How Outsourcing to India Helped UK Company Overcome Software Talent Crunch?

Shaun: Hello ladies and gentlemen, my name is Shaunvir Mahil and I am a co-founder of VirtualEmployee.com. Today I have come to Central London, King’s Cross to meet with Keystone Employment Group, an organization with over 50 years of recruitment experience.

Keystone Employment Group built with VirtualEmployee.com a full-fledged recruitment lifecycle web application, and I have come here to share with you their experience of hiring three senior software developers with us.

So, let’s go inside now and meet with Malcolm from Keystone Employment Group.

Shaun: Firstly, Malcolm, I just want to say thank you for taking time out and agreeing to share your experience with VirtualEmployee.com with our viewers.

Malcolm: Yeah, that’s okay. My pleasure.

Shaun: Thanks. Could you first just start off by introducing yourself?

Malcolm: I am Malcolm Paice. I am the Chief Operating Officer of Keystone Employment Group. We are a recruitment firm. It has been around for over 50 years. We offer online recruitment services as well as traditional recruitment services. We are based in London but we do recruitment all over the UK and we do some internationally as well.

Shaun: Okay. So what services did you avail from Virtual Employee and for how long?

Malcolm: So we started an entirely new project we were building a whole new web platform an enterprise recruitment platform and we needed you know, started off with three full time developers a completely new product, a new business model, and we used Virtual Employee for round about 18 months from start to finish to really build that product from the ground up. We engaged them from the beginning of the project right through until it was actually delivered at the end point. We needed front end and backend, so this is an entire web service. So we needed people to build the user interface and work on the user experience and all that good stuff as well as backend database developers as well.

Shaun: Okay. Can you tell me more about the application that you developed? My understanding is that it’s not just a small web-based application but rather it’s a full-. fledged web application that covers the entire or full recruitment lifecycle.

Malcolm: Correct.

Shaun: Could you just walk us through how it actually works?

Malcolm: That’s right. It’s a full end-to-end enterprise online recruitment portal. So companies whether they are small or large, or even individuals, self traders can use the portal to register, and to create a job vacancy. So they create their job specifications and job adverts. The portal then sends that out to a number of resourcing tools including social media, job sites, as well as tapping into our own database. Then it gathers all of the applications, all of the interested candidates, and creates a shortlist of candidates for the hiring manager. So it’s a full end-to-end recruitment tool. It was also designed to be pay on-demand. So typically recruitment is a B2B model where people have an account with a recruitment company, and that’s quite a slow, sort of analog process, whereas with the Mintt portal anyone can register immediately, they can pay via PayPal or using a credit or debit card. So it’s kind of making a much more transactional based model.

Shaun: Why did Keystone decide to develop this application? How is it different to what’s currently in the market?

Malcolm: There are other web portals out there but we were following a very, very different payment model. In fact, the business model itself is quite different to what else is out there. Our model is designed to be very much on demand. You don’t have to open an account with us. You don’t have to have an existing relationship with us. You can simply register ‘pay for the service’ there and then and instantly access it. That’s quite unique in the marketplace. Recruitment is still very much a B2B kind of open-a-credit-account type of business model. So that payment on demand was quite new, and also the generation of a shortlist is quite unique as well.

Ordinarily when someone is hiring a member of a staff, they are presented with some CVs which they either sieve through themselves to select their candidates or they are presented with one or two people by recruitment agency. What this is doing is taking large amounts of applications and whittling it down to a really solid, qualified shortlist that the person can hire from. Or they can hire more than one person for the same flat fee. It’s a flat fee model; so whether they take one person or three from that shortlist, it’s all for the same fee. It’s a very, very good value for money for a business to recruit that way as well.

So that’s quite unique, quite different, and I think it was one of the first times that an enterprise solution like this has given people everything they need in one place to hire people without ever having to talk to a recruiting consultant at all.

Shaun: Okay. So in short the advantages of this enterprise application are that it is cheaper and it’s faster?

Malcolm: That’s it. Yup. Streamlining the whole process. So a lot quicker from end-to-end, much, much lower cost, and you know what that cost is upfront before you start the process. That’s quite a key.

Shaun: Okay. What are some of the key functionalities of this software that you developed? What can you do on it?

Malcolm: Right at the front end I think that payment for the service that I mentioned a moment ago is quite key. So you can just pay by PayPal or a credit card to actually access the service. All the fees are upfront; you could pay for it that way. Registration is very straightforward. There’s no prequalification; you just register. You post — you write your job specifications in the application and then you upload it.

