Need to urgently hire a tech team for your business? It can take months to source, interview and get developers onboarded using traditional hiring methods — as the SaaS company Albatros found out when they had to build their tech team from scratch. Here’s how Albatros rapidly scaled their team using OfferZen, hiring 10 developers and saving 68% on hiring costs along the way.
Check out the full case study here!
Addressing Albatros’ hiring challenges
Albatros is a SaaS company based in Germany that builds course management software for golfers and golf courses to better connect across Europe and South Africa. After NBC Universal acquired Albatros in 2022, the company started hiring developers from South Africa as part of their global expansion efforts.
However, this came coupled with significant challenges — Albatros had to source a team from scratch to take over a critical technical project:
“We’ve been rewriting our legacy software built in the early 2000s, it’s been a seven-year long process to shift it to a micro service, web-based system. This involves a completely new database, a modern tech stack and building our product from scratch. We are under pressure and really need engineers.”
Here’s how Albatros were able to hit their hiring and growth goals by turning to OfferZen as their solution:
Speeding up the sourcing process
Before starting a subscription with OfferZen, Albatros relied on traditional hiring methods such as recruitment agencies and LinkedIn to grow their team. However, this proved to be slow and cumbersome when Albatros needed to move quickly to hire developers:
“When using LinkedIn to hire developers, it took us weeks to review CVs and just get to do a pre-screening of candidates,” says Grant Little, Senior Manager of Product and Technology at Albatros. “Then add several weeks before you get to the interviews. This is a huge problem because good developers are going to be gone in no time — you can’t take three weeks to do an interview.”
After hearing about OfferZen, they signed up for a subscription to hire as many developers as they needed with an Unlimited hiring plan. Grant quickly saw an improvement in the speed of the sourcing process:
"On OfferZen, I reach out to candidates and I’ll have a first interview within 2 days!”
For Grant, a large reason for this success is the ability he has to rapidly scan through standardised detailed profiles on OfferZen compared to other platforms. Developers also indicate their calendar availability, and showcase what they want in their ideal next job. This helps Grant identify candidates that are a match for his role(s), and schedule interviews quickly.
Getting access to quality developers
Developers go through a curation process before they can start using OfferZen for their job search. Grant found this a useful distinguishing feature to get access to better quality candidates:
“I didn’t like doing sourcing on LinkedIn, the quality of candidates was really poor. It just wastes your time even looking through a lot of those CVs. There’s also no pre-screening of candidates happening, which was solved when we started using OfferZen.”
He also found it easier to directly message developers using OfferZen, which allowed him to better explain Albatros’ mission and the technical projects developers would be working on:
“Having direct conversations with developers is really useful. They’re speaking directly to the person running the project, which adds that human element that helps get them interested in what we’re working on,” says Grant.
Saving on hiring costs with a subscription
In the past, Grant also used recruitment agencies to hire, which led to rapidly rising hiring fees.
“Compared to what we’d spend with hiring fee models, we saved a huge amount of money choosing OfferZen’s subscription"
“Because people sometimes leave your team, the model makes sense even if you didn’t plan those hires,” says Grant.
In fact, in comparison to recruitment agency fees, Albatros has saved 68% with the amount they paid to make unlimited developer hires on OfferZen.
Want to start saving on hiring costs and make unlimited developer hires for a predictable and fixed cost? On an OfferZen subscription, you can make unlimited developer hires and avoid paying individual, varying hiring fees for every hire. Learn more.
Access to dedicated support and unique market data
As they ramped up their hiring process, Grant’s account manager on OfferZen, Michelle Matzdorff, was able to help him benchmark local salary data. This allowed him to set competitive, market-related salaries for the developers in his hiring process:
“Our account manager helped us understand the local market. This has been really helpful because I’m not an expert in developer hiring. With OfferZen, I can lean on my account manager to get an idea of the market.”
The results
Albatros has built a tech team from scratch by using OfferZen exclusively, getting 10 developers on board in just 6 months. This has helped Albatros supercharge their mission:
“Without these developers, we’d be dead in the water when it comes to the project we’ve been working on. The hires we’ve made through OfferZen now make up the core team. Everyone we’ve hired is really happy to get stuck in to work on such a massive codebase.”
Lee Samuel, a full stack software engineer at Albatros, echoes this sentiment:
“The biggest thing that excited me about working for Albatros is upgrading our existing technology and using the latest tech. I think this will excite any developer. Moreover, management is always open to using newer technology and upgrades. As a developer, I feel valued within the team. We work on tasks that are meaningful and impactful for the company, no matter how small the task.”
Following the acquisition by NBC Universal, Albatros now has a greater hiring budget to get all the developers they need for the team. Grant is confident he can leverage his OfferZen subscription to make these hires and save costs along the way:
“In future, I hope that all my hires will be through OfferZen.”
Are you hiring software developers? OfferZen is a curated developer hiring marketplace that connects job-seeking developers with exciting opportunities at over 2000 companies in South Africa and beyond.
Hiring teams can make unlimited hires across all the roles on OfferZen, saving up to 50% compared to traditional recruitment costs.
