Case Study – Head of Architecture

Projects that involve more senior roles offer different challenges, but we are uniquely placed as a company with a history in the IT sector.

Over the years, we’ve built up a wealth of knowledge about the tech ecosystem, and we keep in touch with tech professionals as they progress in their careers.

We stay up-to-date on the changes in tech and our resourcers are well informed about how roles fit into IT teams. All of this together give us a clear vision about what the client wants.

What was the aim for this project?

We always set up an initial call with the hiring managers so that we can understand as much as possible about exactly what kind of person they are looking for.

After this first call, we had a good understanding about who we were looking for, the skills and experience they need, and how they will fit into the team. It became clear that experience in senior positions was important.

A national retailer was looking to expand their ecommerce offering and wanted to bring someone on board that could develop this ecommerce function.

They needed an architect that had experience in senior positions, and had worked on developing strategies from scratch.

Did you come across any problems in the early stages?

In the early stages, we were finding plenty of candidates that had some of the skills we were looking for, but didn’t quite have the experience in senior positions that was important to the role.

Was it easy finding the right candidates for this role?

We expanded the pool of candidates to include senior architects and then spent time talking to candidates to get a complete picture about their work history and experience.

Making sure our resourcers are well equipped with the information they need is vital to matching the right candidates with the role.

How did the project turn out?

The project went well. Our resourcers found some great candidates early on with the right skills. As we worked with the hiring manager to set up calls and interviews with the first cohort, we continued to look for people that would be a good fit.

In the end, a candidate from the early group was a good fit and they progressed through to getting an offer.

A project for us isn’t finished until we’ve touched base with candidates that didn’t progress. We always get in touch to inform candidates why they didn’t move forward for a role, and to let them know about other roles that might be right for them.

How did this project compare to similar projects?

The process we follow for all of our projects makes the process of finding candidates very smooth, and this role was no exception. Early talks with hiring managers normally throws up any issues that are then ironed out. In this case, we had no real issues early on and so moving forward to finding candidates went quickly.