Elements International
When I joined Elements Interactive almost nine years ago, it was still a small company. At that time the team consisted of about six people, including the two founders Danny and Wouter. Every single person was Dutch and we had lunch with cheese and peanut butter sandwiches.
Soon after I joined, the strategy of Elements changed: we wanted to grow. At that time it was as much a struggle finding the right people as it is now. But we were not actively looking across the borders and did not even consider doing so. Our first international hire happened by accident — it was a game developer from Hungary and he was the only non-Dutch speaking employee. Poor fella!
Gradually we started to hire more non-Dutchies, but all because they applied at our company and not because we were actively recruiting across the borders. I don’t really recall when this changed exactly, but since the “War for Talent” in IT became a fact we needed to be more creative and needed to look way past the borders of the Netherlands. Of course LinkedIn accelerated this. It took us a little time to adjust to the fact that if you have a company that makes a core business of innovative development, the Netherlands is just not big enough to find the most talented people.
So, we changed our recruitment strategy and started to recruit actively internationally. We changed all formal communication in the company to English. We tried to do outsourcing with a dedicated development team in Kharkiv in the Ukraine, but this turned out to be quite a challenge, not only because of the time zone and the hassle to travel to and from there, but also cultural differences.
In October 2013 we opened an office in Barcelona to set up a remote team there. We had a tough first year, because working with a remote team in a different country has its obvious challenges. But we survived and I am super proud to say that we now have a great team of eleven developers there doing awesome things for our clients. One of those team members has returned to his home city Warsaw and is still doing Python magic for us. So I guess you could say we even have three offices now ;-).
While setting up the team in Barcelona, we have also kept on extending our team in Almere with new national and international talent. Over the past three years this has changed our company from being 100% Dutch to a melting pot of now fifteen different nationalities and counting. So instead of that peanut butter sandwiches for lunch we now see a lot of warm meals and salads coming by. We speak English, make jokes in English and swear in English (although we maybe already did that). All these nationalities and different backgrounds brought a new vibe to the company — a great vibe if you ask me. Want to join us?
Originally published at www.elements.nl on June 1, 2016.
