Macrosoft International Recruitment Team: Linchpin of the Development Teams LoB

By Sankar Nath (Richard), Ronald Mueller

Macrosoft International Recruitment Team: Linchpin of the Development Teams LoB

This paper provides an overview of the Macrosoft International Recruitment Team (MIRT) and profiles the main elements of success that make it one of the most successful and important parts of our company.

MIRT is the critical part of our Development Teams Line of Business (LOB), as shown in the chart below. MIRT has been a Service Offering of Macrosoft for well over the last two decades and has contributed tremendously and consistently to our company’s success. The next sections of this paper provide a profile of this organization, the basic services offered, the types of clients we serve and highlights some of the success metrics of the organization. All the people recruited and hired by MIRT are for positions and clients in the US.

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There is a second part to our Development Teams LOB, as shown in the chart, a small US-based Recruitment Team that we profile in a second paper. For the most part, the two teams work independently and have different client bases. However, whenever it makes sense, the teams collaborate closely to secure and place new team members with some of our clients.

Shown in the chart are four key support organizations within Macrosoft that work closely together with the International Recruitment Team to ensure efficiency and success of the overall operation. We describe the roles of these support functions in a later section.

Development Teams LoB Structure

We are highlighting this organization within Macrosoft to increase visibility to more of our clients and prospects. This is an outstanding and exciting part of our company that makes a big difference in the success of our clients. Over the last two years, this organization accelerated growth and is now well positioned to scale up much further. As described below, the organization is now taking on several major new growth opportunities that greatly increase the scale and impact of this organization.

To date, we have not ‘marketed’ our work in this area. The clients currently served have come in primarily thru network connections. Others are utilizing MIRT after having worked with us in one of our other five lines of business. With this paper we are beginning to get the word out.

Development Team Roles & Responsibilities

The development team decides how to accomplish the work set forth by the Product Owner. Development teams are structured and empowered to organize and manage their own work. The resulting synergy optimizes overall efficiency and effectiveness.

Among the key functions development team members perform are planning, testing, analysis, programming, and many other activities throughout the course of the project. It’s not likely that all team members will have all the necessary skills to complete a project.

What makes a good development team?

Great Development Teams understand the importance for technical tasks like e.g. performance, security and scalability. They can explain the (business) value to their Product Owner and customer and hereby ensure its part of the product backlog. Trust each other. Great Development Teams trust each other.

Managed Teams

Macrosoft has 27 years of experience delivering quality products and services to clients across the globe. Whether be it our in-house developers or our dedicated development teams each have always strived for quality deliverables. Our development team consists of technology experts, software developers, business analysts, and project managers. Our dedicated teams have delivered solutions for many different industries, from banking to telecommunications.

Managed Teams Benefits

The Development Team in Macrosoft :

The German V-Modell defines numerous roles within a development, such as – Hardware architect, Hardware developer, Software architect and Software developer, Configuration Management Administrator and Configuration Management Manager, Logistics Developer, System Architect, System Integrator and Auditor.

For each role, there is a formal role description that covers a maximum of five points:

  • Tasks and Authority,
  • Skill Profile,
  • Role Assignment,
  • Accountability and
  • Involvement.

International Recruitment Team

This section provides a profile of the Macrosoft International Recruitment Team. We also highlight some of the success metrics we believe show how well it is performing. The chart below shows profile measures of the team as well as success metrics for end of 2020 and currently, as well as projections for end of 2021 and end of 2022.

MetricEnd of 2020August 2021End 2021End 2022Comments  
# of Recruitment Team Members8132030More than doubling team size this year, and another 50% growth in 2022.
# of Submittals per Recruiter per Week  4.0  4.5  5.0  5.5These are actual submittals to open job req’s from our clients. There has been a steady increase this year.
# Of New Placements per month  5.5  6.5  8.0  12.0These are successful new candidates that fill a client position. We expect this to scale proportionally with team member count.
# Of Team Members hired by our clients  20%  20%  20%  20%Our team members are constantly being hired by our clients as the members show their high performance
Total Consulting Team Size  80  90  100  125This is total consulting team size across all clients
Ave Tenure of consultants  2.0 yr.  2.0 yr.  2.0 yr.  2.0 yr.This is average tenure excluding consultants that are hired directly by client.
% of new consultants that are technology-based    70%    70%    70%    70%In next section we outline the other skill sets that the team works on. As noted below, we are also expanding into other areas

