The story of Beamery

The Challenge:

Beamery offers a Talent Operating System for enterprises to attract, engage, and retain top talent, and manage the entire talent journey on one unified platform. Beamery's mission is to help the world's best companies acquire their greatest assets. To build this Talent Operating System, it takes a high-calibre, multi-disciplined engineering team. They all work together from a central London office, which also means they are recruiting in a hyper competitive market. 

The team had a mix of recruiting tools in place including head hunting agreements, referrals programmes, hosting and attending tech events, using resources such as Stack Overflow, Glassdoor, LinkedIn and AngelList, accepting applications via job board websites, in addition to receiving direct applicants, and of course, using their own product for engaging and marketing to talent. All of this wasn’t enough. Beamery were looking to really showcase their tech team and build a community. 

The Solution:

"We got Stack Overflow to build a community and a brand and showcase our engineering product and design team. We have an amazing product, but we also have a really passionate team behind it." 

Even though Beamery is a product-focused company and branding for the solution Beamery and the company or employer Beamery are related, Adam Rabinovitch, global technical recruiting lead and evangelist, tells us that they wanted a way to showcase their engineering team and to place the team members front and center.

Beamery gives insight into the internal structure of their engineering team. 
The Stack Overflow Company Page gives not only a high-level overview of what Beamery are building, it also details how the teams are organised, with further links to each team’s specific page. Adam worked closely with engineers to detail each team's unique traits and culture. “We noticed in the conversations with developers that this has helped interested candidates to dive in deeper and actually learn a lot about how we work.”

After having set this up, Adam and team approached developers directly through the candidate database on Stack Overflow. In terms of active sourcing, Adam stresses the importance of personalizing messaging. “I don’t just send a job listing straight away, I focus on the candidate’s interests and their technologies relating it back to our teams pages. I might also share a bit of a roadmap, or some stats of what the team is working on as a teaser and then offer to pick my brain about Beamery in more detail.” With detailed information on developers’ profiles, Beamery could start a conversation personalized to the candidate.

The result:

For Beamery, the company pages offer a way to communicate everything about the business that makes Beamery such a great employer, and all at a glance. From photos of team events, a listing of perks and benefits, through to the locations and people behind the teams. “We had front-end engineers say ‘I looked at what you are doing on the back-end, and that is actually something I want to get into.’ So this detail and transparency really helps us.”

"Stack Overflow Talent is a really cool platform and it allows you to be really specific about how you want to hire and how you want to advertise your business." 

Beamery has now hired ten people through Stack Overflow Talent, and Adam is sure that transparency was key in attracting talents. “It allows us to tell the full story. We are a JavaScript house through and through, but showing the arsenal of cool new technologies we are using and how we are involved in those communities, writing about it on our blogs and  hosting events is what it is all about.” He points out that this also helps retention, since new starters know the tech stack they signed up for and are more likely to develop and prosper. 

Adam knows that the product and the toolset are only part of the story, and that more time is spent finding people that align to Beamery’s culture.

“We're a close knit team and our values are very important to us. So we want people that are interested in those values, who are curious, want to learn, want to do stuff, want to push forward and solve problems to get just that 1% better every day.” Adam looks for the most holistic impression he can get of a candidate, what their interests are, what tech events they're involved in, the articles they write, and technologies they are using in their own time.

"The technology market is changing really fast. So it’s key for us to use the latest technologies to build what we want to build as a business." 

Read the interview with Adam Rabinovitch, Global Technical Recruiting Lead and Evangelist at Beamery about how to be a successful recruiter in 2020.