Electric is the industry leader in providing world-class IT technology and real-time support for small and mid-sized businesses. It’s the third company founded by entrepreneur Ryan Dehehy, whose two previous companies were acquired. Electric is backed by Bessemer Venture Partners, the same VC that invested in Twilio, Pinterest, Shopify, and Linkedin, among others including Primary and GGV Capital.
Scaling a Unicorn
Electric has a sizable engineering team (it is a Unicorn after all) – with developers from Remotely working across multiple teams and hiring managers: from the data platform to the core backend and beyond, building microservices from the ground-up. We spoke with Chris Scholz, Director of Engineering (Data), and David Kider, an Engineering Manager on the core engineering team, both of whom have engineers through Remotely on their teams.
Finding a high-quality pool of talent: self-motivated, independent thinkers
I’ve never seen, universally, such a high-quality pool of candidates and talent. Language level was really excellent, the technical skill has been there… one of the things that’s really important to us is whether people can figure things out for themselves rather than needing to be told what to do every step of the way… and everybody has been really good at that. - Chris Scholtz
Chris Scholz explained that he had issues with other HR partners, “It got to the point where I, for all of my roles, I stopped using the other partner and moved everything over to [Remotely]." With Remotely, "everything has been going really smoothly.” Chris trusts Remotely to do a really good job of pre-screening people – and explained that no candidates have gotten through the process that shouldn’t have.
Making it easy to find strong contributors
David Kider is an engineering manager at Electric with six engineers on his team, two of whom are from Remotely. When he joined Electric, he had had a few engineers leave the team and was looking to fill their open positions and grow the team.
It’s difficult to find people in the states or abroad who were a good fit for the team and could contribute to the team. I was really pleasantly surprised with what happened with Remotely - we found a lot of really good candidates: a lot of technically sound candidates but also just really motivated people with a lot of interest in contributing and coming up with new ideas – being core members of the team. - David Kider
The Remotely team was communicative and enthusiastic, and stayed on top of things. As David explained, he was very busy at the time, with a lot going on, but Remotely ensured that the process stayed on track and moved quickly.
Sometimes hiring takes a long time, it's hard to find the right people, it’s a long process. With Remotely, we just got a bunch of great candidates right from the beginning. Interviews went really well and we just decided to bring people on — and it’s worked out really well.
David was really pleased with the pace at which the Remotely developers ramped up, and says “they have just been really strong contributors to the team.”
Electric's progress with Remotely
Electric brought on five developers through Remotely in their first five months and continues to grow the team.
