Recruitment process for a demanding financial institution

Tom Potanski

Last updated on May 25, 2023 | 3 min read

London-based Investment Fund

Product Objectives

Cryptocurrency exchange

A few months ago, we started a technology recruitment project for a prosperous financial company from London that deals with algorithmic trading on the cryptocurrency exchange. Today we can boast of great success and proudly say “mission complete”.

The challenge

Extremely high expectations from the candidates

The client had particularly high expectations regarding the engineering team, their algorithmic & problem-solving skills, deep level of expertise, knowledge and resourcefulness. The company was exceptionally demanding, expecting tech lead level engineers, with a work history from a financial sector, or from hedge funds.

Our approach

Intense sourcing and rigorous technical vetting process

We have assigned 3 dedicated recruiters to the team and started a multichannel sourcing campaign using job boards, LinkedIn and social media. In addition, we decided to start headhunting candidates from other countries, including Asia, Eastern and Western Europe and the US.

In order to select the best talents, we also had to expand the recruitment process itself, which was particularly challenging and looked as follows:

• Preliminary qualification

  E-mail questions that fulfilled the function of confirming offer terms and checking the cultural fit, tested
  the attitude for work as well as determination and the written English language.

• Timed programming challenge

  A timed programming task that tested algorithmic skills, the ability to think logically and solve complex tasks under time pressure.

• Soft-skills stage

  Soft-skills stage

• Rigorous technical interview

  Live coding – testing technical skills, especially regarding this specific recruitment (e.g. low-level programming, real-time systems, processing of large data streams)

• Client-side process

  Afterward, the candidates still had to face the client-side process, including take-home assignments consisting of building a trading system. Both our and the candidates’ efforts paid off.

The outcome

Setting up entire engineering branch in Poland.

Primarily, the client initially thought of employing just one programmer. However, while seeing the potential in our candidates and taking into account very good cooperation with us, the company eventually ended up hiring four people and decided to open a local engineering branch in Poland.