The organization is located at Macrosoft’s international development facility in Trivandrum, India. There are currently ~15 recruiters working in the organization, and we expect it to grow to ~20 recruiters by year-end 2021, and to continue to grow an additional 50% in 2022 (see chart above).  In addition to the recruitment team members, there are staff members involved in recruitment processes from four other functional areas within Macrosoft, as shown in the chart above: HR; Finance; Project Management; and Client Relationship Management. We describe these support functions below.

Currently the entire MIRT Team works remotely given COVID. The team follows best practices in all processes and continue to be highly productive working remotely. We expect the team to continue to work remotely through the end of this year and likely a lot longer. The entire team works on a US Eastern Time zone schedule.

The main function of MIRT is of course recruitment: searching for the best available candidates through a variety of methods and sources as outlined below. On average team members are now achieving a submittal rate of about five highly qualified candidates per week.  We are projecting this submittal rate to increase an additional 20% further in the next year. Given that the candidates we find are highly qualified and responsive to the skill and experience requirements of the job requirement, we believe this to be a highly productive level of output.

To gain that submittal rate, each recruiter reviews as many as 10-20 resumes to find one best fit candidate. The team excels at finding the 1-2 best fit candidates for each new position; our clients have repeatedly commented on this point. Our view is, in most cases, it is better for us to do the work to find the best 1-2 candidates to submit to the client. This makes for a much more streamlined process, where clients need to review and evaluate only 1-2 resumes rather than half a dozen or more. Our team takes the responsibility of weeding out the secondary candidates for our clients. Once candidates are presented to client, the team coordinates with the client interface on scheduling interviews and receiving feedback. If the candidate submitted is not quite what the client wants, a second round of recruitment begins. To facilitate this second round, we always recommend a detailed discussion with the client interface to gain further specifics on the priorities in the job requirement.

If the candidate is selected, then the hiring process begins and in that hiring process the MIRT team will work closely with other functional areas of Macrosoft including HR (for employment letter and then time reporting once the candidate starts) and Finance (for invoicing and billing). The recruitment team works through background check processes, which are slightly different for each client. in the recruitment and hiring processes, the MIRT team is very familiar with several the top vendor management systems and background check services.

MIRT does the recruitment and hiring of most new members of our company, both for our clients as well as for new internal projects within Macrosoft. As such, they are continually bringing in new and varied talented people that expand and diversify the Macrosoft’s employee base. Most new members are technology based, about 70%, as shown in the chart above.

The team is averaging about 6-8 new placements each month. As an order of magnitude this team is on target 2 successfully recruit and place between 75-100 individuals this year. As we continue to scale up the team size, we expect this placement rate to go up proportionately to about 12 new placements per month in 2022. As a result, the overall consulting team size (which is a lagging indicator) will continue to rise to well over 150-175 individuals in 2022 and beyond, roughly a doubling of size from the current consulting team. Achieving this level of growth is one of the most important strategic goals of our company, and we are confident we have the resources and knowhow to make this happen.

One final metric we wanted to mention, namely the rate at which our clients hire our candidates, currently at about 20%. While we believe this metric is a good indicator of the quality of our candidates, and we are generally happy when our clients do this, it does take away from the total consulting team base.  Macrosoft’s Alumni typically go on to more senior roles at the organizations they join and thereby provide an opportunity for us to provide our services to them in their new role.

Service Areas

MIRT’s recruitment services are utilized in the following 4 main areas, as shown in the chart below: managed teams; staff augmentation; turnkey solutions; and working closely with a women-owned business partner. We describe MIRT’s role in each of these areas below.

Staffing and Development Teams

Managed Team

Managed Teams are where MIRT assembles a full technical team for a client usually for a specific new project for which the client does not have enough resources or does not have the right skill sets. Once the managed team is assembled and in place, the client will typically manage the team directly.

MIRT work with the client to understand the size and composition of the team needed and the specific skill set of each individual on the team. Then MIRT will assemble the team members working in close collaboration with the client’s project team lead who manages the team once assembled. The client may or may not want to interview each candidate of the team and give their approval. While the client will manage the team and is responsible for the quality and timing of the team’s deliverables, Macrosoft continues to provide technical oversight of the team, as described below.

