How a Proven Recruitment Process
Turns Rare Profiles Into Hires

Interviewer: Adding people to existing remote teams is a challenging task. Adding rare professionals is even more complicated. Please meet Yulia, our Head of Recruitment – a real professional in solving recruitment cases beyond complexity.

Yulia, being Head of Recruitment you’ve probably met a lot of interesting people and challenging tasks?

Yulia: Well, I would not call the tasks incredible or unsolvable, yet sure, some of them are challenging indeed.

Interviewer: Are there stories you’d like to share with our readers? As I think that for more than a decade on board you should have plenty!

Yulia: Oh yeah, yet not all of them can be discussed – our customers’ NDAs are a concrete priority. Still, while prepping for this interview I found some positions we closed at a lightspeed I’d say. 

Interviewer: Lightspeed? Sounds like sci-fi. Who you’ve been looking for?

Yulia: Almost! This was a role of a Technical Program Manager we ought to cover in an astounding two weeks. 

Interviewer:  Two weeks for this role is not much at all!

Yulia: You’re right, yet considering that the English language requirement was stated as essentially native, with a deep understanding of AWS and Windows Server and excellent communication and management skills, it was a nearly impossible hire. 

Interviewer: So, have you managed?

Yulia: We did manage, and the hired professional is still onboard, running several teams for our US customer and leading decommissioning of legacy systems. 

Interviewer: Can you tell me more about this hire? What was your approach? Was there a trick? A lifehack maybe? 

Yulia: (Smiling) Some would describe it as a lifehack, but for us it’s a part of a proven process and strategy. We decided to narrow it down only to people with strong management skills, who could prove they managed multiple teams, and could seamlessly communicate with US teams and management daily. The technical portfolio served as a thorough filter, while our interviews were the decisive event. Thus communication became the one rock-solid requirement. Nothing else mattered for us. 

Interviewer: The hard task of saying “No”, right?

Yulia: Bringing a wrong person on board is way harder, trust me.

Interviewer: Can’t argue... Tell me one more story. Something that wasn't about speed, but about depth instead. 

Yulia: There was a QA Automation Engineer role for an energy sector client. We started looking for someone with quite a list of tech skills: JavaScript, TypeScript, WebdriverIO, CI/CD, Azure DevOps, English at B2+, as well as hands-on automation work with real architectural thinking. We also needed someone who could grow the automation layer. The last “and” was the capped budget for the role. 

Interviewer: Sounds like you were hunting a mythical creature, a unicorn, not less.

Yulia: Pretty much so. The market filter gave us 68 candidates. We ran 20 HR interviews, then 6 technical ones followed. That volume alone told us how rare this exact combination was – hands-on automation and systems thinking in one person; and it needed to be a perfect fit for the client's budget.

Interviewer: That's a lot of "ands” in one sentence. 

Yulia: Tell me about it. However, these tricky tasks make our work rigorous and I, personally, like that about it. 

Interviewer: I see! So, how did the story end? Was it a perfect match? 

Yulia: Almost. The hire didn't make it past probation, not because of skill though.They were spot on. Unfortunately, shortly after joining, the candidate suddenly lost his internal motivation.

Interviewer: How sad! How did you and your team overcome this frustrating situation? 

Yulia: Every miss is a lesson. Technically it was the right person, but disappointments happen – it’s also a part of a process. 

Interviewer: Sounds like a piece of recruitment wisdom, I should say. 

Yulia: Because it is. Gain and pain accompany the recruitment process, and sometimes the clients make the task harder than it should be.

Interviewer: Okay, that's a brutally honest take. Could you elaborate?

Yulia: We were searching for a Full Stack Developer for our first Israeli client, two positions in fact. The process ran through several stages on their side, with requirements that weren't always coordinated between their own teams. We ran 93 HR interviews just to keep candidates flowing through quite a drill: 3 rounds of one-hour technical interviews with live coding.

Interviewer: And yet you closed it.

Yulia: Imagine! Both positions, in 2 and 2.5 months, with two confirmed offers out of 438 candidates in the funnel. The first specialist is still there. Even though the second hire left, I reckon it was a very intense yet rewarding story.

Interviewer: Something tells me that not every story is a clean win.

Yulia: No, and I'd rather be upfront about that. There was a Python role, Data and Machine Learning Engineer, for a client we already worked with. Three specialists in a row didn't survive probation…

Interviewer: Three strikes. That's rough on everyone.