Then some of the other functionalities that we have in there is integration with some third party services. So there’s some APIs that we are written to make the service work, and that’s so we could seamlessly use external search engines, job sites, social media, so on and so forth. That’s very helpful because that helps us in gathering candidates from a large number of sources.

And then one of the key bits of functionality is the sorting and filtering of a shortlist; that’s quite a key part of the software, and then presenting that shortlist to the hiring manager in a nice user interface that allows them to very quickly have a look at the people that had applied in a summary form. They can watch a short clip, a video clip the candidate has made, or they can actually arrange a video interview all through the one application. So that’s quite a varied range of functionality in there from start to finish.

Shaun: So for the candidates who are conducting the video interviews, can they do them over their mobile?

Malcolm: They can do, yeah. The main drive really is for short video clips. Video interviewing actually is still in its early days in many ways. People still like the face-to-face aspect of interviewing a candidate. But yeah, if they are doing a video interview or if they are uploading a clip, they can do it from any device. Very, very straightforward.

Shaun: Third party applications don’t — usually don’t have robust documentation. So when you are creating custom solutions for your application it can be challenging whilst integrating the third party APIs like I believe you did with Broadband and Launchpad. Were those some of the challenges you experienced whilst developing this application, and what were some of the other challenges that you faced whilst developing this application?

Malcolm: Yes, it was seen as a challenge at the beginning of the project. Actually, those third party integrations weren’t the most challenging aspects partly because firms like Broadband PayPal, and Launchpad have got very well established APIs. The virtual employee developers were well versed in writing to those. So they are a body of work; we expect those to be a pain point, but as it turns out, they weren’t; they went relatively smoothly.

Some of the other challenges in terms of functionality was around that gathering of the shortlist I mentioned a moment ago. That’s quite a unique thing to do. There wasn’t a template for the developers to follow. It was a new piece of functionality that in our view have never been done before. So that took quite a bit of creativity and understanding from developers to make that work.

You can’t just do it, you can’t write an algorithm that finds the best people in a list of maybe 100 candidates. So that took a lot of time working through. But I think the solution we ended up with was quite nice, quite well defined.

Shaun: Okay. And what were some of the languages that you used to develop this application, and what methodology did you use?

Malcolm: Frontend is mostly C Sharp At the backend it’s SQL database. So pretty common sort of languages, and the team that we utilized within Virtual Employee was very, very experienced in those. So we didn’t have any real concerns there.

Shaun: Okay. And what methodology did you use?

Malcolm: We adopted Agile methodology. I think for a project like this that worked best for us. There was quite an intense frontend period of development which then changed as we worked through the business sort of process. So that kind of having regular scrums and updates with the developers over in India was very, very helpful, and that plateaued out into sort of more refined debugging and so on and so forth further down the line.

Shaun: Okay. You followed a service-orientated architecture. Why did you choose this approach?

Malcolm: Really for longevity reason, to make sure that we had a service that could be supported easily, that we could append to later on, that we could adapt, that we could modify some of the process flows, how it hangs together. Yeah support and flexibility really was the main approach there.

Shaun: Malcolm, why did Keystone decide to offshore in the first place?

Malcolm: So we had a number of options which we considered. One option is to employ people here locally in London, have them in an office or perhaps working remotely, which takes time and money, It’s despite the huge growth in technology in London. It’s still very, very expensive to employ people on the part of full-time basis. You’ve got to have enough space to house them, manage them. So that would have slowed the project down and undoubtedly drawn some money away from the project that could have been used elsewhere.

We are a London-based company. Wages are high, real estate is at a premium, so housing. We had started off with 3 full-time developers with Virtual Employee, having those based in London would have been expensive.

But it’s not just about costs. We also looked to outsourcing it to a web development company, but that’s very much a sort of a project is delivered, you’re given a price upfront, you provide your specifications, they will deliver that. That’s it. You tend to part company, which didn’t really suit us either. We knew that because this is such a new business model that we were building that it would change over time, and we didn’t really want a web developer to just deliver something and disappear into the sun set and charge very high fees thereafter. We knew that after the initial 9 months there would be changes that took place and you have kind of then embed them into your business and try to smooth over the ongoing support. And it could be very, very expensive. The cost of that outsourcing approach is usually the most expensive approach of all of them.

