The Glue – A challenging IT scale-up

Interview with Mr. Danny Goovaerts, Chief Technology Officer at The Glue.

“Exellys has an excellent feel for our way of working and knows our DNA well; they always keep this in mind when matching talent with The Glue.”

How did you get to know Exellys ?

We encountered Exellys for the first time when we did a project (in a previous life) at Swift, where we saw the Exellys model and approach at work in real life.

Which specific challenges did your organization face (concerning IT Talent hiring, integration & development)?

The Glue was founded mid-2015, with the ambitious goal of building an advanced software layer (high complexity) for the banking sector, and this with the quickest marketing time possible. Consequently, we had to exponentially scale-up our capabilities over 2016.

Given the high technological complexity, we initially needed a bigger, flexible, and experienced (five to ten years) development team, which was sourced on a temporary basis.

Also, we wanted to populate our own organisation with more junior profiles with an IT and business background for our QA and professional services team. We strongly believe that each organisation has its specialism. Through partnership and cooperation, business eco-systems get stronger as a whole. We consistently use this ‘stick to the knitting’ as a guiding principle when working with customers and suppliers.

What value did you get from Exellys in helping your organization to solve this challenge?

We have no in-house HR department and don’t have the specific competencies to attract and select younger IT talents. We find the highest complementarities with Exellys in this domain, as this is their core competence (screening, selection, development tracks).

Most valuable for us in the Start Smart training and coaching programme are the personal development training and individual coaching tracks for the young graduates. We blend in our own expertise for technical training and peer-tutoring with our senior staff for specialist domains such as Java.

We currently have four Exellys talents with outstanding IT-profiles on board, out of which two are Java developers and two with a more business profile as part of our client facing team.

Our ultimate goal is to introduce the young graduates to our payroll, following the two-year program.

How would you quantify the potential (business) impact of partnering with Exellys ?

With traditional recruiting, we would never have equalled the success encountered via our partnership with Exellys. We would probably have recruited one or two starters. However, with Exellys we’ve got four IT talents on board now, all of them quickly reaching significant productivity levels. The combination of the talent of the young graduates, the amount of skills and knowledge they gain, and the fast pace at which they develop, is a rare thing to get. That’s where the value is.

Meet Jens, implementation engineer at The Glue and exemplary Exellyst!