Yulia: It is. We ran three full sourcing cycles, checked requirements against the client's own test task each time, flagged risky candidates during terms negotiation, and tracked feedback closely so we could restart fast. Recruiting covered the client's needs across all three rounds…

Interviewer: Yet three times the new hire left… Why though? Have you found a reason? 

Yulia: Oh yes, at the end we figured it out. The AI solution’s architecture wasn’t yet agreed – the client only planned to work on a fixed technical vision for the AI integration. Thus, the collaboration ended whenever a candidate couldn't propose a solution or explain why it wasn't feasible. This lesson was painful, yet it left us with something useful: placing specialists before an AI solution's architecture is agreed on the client's side as a risk factor. We watch for it now.

Interviewer: Is that a pattern you see often?

Yulia: Let’s say, it happens. A hire fails when the client is hiding the real pain point behind the role. That person leaves eventually. Another example: when the profile describes someone who doesn't exist, so there's no real criteria to search against in the first place.

Interviewer: Someone who doesn’t exist. This could be a nice case! You surely have one, haven’t you? 

Yulia: Oh! My fav here is the Xamarin/macOS role. Since 2022 the client had been trying to replace a specialist with a genuinely rare profile, desktop interfaces and business logic in C#/.NET on Xamarin and macOS. The market for that combination thinned out, expectations on pay climbed, and soft skills and English were inconsistent across candidates. We reopened that position a whopping eight times.

Interviewer: Eight. Times. Reopened. That's not recruiting, that's a treasure hunt.

Yulia: It was indeed. We adapted the strategy as the market and the project shifted. Split the responsibilities, changed the profile three times, from cross-platform .NET/Xamarin in 2022, to native macOS UI in Swift in 2023, to a low-level macOS system and security engineer in C++ in 2024. That flexibility kept the project staffed with native specialists right up until it closed in 2025. It proved something we now apply everywhere else. A hybrid profile that's too broad often closes faster once you split it into focused roles.

Interviewer: Do clients agree to that easily?

Yulia: Not always, which brings me to the next case. A Senior DevOps search for our beloved long term supply chain and logistics client. The initial task was close to a universal profile, Azure, Bicep, CI/CD, Docker and AKS, serverless, networking and security, high-load messaging, Elastic, Redis, SQL and NoSQL. In the first 42 days we processed 97 candidates, ran 20 HR interviews, 13 internal interviews, and 7 client technical interviews. Zero offers were made.

Interviewer: Seems like the funnel worked and the profile didn't.

Yulia: Exactly. We sat down with the client and rebuilt the profile together. Kept the essentials, Azure in production, Bicep, CI/CD, Docker, scripting, networking and security, and moved the specialized skills into nice-to-have. After that we focused on candidates strong in the core stack, instead of a full match across everything.

Interviewer: Did that change the numbers?

Yulia: After the reset, 39 more candidates, but only 3 HR interviews, 2 internal, and 1 client technical interview. The final candidate came through seven days after the profile change and accepted an offer thirteen days later. Sixty two days total, but only twenty of those came after we recalibrated.

Interviewer: Impressive numbers I’d say.

Yulia: That's exactly it. Last one along those lines – an Upper-Middle Full Stack Developer search that quietly needed to be a Senior one. The client wanted proactive and forward-looking, but also, in their words, unambitious and easy to manage. My team spent a month with Middle-level candidates, all turned down for setting the bar too high.

Interviewer: That's a grave contradiction...

Yulia: It was. We backed our read with market analysis, went back to the client, and made the case that what they were actually asking for matched Senior, not Middle. They agreed, we refocused, and closed it in two months total, counting the month already spent on the wrong level.

Interviewer: Last question. Are you seeing AI in your candidate pipeline?

Yulia: Oh, yes we do. Some candidates run their CVs through AI tools, occasionally tailored to our specific opening, and it gets a little suspicious for it blurs the person's real experience, the research proves helpful here. We're also seeing fake profiles with vague skills descriptions. Most of those simply ignore our questions. 

Interviewer: And during the interviews?

Yulia: Happens sometimes, but we have trick questions prepared, to understand how deep the candidate understands the matter. 

Interviewer: Thank you Yulia! It was an insightful chat! 

Yulia: Thank you, it was fun to recall all those cases.