So, cost was a big factor but I think flexibility was a bigger concern for us. We didn’t want to do that simple outsourcing. Had we employed people in-house, it’s not so flexible. If you now got the 3 fulltime or even part-time employees, they have to be managed, they have got to be nurtured, and all of the management infrastructure that goes around that. So really I think the Virtual Employee model was the perfect sort of compromise between those two. We had the control of having direct employees but with lower costs, but moreover we had flexibility. Over the course of the project, we went from 3 developers to 2 to 1. And that was just way more frictionless than it could have ever been if we had employed those people directly. And as the project was extended a little bit, it meant that we didn’t have very high cost that we would have incurred from an outsourced third party. So really good meeting of those two worlds. I think it was the solution we got there.

Shaun: Okay. Where there also other hidden factors aside from cost that prompted you to consider offshoring? You’re very experienced in the recruitment sector, so you know how the local market operates very well.

Malcolm: Absolutely. I mean we know the technology of recruitment market very well. That’s part of our business. We know how some of our clients often struggle to find and retain tech talent. Sometimes it seems it’s a bit of an irony in a city like London, which has such spectacular growth in that sector. But we have also got some of the most acute shortages in tech talent. Of course, it would have cost us more, but it would have also cost us time when we would have to recruit that talent with as same as any other firm. We have to go out and find the people that we think would work on this project that would stick around and work on that project. Training people, you have got to invest time, effort, and money there.

So it’s more than just the financial considerations; it’s also the time that it takes. Yeah, the technology sector, the work has command high salaries in London. Cost of living in London is very, very high. Not many will want to stick around on a project once it’s out of the exciting phase. They’d want to move on. The earnings in tech talent are quite high; so they can move from job to job and improve their earning capability and of course their experience. I think developers need varied experience to survive.

So yeah all of those things were in our mind. We have seen a lot of our customers struggle with retaining technology talent. And that was a challenge that we really didn’t want as an additional body of work when we were doing a project as big as this.

London is an interesting city at the moment for developers because technology is enjoying great growth and yet there’s a real problem with attracting talent. So it would have taken us probably a good couple of months to find the right developers at the right salary. Then we would have needed to house them. We occupy quite small offices; a lot of our work is done online. So chances are that we would have to work remotely any way.

And then of course there’s retention of tech staff. I mean if you are the tech talent that London and so many other cities need, it’s a seller’s market. You can command a good salary. You can decide to whether you stick around on a project or move on to a new interesting one. London is not short of new and exciting technology projects to work on. So retaining talent is often an absolute key consideration.

On a project like this, we thought that there’s a strong chance we would have difficulty retaining people after about sort of the 9, 10 month period. When the main sprint of the project is over, we knew that we would need people way beyond that to refine it, develop it further, adapt to the market.

So I think that it would have without a doubt taken us longer, it would have been more expensive, I think retention of full-time staff would have been a bigger challenge.

Shaun: It’s a very interesting point you mentioned I guess as a recruitment company yourself you have firsthand experience of what is happening here locally in the London market and there is another very interesting point actually that it’s one thing to acquire talented staff or talented software developers, but it’s another to actually retain them for 18 months or 2 years. Because they are in such high demand they can easily get job offers from other companies as well.

Malcolm: Correct and that’s not getting any easier because the supply of tech talent particularly in London is far outstripped by the demand for that talent. So if you are a good developer, you can afford to move around quite a lot. That’s important for developer to get lots of experience, and of course to boost their earning potential.

And you’re right, we are a recruitment company, we do a lot of recruitment in the technology space, and a lot of times our clients are asking us to not only find good developers, but get good developers that would stick around for at least a year. It’s hugely expensive to train and nurture new members of staff if you have to do that with talents that is difficult to find in the first place. You can just get caught in a never-ending cycle of incurring recruitment, management, and training costs. You only hold on to people for a short period of time. So it’s really an acute problem and one that we want to avoid with them in the project.

Shaun: How would you compare scaling up and down with Virtual Employee as opposed to scaling up and down here locally in London?

Malcolm: A lot quicker and a lot less painless. I think that we started off with 3 full-time developers. That could have needed to increase; it didn’t in the end. It was ample for what we needed. But if we had had to increase to 4, we knew that doing that in London would have taken time, and again would have –we would have paid quite a considerable salary to make that happen. And again you have got to worry about fitting them with the team. That’s another consideration that you got to do at that stage. Scaling down, that also has its challenges.

