Sourcing the founding team roles for a global tech scale-up business
Global
Permanent, leadership
39
Candidates onboarded
7
Month brief to completion
8
Candidates sourced across 4 continents and 8 countries
The company
Founded in 2013, this data centre developer and operator has become renowned in the market for its exemplary design, build and operation of data centres and mission critical systems for crucial industries such as aviation, financial services, utilities, the military and government.
Proudly staffed by data centre and operational experts, the company’s main goal is to develop data centres that not only perform to the highest standards worldwide but are also sustainable and beneficial to local communities.
Since its inception in London, the company has continued to evolve and now operates from offices across the globe, including Seattle, New York, Dublin, Jakarta, Dubai and Cape Town.
The challenge
After expanding its operation across all continents, the company realised its need to scale its small existing team of 16 people at pace to support its plans for continued growth.
Due to a lack of internal hiring capability at the time, the company knew it would need the help of an external consultancy specialising in property and construction to find the talent it desperately needed.
Due to the importance of developing its founding team, the company needed to work with a consultancy able to quickly grasp what was needed from prospective candidates and the impact they would be expected to have on the business, whilst also understanding the scale and pace required.
Capstone had worked with the company’s Development Director previously. This long-standing relationship and our reputation in the property and construction space resulted in him recommending us to the company’s hiring team. We were asked to support the hiring team in sourcing multiple roles, ranging from head of construction to project planners to chief executives, to work across the company's many global offices.
The role
The company wanted to expand its founding team with numerous hires across its global office sites.
The service
Due to the scale and pace of the company’s mandates, we began a search approach across all of the roles. While some of the roles were well within the reach of our existing network, others were more specific and required us to go further afield. We used a combination of our in-house research tools, our network and database, as well as referrals, advertising and headhunting.
To ensure we were able to find candidates with the right skills and experience quickly and efficiently, we held weekly meetings with the company and its executive team. These meetings would often take place late at night or early in the morning due to the differing time zones, but we were committed to discovering as much as we could about the candidates they were looking for.
Having these regular conversations allowed us to discuss each candidate and role extensively, whilst also building an excellent and valuable rapport with the teams working across several departments.
As the roles were considered highly attractive, our team were able to use their knowledge of the company, its strict requirements and the industry itself to quickly narrow down the large volume of applications and ensure we only presented candidates with the right mindset, skills and experience.
The result
Capstone on-boarded thirty-nine people into the company in just seven months, across four continents and eight countries. This involved several relocations including a Project Planner from Sweden to the UK, a Country Manager from Dubai to Indonesia and a Construction Project Director from Cyprus to Abu Dhabi.
Focusing predominantly on hiring roles within the company’s DEV CO side, which was responsible for building data centres, we filled a wide range of roles requiring varying skillsets and expertise. These included project planners, construction managers and board directors. We also placed a Chief Executive of Operations, who has since been promoted to CEO of the entire company.
We used our network and industry knowledge to successfully establish 90% of the company’s founding team, saving the company significant time, resources and manpower. By hiring senior leadership roles first, we were able to introduce more decision makers into the business which enabled the company to build specialist teams around them. Our involvement also helped to set the tone for what the recruitment process and governance needed to be moving forward.
Stakeholders at the company have expressed great satisfaction with our working partnership and the candidates we sourced for them, highlighting their appreciation for how accessible we were, even when dealing with differing time zones, and our understanding of the importance of the work we were doing for them.
Client testimonial
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