We’d been very lucky to this point in our operation, where we were able to be completely successful without ever having to take on any clients in our own city. I mean Montreal is a great place to work and has a growing startup community, don’t get me wrong, but as recruiters, we have two criteria to follow in order to be successful: follow the jobs, and follow the money.
Montreal tech jobs aren’t as lucrative as tech jobs in NY, SF, or LA, for example, and they most certainly aren’t as abundant. Nevertheless, we’d reached a point in our entrepreneurial lives where we felt it was time to give our hometown the love it deserved and see if we couldn’t help grow a startup in need.
It wasn’t long before we found a company in the Old Port of Montreal that was fresh off moving into a massive new office and was in need of filling it with the best tech talent around. They’d been generating revenue for months, were running the entire production process for their unique fitness hardware devices in-house, and they’d recently received the funding necessary to build out a legitimate software development team. In a matter of 6 weeks, we learned the company inside and out, met with dozens of highly qualified candidates right here in our own city, and managed to help our client hire 4 awesome engineers. We were amazed at how quickly we got it done, because as you may recall, the average recruiting cycle for 1 role is about 6 weeks, so to have 4x’ed the process, we felt pretty good about ourselves. It also helped that our client was capable of producing offers after just a single interview (whereas most companies put candidates through a gauntlet of 3-4 rounds).
It’s not that we didn’t enjoy the work we did for this company, because in fact, it was one of our greatest achievements to date, but like I said before, we had to follow the jobs and the money, and after this brief success in the Old Port, we came to realize just how different the scene in Montreal was compared to our other cities. There was less of a desire (or perhaps a need) to have recruiters help out in hiring for tech roles, and as such, our prices were being driven down with every proposal we made. We created some solid relationships, and felt there might be a future for our business should Montreal become a tech mecca in Canada, just as Silicon Valley is in the US, but for the moment, we had to go back to what worked best for us. And it’s a good thing we did, because the Southwestern US was about to be real good to us.
We would continue to succeed in Cali, but out of the cobwebs came a new city, one we’d yet to conquer, and it would become a very important one for 2015. But the question remains – how do we find a geographic focus in such a volatile space? Will we ever be able to establish ourselves in one (or a few) cities in particular? It was never really something we thought about too much, but when it comes down to it, we saw the impact we had on just one company in Montreal, so what would that say about us if we opened up shop in LA, for example? We got to thinking…
[button color=”accent-color” hover_text_color_override=”#fff” image=”default-arrow” size=”medium” url=”https://synapseint.com/contact/” text=”Schedule a Time to Chat With a Synapse Talent Expert” color_override=””]