We knew that we started off with 3 developers where in the intense development stage when you knew that that would reduce the project date. If you are letting people go as the project starts to scale back, you could be looking at redundancy cost and all that entails. So absolutely that degree of flexibility was a core part of that decision-making process.

We quite after having developers, 3 developers fulltime for quite a long time it got to the stage where we scaled that down to 2 and then scaled it back down to 1. And that process was again a lot more frictionless by doing it through Virtual Employee rather than the processes that we would have gone through if we were doing it locally.

So yes, whether a project is larger or starts to scale down in size, that sort of flexibility is key, and there are hidden costs attached to it. It’s not necessarily cheap or easy to scale up or down over the lifecycle of a project like that.

And I think you also can get bogged down in some of the other things that are happening in your organization. I think almost having the employees at arm’s length was beneficial because it meant that we could really take a step back right that this project is at a stage where it only now needs 2 people on it. So let’s scale it back.

I think that inevitably what happens if you directly employ people is that there is greater chance of mission creep, those people end up working on other things.

I don’t think it’s easy to be as objective about the job that people are doing and what you are paying to get that job done. I think that was a really helpful aspect of having employees at arm’s length.

There’s attachments that just happen. You have got to — that could be quite painful when you got to scale it down. I think being able to go from 3 to 2 to 1 developer as we did over the full sort of 9 months was key. It was an important part of making sure the project came in on time, and that the phasing of the project was kept clean. Otherwise, I think there could have been a risk that we were still overstaffed to the points where the project really didn’t require.

So it was absolutely a key consideration, that scaling up and scaling down. It was very, very painless with Virtual Employee. We were able to take very objective decisions about when we moved from 3 developers eventually down to 1. And it just kept our decision making very, very clean without some of the other issues that can affect you with full-time employees and of course the legislation that is there to protect them.

Shaun: I thought even aside from the legislation point of view, you made a very interesting point about being objectively being able to scale down staff. Could you just expand on that because that’s the first take that have really head on that? How does having somebody sitting next to you sometimes impact your decision-making on a project like this?

Malcolm: I think it’s almost inevitable. Human nature is that if we have staff, we want them to be busy, that we want them to be engaged, and we want them to be — flexibility in a member of staff is something that everyone looks for. So I think without a doubt what happens is with any employee, particularly good employees, is that there’s that mission creep, there are other tasks that start to fill their day. And that probably ought not to be the case. If you had bought in some resource specifically to work on one project, you could very easily get lost in what that project is costing you if you have a developer that’s doing some other things on the side for you. It’s very easy with developers to do. We have a number of technology projects. Had we had someone in our building, I am pretty sure that we would have said actually you know C# let’s get you to have a look at this. That’s one aspect to it. That’s where you can sort of — you can drip from the original project brief.

The other aspect to it is just about human relationships. As I said, we have a core team of about 15 fulltime members. If you bring 3 people into that team, we all like to get on as a business and friendships form and relationships form. Again when it comes to having to scale a project down, none of us like to be too mercenary about — that’s it. We have to sort of break the team up.

But I think it’s a lot harder to remain objective when you bought those people in and you’re engaging with them in ways other than just the project at hand. What enables us to do, looking at this project, is we knew these are the various phases. When it moved up the initial first sort of sprint period, the very intensive development and the product was really started to get well formed, we knew we had to take it from the 3 down to 2, that we were very acutely aware of the cost attached to the project at that stage. And then again when we went from 2 down to 1 it allows us to take just a much more objective view of where the project was at, what it was costing us, and the resource that we could realistically attach to it ongoing.

So that weaning off of resource is always a difficult thing to do. You know, we are all compassionate human beings, but doing that when the employees are kind of at arm’s length just makes the whole process just much more straightforward.

Shaun: How much cost saving would you then estimate that you save perhaps per developer, per year?

Malcolm: It’s a tricky one to fathom because I think had we employed people directly, I think as I said before, there’s a lot of hidden costs that get bundled in when you start employing directly. And of course, compared to quotes that we had from a complete outsourced solution, it was dramatically cheaper. So — but to answer your question compared to had we employed the people ourselves, we think it’s somewhere in the region of round about £40,000 a year. Possibly a lot more but I think if we are on the conservative side, that’s where we think and then of course that’s money we can put elsewhere into the project into promoting it, marketing it, getting it to market, and actively selling it. That’s the size of a chunk of a budget that we don’t use to push the service out there, but somewhere in that region.

