“Elements have taken time to understand our culture, understand the unique challenges of our roles and are as strong as anyone on our internal team at selling our dream. Their speed is impressive, matched only by their deep technical and industry knowledge. There is no way that we could have made the progress in hiring that we have in the last few months without their help.
Kristen Clemmer, Global Head of TA, Atlassian (creators of JIRA)Atlassian had a target of 50 design hires in the calendar year. Central to this was a 2-week roadshow in 4 of the hottest design talent pools in Europe: London, Berlin, Amsterdam & Stockholm. We were given 2 months to arrange 25 on-sites across these destinations for roles ranging from Senior UX designers to user researchers. Atlassian had just lost their most senior Design Recruiter and their standards were extremely high, both in terms of technical skill and cultural fit. The Design Managers were anxious to review every submission and tended to dismiss high-quality candidates based on limited evidence.
We created a high-quality longlist from our passive design candidate networks and conducted video calls to pitch them the opportunity (and the idea of relocation). We attended meet-ups organised by the company to ensure we tapped that talent pool. And where the Design Managers disagreed with our thinking, we provided a detailed rationale and asked them to trust our judgement.
8 of those accepted and agreed to relocate to Sydney. (This included 2 which the Design Managers had tried to dismiss earlier.)
We arranged 25 candidates to attend onsites. The company went on to offer 11 of them a job and 8 of those accepted and agreed to relocate to Sydney. (This included 2 which the Design Managers had tried to dismiss earlier.) The company asked us to run the same process again the year after, rather than using their new internal Design Recruiter.