When you need tech talent for a project fast, what do you do? It can be difficult to determine the right fit given the nuances of the technical task at hand. This is where Talent Alpha, a company founded in Poland at the end of 2018, comes into play.
The company adds value by aggregating workers at small and midsize European tech organizations (“software houses”) onto a unified human cloud platform, enabling companies with tech needs to easily sift through and find the help they need. Often, an entire team on the platform can be hired for a project.
Talent Alpha takes advantage of the relatively untapped Central and Eastern European market, where many tech workers are employed by small businesses. Talent Alpha’s founder and CEO, Przemek Berendt, estimates the region has more than 25,000 of these firms, which are home to more than 700,000 software engineers. “This is a huge pool of very qualified people who typically don’t have access to large enterprises,” he says. The company primarily serves large companies, and its main geographies are Europe, US and Israel.
Talent Alpha also adds value by providing detailed data solutions that shorten the recruitment process. The company collects more than 500 data points on each of the specialists on its platform to provide a robust model of their individual competencies based on “Talent Science.” Skills measurement comes via self-assessment, third-party assessment and ongoing feedback after the task begins.
Berendt’s company “aspires to build a model that allows us to build a regular snapshot of how these competencies evolve at the individual level, and our technology allows us to do that after the professional is deployed, with two additional assessments for given skills — client feedback and team feedback.” Based on candidate and client assessment, each specialist is evaluated for hard skills, soft skills and psychometric traits. Testing is not a one-time event but rather occurs on an ongoing basis, with updates every couple of weeks.
Having access to these current, holistic data points means quicker engagement and a shorter hiring process for most companies. And because the platform enables Talent Alpha to see who is available at any given time, these specialists can be deployed quickly — sometimes within 24 hours.
The company also seeks to reduce the time to productivity. Talent Alpha sources individuals from organizations with spare capacity, and they typically migrate between assignments as teams. Thus, they already know how to work with one another and develop software together.
The Buzz
Talent Alpha aggregates top tech talent from smaller firms, collects valuable data points on each specialist and enables existing teams to work together, helping to promptly fill the talent gap for companies with on-demand tech needs.