Shaun: How were the results of working with Virtual Employee?

Malcolm: The project came in on time, on budget which is kind of job done from my perspective. I think if you hit those 2 markers, then you are in pretty good shape.

I think the product was actually more refined than we originally set out. There were some additional functionality added in that we haven’t expected right at the beginning of the project. That’s what happens. We have good creative people working on the project that suggested how we could improve things.

If you look at our original brief, what we set out to do. It changed along the way. That’s the trouble with project is that 9 months in a modern business is a long time. The market changes, price points change, dynamics change, so being able to be flexible, meet development, take the agile approach was really important. But we got all the functionality we wanted with some more that we didn’t have in our original brief. So we came in on budget, the project was delivered on time, and we successfully took it out to market. So from that perspective it was a very good experience.

Shaun: So with the benefit of hindsight, let’s say perhaps you had taken this project to an outsourcing company, whether based here locally in the UK or abroad, what would you say was the advantage of our model over traditional outsourcing models where you are pretty much giving control to the vendor. If you want to make any changes 9 months down the line….

Malcolm: Yeah.

Shaun: ….you have to go into re kind of negotiations with them. What was the difference in experience for Keystone working with Virtual Employee as opposed to a traditional model?

Malcolm: It really is about control and flexibility because if you just give somebody a set of user requirements and they give you a price, they will go and build that. It’s rare to find an outsourced company that can give you the degree of flexibility that you need coupled with control.

On the control aspect, an outsourced company just gives you a price. They will do it the way that see it done and they will deliver it to you as the customer. You don’t really have a day-to-day management control over that. That could be quite a painful experience. If you are trying to manage the way another company delivers a product to its customers that can be the struggle I think. But the flexibility is key, is that I know now that some of the changes we needed to make as the product developed, that would have translated with a typical outsourced company into another fee. Okay we will make that change for you but here’s another cost for that, here’s another cost for that. And pretty quickly we would have busted the budget for the project I am pretty sure.

So I think it’s those two things — control, having the level of control is if you’re managing it yourself with people in-house but with the flexibility to change some things, get some other things done that you might not have done without just constantly having an outside company re-quoting and re-pricing for everything. I think those are the two big points there.

Shaun: Okay. So would you agree that hiring Virtual Employee is like hiring in-house resources but just in-house resources that are based offshore?

Malcolm: Yeah there’s no difference at all really other than it’s less burdensome on the organization in terms of people management and costs and all the things associated with taking people on full-time with a level of control. The way that you interact with your staff is really no different.

The level of influence that you have is no different. You are managing that process; your employees are delivering it. Yeah the only difference is that they are not in your building, they may not necessarily be in your country. But as I said Virtual Employee is well versed in that. They know how to act as employees overseas. So that has made our job of managing the whole process.

Shaun: Why did you partner with Virtual Employee over perhaps one of our competitors?

Malcolm: When we were looking at the market, we wanted a proven ability above all else. But I think from a technical development perspective Virtual Employee had a very good proven track record. We didn’t have to guess whether or not it was going to work.

I think the level of experience and some very, very positive feedback from other people that had used Virtual Employee on similar types of projects, that was what really clinched it.

Shaun: How did Keystone find working with software developers remotely? Was it seamless or was there any inefficiencies in the process?

Malcolm: We were worried at first; we had concerns, the usual concerns over things like language barrier, time difference, just remoteness, just having people remote. But I think again it comes down to experience. I think the developers at Virtual Employee are very, very experienced in working that way. We weren’t as the client the first time we worked with developers based overseas. But because that’s what these developers do all the time, they were very well versed in it. So communication was superb, some of the best communications we ever had on a project like this.

We used Skype calling and emailing very effectively. So communication was probably greater than if I have had local developers. But I think the guys at Virtual Employee they make a particular point about keeping you informed every step of the way. So every single day we are getting updates even if we don’t have a scrum session or a discussion with the developers. We would still get a daily summary, no matter what would happen, even if it had been a relatively light day in terms of development. So communication was excellent, the deliverables measuring what was getting delivered on a week-by-week basis was very clear. We were never in the dark about how the project was moving forward. So we had concerns early on but actually it was a painless process. Having the Virtual Employee developers work on UK time so there was no issues there. That was something I hadn’t reckoned on. But working on UK time really made the whole process a lot easier.

Shaun: Why did you decide to offshore to India over other outsourcing destinations like Eastern Europe or the Philippines?

