Talent

Talent Services

Cobb Systems Group's talent services produce qualified candidates for your full-time, temp-to-perm or contract job opening at lower cost and risk to you because we focus on candidates that demonstrate that their skills and capabilities will match your needs. Cobb Systems Group delivers customized interview automation and job simulations that allow candidates to demonstrate the key skills and capabilities needed to perform a job as defined by the hiring team. CSG capabilities allow our clients to hire a smaller number of highly skilled employees that can cover multiple roles and job functions.

Talent Services Engagement Model

Featured Case Studies

• Synopsis

  Our client has a long, distinguished history of serving institutional investors, ultra-high-net-worth individuals, and financial intermediaries. Paying its sales force accurately is a critical component to realizing its aggressive growth goals. To ensure the accurate payment of its sales force, our client set up a sales data analysis group to analyze the sales data that originates from many desperate sources and ensure that sales are properly attributed to the correct sales region, even when sales records are incomplete or duplicated.

  What challenges did our client face in hiring talent?

  Our client endured years of high turnover in the department, causing payment issues with the sales force. Our client could not accurately find or identify people that would excel at this role and was terminating people at a rate of 1 per month.

  How did CSG meet these challenges?

  • CSG analyzed the key skills needed to perform the position, which turned out to be the ability to comprehend the volume of detail inherent in large sets of data and the ability to do analysis and research in a fast-paced environment.
  • CSG built a software-based simulation of the daily activities of the position that allowed candidates to demonstrate their ability to perform the job.
  • CSG also created a temp-to-perm arrangement with this client for this position.

  The result: Since this engagement began, our client has not terminated anyone in this position and has converted the first wave of temps to full-time employees. This department is now considered a “talent farm.”

• Synopsis

  Many CSG clients have hiring needs for C# software engineers. The breadth and depth of needs encompasses front-end user interface to back-end middle-tier and database development, and ranges from junior to senior levels of experience.

  The developers needed to have experience with the majority of .NET libraries and programming patterns and styles(LINQ, WCF, MVC, MVVM, single/multi-threaded, etc.).

  What challenges were CSG clients facing in hiring talent?

  • Traditional recruiting agencies did cursory pre-screening of candidates based on keyword matching.
  • Resumes did not truly represent how, in practice, the skills and capabilities of the candidates matched up against the needs of the client, resulting in an inefficient hiring process and an increased risk of missing good candidates.

  How did CSG meet these challenges?

  Two exercises were developed:

  • A pre-screening exercise that gathered candidate perspectives on various aspects of their software development experience and capabilities.
  • A C# exercise that assessed their C# skills and skills in specific areas of interest to a client (e.g. LINQ, multi-threaded solution development, etc.).

  Using these two exercises in conjunction, CSG was able to supply candidates who were a close fit to the client’s needs.

  To date:

  • Efficiency and effectiveness of client hiring processes have been significantly improved. The development teams interviewed fewer, more qualified candidates.
  • Many C# software engineers have been hired and retained by clients.
  • All candidates were a strong technical fit; if they were not hired it was due to non-technical reasons.
  • No candidates have been terminated for lack of technical competence.

• Synopsis

  Our client is a Global FinTech 100 technology provider of information-enabled software with proven expertise in online brokerage, tax and portfolio reporting, and wealth management applications.

  What challenges were our client facing in hiring talent?

  • Our client was getting ready to release a new product and found that its product managers were overwhelmed with user training and customer support requests as well as new product feature definition needs. They decided to open up a technical writer position that would generate the materials needed to train customers and allow them to become more self-sufficient.
  • The new product deals with a very complex subject matter area and if the product managers had to train someone, the objective of freeing up the product managers would not be attainable, yet the possibility of finding a traditional technical writer with subject matter expertise was extremely low.
  • A business analyst with subject matter expertise might suffice, but our client's past experience was that traditional business analysts did not create training or market communication content to our client's satisfaction.

  How did CSG meet these challenges?

  • CSG worked with the hiring manager to create an exercise that would allow candidates to demonstrate their ability to write and to perform analysis of a common problem set for which the new product offers a solution. The exercise does not require the candidate to have any previous knowledge of the subject matter, but does allow the candidate to demonstrate their ability to learn the subject matter and put that knowledge to use in the context of the exercise.
  • Using this technique, CSG placed a candidate that never formally held a technical writing position or a business analyst position, but demonstrated the ability to do both roles.
  • The engagement was successful. Our client was very pleased with and complementary of the work of our consultant.