Staff Augmentation

Staff Augmentation consists of recruiting and hiring specialized resources based on skills and experience contained in specific job requirements provided by the client. The consultants secured through this process usually become Macrosoft employees, but MIRT does recruiting for direct hire positions as well.

The client then takes on the successful candidate as a member of the client’s team. Once a candidate is hired and working for a client, the consultant’s work is managed directly by the client’s project manager. As with the managed team category above, we provide a level of technical oversight of the consultant.

For the most part, the resources we deal with currently are IT-centered. This includes three areas of IT-centered work: Developers/QA; Engineers; Project Managers. We also engage in staff augmentation in areas other than IT is including Customer Support and Light Industrial and Administration Clerical categories. For one of our new major channels, we are now extending our recruitment capabilities to include a broad range of health-care related skill sets as described below.

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Turnkey Solutions

Turnkey Solutions are like Managed Teams except now the team is under Macrosoft’s direction and responsibility. MIRT recruits and hires any US members of the team not available within Macrosoft’s current staff. Some of the team members may include individuals from our international development centers.

Turnkey Solutions involve fixed contracts where we take on the responsibility of delivering the project on time and within budget based on an agreed-upon Statement of Work. In this case Macrosoft determines what team members will be required to complete the project, and we assign a PM to the project, who is largely responsible for ensuring project success. There is normally only limited involvement from the client’s IT team during the project (usually for final implementation steps) although the client’s business team will normally play a key role in ensuring the new system meets requirements.

Women-Owned Business Partner

The fourth area of work for MIRT services is related to a growing relationship we have with a women-owned business partner that specializes in technology-based staffing needs. Basically, working with this partner we can provide diverse technical staff to companies that need to diversify their supplier relationships. This is an exciting and growing part of the business for MIRT and we are expecting it to grow substantially in the coming year.

Management Oversight of All Tech Members

For all four types of work outlined above, Macrosoft provides a level of oversight of each tech member engaged with a client.[1] The level of oversight varies based on which of the four work types the member is involved with. For work in staff augmentation, managed teams, and women-owned business partner our oversight includes the types of activities included in the chart below. For turnkey projects, the Macrosoft PM of the project will be managing and guiding each member of the team daily, so the level of supervision will be much more direct and intensive.

Task/ActivityResponsible Party  
Quarterly oversight of work of member to ensure it is high quality. There is also an oversight done near the beginning of any new assignment for the member.This oversight is provided by the Macrosoft project technical manager, or Director who is assigned to the client interface. Based on this oversight we may recommend new training for the team member
Annual survey of client technical managers to get their feedback on member performance and to get their insights into any shortcomings that need to be addressed.This is done as part of our ISO 9001 certification requirements. Results are reviewed by the Macrosoft manager for each client.
Training as new skills are needed.This can be determined by the project tech manager or client interface. We work with the tech member to ensure the training is completed.
Specialized support for team member.We provide specialized support to a team member if there is some specialized skill needed to successfully complete a project for a client

Customer Profiles

Overall, our customer base for MIRT services consists of about 20 active clients. We define active clients as ones for which we have provided candidates over the last year or so and ones that continue to return to us whenever they have new openings. As noted at the beginning of this white paper, all the clients we now have, have come to us through network connections or previously worked with us via one of our 5 other lines of business and have decided to utilize our recruitment services as well.

The clients we now have are divided into two classes – small and very large. For the group of small clients, many of which are startups, we are usually positioned as the sole provider of IT services for those clients and are providing them with a managed team. Over time the size of our managed teams for these small clients have tended to increase as the companies grow in scale. These managed teams are critical to the success of the companies and have built up tremendous, embedded knowledge about the companies’ business. In some cases, Macrosoft has a (usually small) ownership position in the company. In all cases our managed teams are very profitable to Macrosoft.

For the few very large clients we have, we are normally one of many vendors providing candidates usually through a vendor management system (VMS). We have been highly successful with these very large clients because of the high quality and responsiveness of the recruitment services provided by MIRT. Given our highly responsive processes we can provide very qualified candidates in short timeframes. As a result, we continue to be able to place dozens of new candidates with these very large clients.

