Background to the Exercise

Perform Media are a £300m turnover sports media organisation. They are establishing a new brand, DAZN, to provide an “over the top”, subscription -based, Video on Demand service for live sport. Their offering is extremely similar to Netflix and is available in 8 countries including the US, Japan, Canada, Germany and Italy. It will be available in 20 countries by 2020. DAZN sought to build a new software development centre which would comprise of highly-skilled and permanent Engineering Managers, Software Engineers, Scrum Masters, Testers, & DevOps Engineers. In the competitive Leeds recruitment market they needed a proactive solution to fill the roles quickly as the growth plans were ambitious: 60 technical staff in the business’s first year. Highly skilled technical staff require more than money and career opportunities: they want to work on the most cutting-edge, ideally high profile, projects available. DAZN offered this but had no reputation whatsoever in Leeds as an employer.

Why Hotfoot?

Hotfoot have been established and active in the north of England for over 17 years, working on niche technical requirements for some of the country’s – and the world’s – biggest names, as well as start-ups and SMEs. The Directors have over 20 years’ experience in IT recruitment each, and the staff are some of the best in the business. Expertise and continuity are a given and this ensures clients stick with Hotfoot, in many cases for over 10 years. Clients invariably appreciate that Hotfoot are neither nodding dogs nor aggressive salespeople. The business thrives because of the honesty and expertise of the staff, putting together progressive recruitment strategies which recognise the unique problems which face any business trying to attract the best hands-on technical staff. Every strategy or campaign proposed is tried and tested. Hotfoot can represent and promote your business as a recruitment brand in the best way possible and can fill the most difficult technical roles efficiently and effectively.

The Roles:

DAZN immediately sought:

• 2 technically-oriented Engineering Managers

• Skilled senior Back-End and Front-End Software Engineers

• 2 Automated Testers

• 2 Scrum Masters

These needed to be some of the most skilled engineers in the region.

The Solution

It was clear from the outset that recruitment advertising and/or recruitment agency databases would not produce the calibre or number of candidates required and would be inefficient and expensive. The Leeds software development market extremely tight knit and strong technical communities exist. In common with all in-demand software engineers, staff of the calibre sought were not readily available on the recruitment market. A proactive and retained ongoing recruitment campaign was run by Hotfoot. This comprised of an intensive, full-time executive search exercise combined with 2 non-recruitment branded events which were managed and conducted by our separate and established events company – “Northern Tech Events”.

“Hotfoot have been enjoyable and refreshing to work with. They have done an amazing job at listening to our needs, sourcing candidates that fit our hiring criteria. We have grown at the pace we have needed to because of Hotfoot’s expertise and ability to bring the right people to us.” Richard McIntyre, Engineering Manager, DAZN

The Events

As DAZN are a new presence in Leeds, a technical “meet-up” event was arranged to introduce the business to the market. This was done via Hotfoot’s technical events company; “Northern Tech Events, an established events company with a network of thousands. This meant that an opportunity was given to the local development community to find about more about the arrival of this new software engineering centre in an informal and friendly setting. Northern Tech Events hand-picked an audience who were technically relevant to DAZN’s software environment which comprised of sites in Leeds they were specifically interested in hiring from. This target audience was agreed with DAZN from the beginning. DAZN provided technical speakers whilst Northern Tech Events funded and ran the event which was fully branded as DAZN and not promoted in any way as a recruitment event. Good quality food and a free bar were provided along with branded goods and prizes which involved the attendees raising the DAZN profile on X (Formerly known as Twitter).

This first event was a big success with 59 attendees, all of who were of potential technical relevance to DAZN. The event was free to delegates but was not open to recruiters or sales people. NTE manage this successfully and diplomatically. In the weeks following, Hotfoot approached the attendees judged on the night to have been of interest as potential employees. These approaches resulted in DAZN engaging, interviewing and ultimately offering roles to a number of these attendees, who were now excited by DAZN and their technical offering. Another event took place in October 2018, on a similar basis. This time a larger venue was utilised and 96 relevant developers attended. Again, these attendees were hand-picked as relevant technically. Interest was much greater and had snowballed as a result of the waves being made in the market. The DAZN brand was now established and several people who had previously discounted DAZN as a potential new employer, were now engaged. “Working with Hotfoot over the last six months has been great. They know the Leeds tech market really well, understand the different skill-sets and understand different roles available. They go the extra mile to engage with candidates in a way that is thorough but not pushy. Hotfoot have placed over fifteen software engineers with us in the last six months and also helped grow our brand awareness within the local tech community.” Rob MacDonald, Engineering Manager, DAZN

