing and risk management services that benefit customers of cloud services globally. Founded in 2010 by Dr James Mitchell (CEO) and Mike Smith (COO), both who came from a Renewable Energy background, the goal was to minimise the Carbon footprint of IT services.

The Challenge

When we met Strategic Blue in 2018 they were a team of 8 with a dream to become the pre-eminent trader of cloud resources. They wanted to make markets for all of the major hyper-scale public cloud providers and to do that, they needed the right people.

Until now they had managed to recruit through word of mouth and outreach but they needed to scale fast, and wanted a recruiter that could help them find the right people, without the risk of high employee turnover down the line.

The Solution

Strategic Blue were the perfect match for us for three reasons:

  1. They were ambitious and keen to scale the business fast

  2. Large scale global recruitment drives are our key strength

  3. They had a positive working culture

We set to work fast with Strategic Blue and settled into the office for a few days so that we could work alongside them and get a good grasp on the working culture. Our first step was to work on the employer brand. Together we created:

  • Recruitment brochures for prospective candidates

  • Bespoke cover sheets that replace the need for telephone interviews

  • Custom recruitment programme management tool on monday.com

The Hiring Manager could log in to the platform at any time to review the longlist, shortlist and sources. They also had the option to shortlist candidates they thought were a good fit.

Shared Risk

To ensure long-term success with Strategic Blue we agreed shared risk terms with a portion of the fees paid on:

  • Signature of employment contract

  • On their start date

  • Successful probation

  • Their first year anniversary

The Result

In 12 months we’ve more than doubled the team in London placing 10 key positions. Including:

  • 1 HR and Finance Analyst

  • 1 Pricing Analyst

  • 1 Head of Marketing

  • 1 Architecture Manager

  • 3 Clojure Developers

  • 1 Head of Direct Sales

  • 1 Technical Consultant

  • 1 Commercial and Contract Manager

100% Employee Retention Rate

100% Assignment Completion Rate

75% CV to Interview Ratio

91% Offer to Acceptance Ratio

Client Feedback

We run a career development program and treat clients and candidates alike as our customers, meaning the feedback from Strategic Blue has been two-fold.

“Appointing Findrs as our sole provider has been the perfect result for us and over the past 15 months have exceeded all expectations. They have filled every vacancy we have opened whilst also minimising time spent on hiring by department heads. This has enabled us to keep focused on growth and now our next round of investment."

Mike Smith, COO of Strategic Blue

“Whilst many recruiters will contact you regarding the same, generic opportunities, Findrs presented a role which stood out and very much matched what I was looking for”

Hitesh Shah, Financial Solution Architect at Strategic Blue

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