This year we have been able to add two important new recruiting channels that we profile briefly below. We expect these two new channels to greatly expand the work and success of our International Recruitment team.  

The first of these new channels is in health care. We are now working with a partner company that is firmly positioned in the health care and hospital sector with multiple positions and projects to fill. We have teamed up with them to be their sole recruiting partner. It is an exciting new opportunity for both our companies, and it is already bearing fruit.

The second new channel we are now working on is with a huge global software and professional services company for which we have been added to their vendor roster as a preferred technology placement vendor for all their openings. In addition, we are working closely with them in the Quadient services area where Macrosoft is a leader. Quadient services is one of Macrosoft’s Six lines of business. We are now providing them with a significant number of Quadient developers for their clients in the US. We have also begun to fill general IT positions via their vendor management system.

Recruitment Tools and Processes

The chart below shows all channels MIRT utilizes to find the best available candidates for new positions. Among the traditional job boards, our mainstays are Monster, Dice, and Career Builder. We have begun to post jobs on Indeed and have been highly successful with Indeed especially for customer support and admin and clerical support fields.

Over the last year, we have greatly expanded our use of LinkedIn, and are now using it in several ways, including paid recruitment accounts, job postings, and becoming members of relevant technology and business groups. LinkedIn has become especially useful for high end specialized IT job.

We maintain a private database of candidates we have come across that our team feels are highly qualified for various IT roles. We stay in touch with these people and contact them whenever a new position becomes available that fits well their skill and experience background. 

We also have a network of about 50 technology resource partner companies that we reach out to regularly to see if they have qualified candidates for our new positions. In this case we are only looking for candidates from these companies that are directly on their payroll.

As a final source, we also tap into the Macrosoft Alumni Network in two ways. First, if we feel some alumni is highly qualified for a new position, we will contact them to see if they are interested. We also utilize the network to find good referrals for new positions. We always find personal referrals from Alumni and current employees of Macrosoft are a great source of excellent candidates.

Recruitment Team Toolset

Final Comments

That concludes our writeup describing Macrosoft’s International Recruitment Team. We are very proud of our recruitment capabilities (especially for IT-centered positions) and feel that we provide responsive services to our clients. We believe strongly this team is exceptional in its work and results.

As a final comment we point to the chart below which lays out the basic principles of our company. We believe these four basic principles are essential to our company. Our MIRT team follow these four principles closely in all their work.

Macrosoft-Recruitment Team Principles
Macrosoft Recruitment Team Principles

[1] The same level of oversight is in place for members who are not IT-centered

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By Sankar Nath (Richard), Ronald Mueller | October 4th, 2021 | Staffing Services

About the Author

Sankar Nath (Richard) Director of US Recruitment for Macrosoft

Sankar Nath (Richard)

As an 14-year veteran of Macrosoft, Richard operates as Macrosoft's Director of US Recruitment. Richard's main focus is talent acquisition, client support, and managing the full life cycle of the recruitment process. Additionally, Richard specializes in the placement of qualified IT resources. Generally, these recruits move into a broad client base of IT, Infrastructure and Telecom industries.

Richard takes pride in making sure that the recruitment process is risk-free. Further, Richard recommends and implements process changes to meet business goals. Additionally, he addresses candidate delivery issues and manages risks to ensure on-time and on-budget delivery of recruitment services to Macrosoft’s clients.

Dr. Ronald Mueller Chairman and Founder of Macrosoft

Ronald Mueller

Ron is the Chairman and Founder of Macrosoft, Inc. He heads up all company strategic activities and directs day-to-day work of the Leadership Team at Macrosoft. As Macrosoft’s Chief Scientist, Ron defines and structures Macrosoft’s path forward. Ron's focus on new technologies and products, such as Cloud, Big Data, and AI/ML/WFP. Ron has a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from New York University and worked in physics for over a decade at Yale University, The Fusion Energy Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, and at Argonne National Laboratory.

Ron also worked at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey., where he managed a group on Big Data. Ron's work focused around the early work on neural networks. Ron has a career-long passion in ultra-large-scale data processing and analysis including predictive analytics, data mining, machine learning and deep learning.

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