PHP Developer

Client’s Need

Our client is an e-counselling provider, offering its customers affordable and convenient access to mental health services from licensed and accredited therapists. Our client needed to build a software engineering team of 8 people with experience in PHP – a mature language perceived as less popular within the developer community, raising the recruitment complexity. 

Solution

Knowing that the client did not have consistent success with other recruitment agencies, the Michael Page team began with fully understanding the company mission. Hiring people with the technical skills was important, but it was critical to get people on board who were driven by our client’s mission of helping more people live a better, healthier life, by developing digital platforms with the end customer in mind. 

We partnered with the VP of Engineering to learn about the features the e-counselling platform wanted to offer its customers and ultimately the technical skills needed to build out those features – this understanding helped us achieve two key things: We narrowed our targeting to reach those candidates who were not just adept at PHP, but also whose experience around the application of the language and previous working environments would be relevant for the client. We informed our qualifying questions to candidates in the pre-screening stage.

Results

A thorough pre-screening approach enabled us to deliver a robust shortlist of candidates, 95% of whom moved onto the second interview. With a solid understanding of our client’s customer-first approach, we offered valuable feedback to candidates at every stage of the interview. This eventually helped them align with the company’s mission, foster a stronger connection with the hiring manager, and ultimately be clear about the expectations of the job at hand.