The Executive Search

The executive search (“Headhunt”) campaign involved Hotfoot agreeing several (ongoing) target lists with the hiring managers at DAZN. These comprised of non-active job seekers but who were identified as working for DAZN’s technical competitors, companies like, BSkyB, William Hill and the BBC. Hotfoot proactively approached and engaged these candidates with a view to initialising an informal meeting with the hiring manager. Following these informal meetings, the interested and interesting candidates were entered into the newly designed recruitment process. The full process and methods employed can be outlined during a face to face meeting.

Ongoing Recruitment Process Consultancy

Every week throughout the exercise a new Target List was agreed and worked on, keeping the process fresh and relevant, as DAZN’s priorities shifted. As hires were made, the priority for certain roles changed. As an example, it was important to recruit certain senior people first to ensure their involvement with the specification and selection of future hires. Hotfoot also attended DAZN’s premises at least weekly and provided activity reports to help track progress and identify any potential blockages in the process.

Candidate Experience

“Back in May 2018, I saw a notice on LinkedIn for a DAZN event being held in Leeds (two technical talks covering MobX and serverless design patterns). I didn't have a buddy to go with on this particular Thursday evening, but the topics themselves motivated me to attend on my own and I'm glad I did. Standing at the bar I met a couple of friendly engineers and started talking nonsense about React vs Vue.js and the merits of AWS Lambda before the talks started. Ensuring we grabbed an adequate number of DAZN laptop stickers (can never have enough of those) on the way to our seats, we enjoyed Luca's MobX talk, particularly his discussion on micro-frontends, and made sure we asked questions on camera to get some SWAG after observing others doing the same (I got a T-shirt). Without moving from our seats - Josh from Hotfoot made sure our drinks were topped up without having to go to the bar :) - we enjoyed the pizza hospitality and listened to Yan's densely packed talk on AWS serverless patterns. After the talks, myself and my new friends hung back at the bar and had the opportunity to talk directly to Luca, Bruno and Yan from DAZN, with Josh from Hotfoot continuing to facilitate beverages. We did our best to try and pressgang Luca to open source his microfrontend code, before he embarked on his book tour of America, sadly to no avail. It really was a great event - a good location that attracted a healthy number of diverse attendees who generated numerous questions for the enthusiastic and knowledgeable speakers; plenty of drinks and pizzas to sustain the audience; and most importantly a chance to network with like-minded technologists both before and after the event. Events like that are an excellent way to connect candidates with new job opportunities in a relaxed setting, where recruitment professionals can discuss clients' needs informally and get a feel for candidates face-to-face. Following the event, I caught up with Hotfoot about possible roles/opportunities at DAZN (purely on the strength of the technical talks at the event) and ended up being interviewed at DAZN's offices in Hammersmith a month later after an informal meeting with Bruno. Whilst I didn't take them up on a job offer at the time, I kept in touch with Hotfoot throughout the year and met with Josh in Leeds to discuss my situation 6 months on. They arranged another chat with the DAZN guys in Leeds and following that meeting I accepted an offer to join DAZN in the new year. I really like dealing with the guys at Hotfoot and their approach to finding suitable candidates for their clients. They provide the right amount of support to candidates (seemingly always available and responsive whenever you need them), have very strong relationships and alignment with their clients and communicate clearly in an honest, nononsense fashion, always doing what's right for both the client and the candidate.” --A Software Engineer

The Results

The exercise lasted 12 months, from June 2018 to June 2019. 41 permanent technical staff and 1 contract resource have been hired via Hotfoot, primarily Software Engineers but also including 2 Engineering Managers, 2 Scrum Masters, 2 Dev in Tests and 1 DevOps Engineer. DAZN have quickly become very well established and respected amongst the Leeds Developer community. They are facilitating their own meet-ups from March onwards. The overall cost of the project was LESS than if DAZN had used their existing agencies on a traditional success-related fee basis. The amount of time invested by hiring managers has been a fraction – they interviewed a small number of very high quality non-active job seekers who were exclusive to DAZN, ensuring no competition from other employers. The message and vision of DAZN was clearly defined within the local technical community, making ongoing recruitment more effective. CLIENT COMMENTS John Nathan, Head of Recruitment for DAZN is happy to give Hotfoot a reference and confirm all the above to be factually accurate. He can be contacted via email