Precision Sourcing: Local and Global Talent
In today’s competitive tech hiring landscape, companies need a recruitment partner that understands precision talent sourcing—whether that means targeting a specific city or casting a net across multiple continents.
From hyperlocal hiring to worldwide talent acquisition, discover how our adaptable recruitment strategies empowered four cutting-edge tech companies to build specialised teams exactly where and how they needed.
JOY - Scaling Engineering in Hypergrowth
📍Hiring locations: United States, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Netherlands, Nigeria, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, United Kingdom, and Ukraine.
Joy, a wedding planning platform launched out of Y Combinator in 2016, engaged Panda following their Series A funding round.
Challenge: Joy aimed to double its engineering team size, growing from 25 to 50 engineers within a year. Cost-efficiency was critical, as was expanding quickly while maintaining team quality and fit.
Solution & Results: Panda delivered 19 software engineering hires within three months, achieving rapid growth without compromising on quality. Alongside full-time engineers based in the U.S., Panda sourced skilled contractors from cost-effective regions across Europe, South America, and Africa.
Madhur Joshi - VP of Engineering @ Joy
“I highly recommend working with Panda. They saved us a lot of time in sourcing and pre-screening candidates, and their communication is always timely and to the point.”
Weaviate: Building a Global Team for a Top 50 AI Startup
📍Hiring locations: United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Netherlands, France, Spain, Ireland, Dubai, Poland, Switzerland, Portugal, and Brazil.
Weaviate, a pioneering vector database company and one of Forbes' Top 50 AI startups, partnered with Panda to scale from an eight-member team into an organization ready to lead in emerging database technologies.
Challenge: With Series A and Series B funding secured, Weaviate needed highly skilled engineers to support rapid technological and product innovation. Flexibility was key, with hiring intensity fluctuating to align with funding milestones.
Solution & Results: Over 2.5 years, Panda provided both contingent and embedded recruitment services, scaling to match Weaviate's hiring needs at each growth phase. Panda placed more than two-thirds of Weaviate’s current engineering team. Successful hires spanned 12 countries across four continents.
Embleema: Building a New Engineering Team in Paris
📍Hiring location: Paris (France)
Client Background: Embleema, a health tech company headquartered in New York, specialises in a blockchain-based platform for secure medical data sharing within the healthcare ecosystem. Initially relying on third-party collaborators, Embleema sought to establish an internal engineering team in Paris.
Challenge: Embleema needed skilled software engineers with blockchain and healthcare experience who were based in Paris.
Solution & Results: Over a 19-month engagement, Panda sourced more than 90% of Embleema’s Paris-based engineering team, securing 12 skilled software and data engineers who drove the company’s internal development capabilities.
Vespa: Finding Local Talent for an Office-Based Team
📍Hiring location: Trondheim (Norway)
Client Background: Vespa, a cutting-edge vector database and search engine that spun out from Yahoo in 2023 and is used by brands like Spotify, OkCupid, and Wix, approached Panda to source local candidates for their Trondheim office.
Challenge: Unlike remote-first companies, Vespa required candidates to work on-site in Trondheim, a smaller market for tech talent, and needed experienced engineers living locally or willing to relocate.
Solution & Results: Panda mapped the local talent pool, targeting skilled software engineers and site reliability engineers suited to Vespa’s needs. Through a strategic recruitment approach, Panda successfully met Vespa's staffing goals, helping them build a reliable, on-site engineering team in Trondheim.
