HighFive successfully found a VP of Engineering for a pre-Series A startup in seven weeks.
Vice President, Engineering
CLIENT
This pre-Series A startup commands $5M+ in ARR and was in need of an engineering leader to support their continued growth.
CHALLENGE
The company’s founders were not technical experts, and they needed assistance developing an assessment model for evaluating potential candidates. This startup environment called for an engineering leader who had proven management skills but remained an active coder. Furthermore, their focused budget and HQ location (in a competitive regional labor market) would render compensation a potential obstacle
SOLUTION
HighFive helped define an assessment model to evaluate each candidate’s technical acumen. Based on HighFive’s suggestion, the executive team brought in one of their investors who had significant tech background to assess and interview the candidates.
Our market intelligence suggested that filling this position with a highly qualified candidate from the client’s HQ region would be cost-prohibitive, and we recommended hiring this position as a remote role since the company already had an existing culture of distributed teams. We were able to find and present multiple candidates who were active coders but came with a range of management experiences—a truly rare find.
RESULT
HighFive successfully filled this search in seven weeks. Our diverse pool of candidates enabled our client to pick and choose the right pieces for a scaled-up engineering team, carefully picking candidates with mutually complementary skills and experience.
Our well of experience and data helps source elusive combinations of management ability and subject matter expertise, even in industries where this sort of talent is in high demand.