Malcolm: It’s really about experience, experience in working in the space. I think the people we had based in India very, very quickly proved themselves to be very experienced in working this way. They had the skillsets; that’s absolutely vital, and they had skillsets available in abundance. So if we needed to scale up and get more people, we knew that the skillsets were available and available quickly, and we can add people on and drop them off in a short period of time. So that was the main factor.

I don’t know if we could have outsourced to somebody in South America, I don’t know if they’d have the level of experience that the guys in India have, they are very, very well versed in working this way.

Shaun: Aside from the virtual employees that you’ve worked with, how was your experience of working with VirtualEmployee.com as a whole?

Malcolm: It was very good, very painless. I think they take customer service very seriously. Sometimes as a client you could be a bit awkward. You are asking for things that are a bit of a challenge, but they are always very, very receptive, always very helpful, and did everything they could to make it work for us, both in the beginning when it was a very intense full-time project with 3 developers on, and as we started to scale it back, they made life as easy as possible for us.

Great organization for customer service. Communication again was very, very good. They were very good at keeping us informed of everything that was happening and very responsive. So again they worked on UK time, so whenever we had a query or any issues cropped up, we always got very, very good responses. Yeah, no problems at all.

Shaun: What were the advantages of working with VirtualEmployee.com?

Malcolm: I think it really comes down to control. You have complete control over the project the same if you directly employ the people yourself, but you have flexibility. I mean that’s a key thing that is very difficult to get if it’s an outsourced third party provider. So being able to completely control the project, having the flexibility to scale the number of employees up or down, being able to take the project off in different tangents the same as you — what happens in business is things change, decisions change. Being able to do that without the project getting thrown into disarray, I think it’s those two things — control and flexibility.

The whole process really reduces lot of risks from the project — from our point of view. There’s lot of risks in any project and the benefits we have got from Virtual Employee have neutralized a lot of those risks.

Shaun: Okay. Would you recommend VirtualEmployee.com services?

Malcolm: I absolutely would. As I said before I think where you as a client might have some reservation or be a bit nervous about it, I think the experience that Virtual Employee has fills that gap. For us it was a first but Virtual Employee they have done it many, many times which really helped the process along. So absolutely I would recommend it. It’s a good model. And I think they are one of the best at what they do.

I think with Virtual Employee there’s a great degree of capability there, great degree of experience, and it really isn’t that different to just having your own employees in-house. It’s over the benefits of that that you have of having your own direct employees but without some of the costs, risks, and lack of flexibility that you might have if you employ people directly. So I would definitely say to give it a serious consideration particularly on a project based. If you have got a project in hand, I think it’s really a good way of reducing risks from it.

Shaun: Is there anything else you’d like to add for the benefit of our viewers?

Malcolm: I would. I think that we were a bit cautious about this sort of overseas virtual employee model. We weren’t sure about it, we weren’t sure if it will work, and of course you see that as a risk. But what I would say to anyone thinking about taking this approach is actually this process removes the risks for us. It removes the risk of us having full-time employees that may be wouldn’t have worked out, it removes the risks of going massively over budget because you retain control, and it removes the risk of that sense of being held at ransom by an external third party where you can end up in a battle with the supplier that hasn’t delivered what you thought or what they promised to deliver at a very high cost. So what I would say is put your mind at rest about some of the things associated with it, about it being remote and overseas, and think about those risks that you remove from the project by using the Virtual Employee model.

Shaun: Okay. Well, Malcolm, I am glad to know that your experience with us was a good one. And I just want to say again thank you for taking time out today and sharing your experience with our viewers.

Malcolm: My pleasure.

Shaun: Thank you.

Malcolm: Thank you.

Shaun: In conclusion ladies and gentlemen, I thought Malcolm raised a lot of interesting points in this case study. But two really stood out for me. The first was about keeping a hold of talented employees. When we are expanding our teams, we often think in terms of just accessing good talent. But when you are based in a high tech city like London it is often equally as challenging to keep a hold of talented employees.

The second point was about capacity planning and how Malcolm said when some of your staff are at arm’s length, it’s often easier to make objective decisions.

So please do keep in mind that offshoring is not always just about cost saving; there are additional advantages too such as increased scalability, having that management burden taken away for you, and being able to keep a hold of talented staff.

Thank you very much for watching this case study and the best of luck with your future offshoring endeavors.

Source: https://youtu.be/EKT_Z1RvLVg