How to Ramp Up Technology Teams Quickly

Are you looking to ramp up your Technology Team quickly? 

Getting the approach ‘right’ can lead to successful projects and rapid growth. Alternatively, getting this ‘wrong’ means lost opportunities, high costs and restricted growth. Let’s take a look at the core activities involved in quickly ramping up a technology team. 

We recommend the following elements in the structured approach:

1. Project Planning

• Roles and responsibilities – The recruitment process starts with evaluating and understanding the needs of the project. As a part of the project plan, roles and responsibilities need to be clearly defined, so everyone involved knows what they are accountable for. This step breaks down the scope of the project into manageable sections for the team, and helps in clearly highlighting individual responsibilities.

• Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) for every activity – It is important to define clearly TAT for each activity in your project plan and measure them. This will clearly help identify and remove the bottlenecks.

Roles and responsibilities and SLAs should be shared with all teams right up front. Objections or need for clarifications can be resolved before the execution starts

2. Defining Requirements

Skill and competency mapping – Requirements or Job descriptions need to be crisply defined into skills and competencies, and the corresponding levels required. “Must have” skills and competencies must be clearly called out. Temptation to have all skills and competencies listed in a job description needs to be strictly avoided, for that dilutes the JD and creates misdirection for the recruiters. Often the requirements become so fuzzy that the recruitment team is unable to decipher and prioritise skills to look for. 

3. Project Management Office

The role of a PMO becomes crucial given the volume of roles to be hired and the coordination work load across many stakeholders and teams

• Tracking – A dashboard view of all searches with a drill down to individual candidate cases is a must. SLAs should be closely monitored to identify slippages or bottlenecks, and fix them

• Reviews – Frequency of review must be pre-defined, In Catenon’s experience a weekly review for large tech hiring projects enables timely interventions and fast issue resolutions

4. Leveraging an expert recruitment team

• Expertise in technology hiring – Technology recruitment is a nuanced activity which can be quite overwhelming for teams not used to it. To be able to decipher the difference between Engineering, Product, DevOps, Cloud, Release teams and accurately turnaround candidates who are best fit to the specific requirements is a non-trivial task. Therefore, technology recruitment is not a keyword sourcing project and is best left to experts. In our experience, many tech leaders are frustrated when dealing with generalist recruiters who just do not seem to understand what to look for! 

• Experience of delivering large projects – Without knowledge of technology, it is impossible to deliver. However, recruiting tech positions at a scale also requires a disciplined process based approach (see point 3 – PMO section). Without this approach teams can create a mountain of clutter to sort through which is a self-defeating exercise. 

Reference check – It is always a good idea to conduct some reference check about the external recruiting partner you intend to engage with. 

5. Supporting elements

All supporting elements must also be identified and discussed in the planning phase including 

• Use of an Applicant Tracking System (ATS), its access and usage
• Format of Tracker
• Offer negotiation and roll out process 
• Onboarding process and documentation 

In Catenon’s experience, once these elements of a structured approach are in place, project success is guaranteed! 

Happy recruiting! Stay safe! 

Authored by Gaurav Chattur | Managing Director APAC| Catenon | Linkedin Profile