Global M Case Study

Overview

Global {M} worked with Kayak, an online travel agency, and metasearch engine. Founded in 2004 it is now one of the world’s largest travel sites and search engines, operating in more than 30 countries.

We partnered with Yolanda Li (People Director) and Ralf Boeck (Senior Vice President of Technology), to help organise and manage an ambitious recruitment drive during the COVID pandemic. We were tasked with hiring for technical positions such as Python, Front End, Android, QA, Flight Data, and Java Engineers in Berlin, Germany, and Boston, USA.

We started with onboarding a Talent Partner who initially focused on hiring in Berlin. He had several years of experience in tech recruitment including previous work in Germany. We felt he had the capability to work with a large tech company and fit easily into their processes & tools, and also build relationships quickly with hiring managers.

It soon became clear that Kayak also needed support in the US so we wasted no time in placing another one of our Senior Talent Partners who was able to work in US time zones. She also had several years of experience in tech recruitment internationally and was able to seamlessly embed with US stakeholders.

Why Global {M}

Kayak chose to work with Global {M} as they needed senior tech recruiters who could pick up their processes and tools (slack, greenhouse, google drive) quickly, but more importantly, they needed talent partners that we’re able to interview and identify strong engineering talent without prior training. It was important that talent partners understood tech hiring and needed no hand-holding. They needed to be self-sufficient from the go and able to organise tests, interviews, offers, and advise hiring teams. Our Talent Partners were fully embedded into Kayak’s recruitment team.

Challenge

Kayak had a large number of vacancies to fill but was also fortunate to be in a position where they received a large number of applicants. The challenge was to filter through candidates and identify and prioritise the best candidates and move them through the process quickly to the offer stage. It takes experience to be able to identify these candidates from the beginning. Talent Partners needed to be able to organise a large number of vacancies, candidates, and stay on top of the pipelines, e.g scheduling and administering large numbers of tests.

Approach

Kayak already had quality processes in place so our approach was simply to be there and support them. We took a lot of pressure off their shoulders and our experienced talent partners were able to manage vacancies for them to the closing stage. We were available on communication channels to answer questions from the business. We also tracked all our data and were able to provide weekly updates and monthly reports on hiring.

ROLES SOURCED

2 * React Front End Developers, 4 * Python Engineers, 3 * Back-End Engineer, 1 * intern, 2 * Android Engineers, 2 * Flight Data Specialists, 1 * Quality Manager, 4 * Data Scientist, 6 * Sr Java Software Engineer, 1 * Network Engineer, 1 * Security Engineer