How Collective hired three remote senior developers in four months
Collective is a San Francisco-based startup backed by the prominent investors who have financed and built iconic companies like Uber, Snap, Udemy and more. It is the first online back-office platform designed for self-employed people. Their mission is to give their members the freedom to focus on what matters by taking care of everything from business incorporation to accounting, bookkeeping, tax services and access to a thriving community. The company was founded by Hooman Radfar, Ugur Kaner and Bugra Ackay.
Prior to moving to San Francisco, Ugur Kaner lived in Helsinki where he met Oleg Podsechin, the Co-founder of Toughbyte. Just before the COVID-19 pandemic Oleg went to San Francisco to pay a friendly visit. When all the world went online due to the virus, Collective was not an exception. This was the time when they realized they can have a fully remote team of software developers. At that time they secured some funding, wanted to implement more features and needed to hire more developers. Though they used some local recruiters and different recruitment platforms before, they decided to ask Oleg for help as being a developer himself he is an expert in the field of tech recruitment.
We at Toughbyte discussed the requirements with Collective and agreed to look for the remote developers within the same time zone as San Francisco, so the choice of Latin America was quite obvious. In the beginning of June 2020 the very first remote developer was hired by Collective. Within the following four months we managed to find two more developers to join their team. The new team members brought the best practices which they learned from their studies and previous work experience, like testing, technologies, different types of implementation, etc. They helped to deliver new features for the successful new seed round which happened a month ago.
We asked Collective which advice they can give to companies that just start building remote teams and here is what they say: “Communication and the culture fit are super important, as much as the technical background”. We can’t agree more!