Surgent Professional Education is the largest independent provider of continuing education for CPAs and other financial professionals in the U.S. Surgent aims to serve as the most reliable and trustworthy source of the practical and timely information that tax and financial professionals need to excel professionally.
Deciding to bring the development team in-house, and already having some experience with DistantJob, Surgent came to us for help in finding the perfect people. We had a chat with their CTO, Matt Bricker, about their experience.
DistantJob: Please tell us a bit about what your hiring experience with DistantJob was like.
Matt Bricker: Well, last year about this time we had decided to internalize development. Working at that, we tried to find partners that could give us a breadth of experienced people as well as someone who could fill the job quickly.
So we’d been working with you on another project where we were able to find [a person with] the right skill set, it took a little bit of time but once we did we found the right person for the team and we’ve had pretty good success having them stay and actually grow.
One of the first candidates we got with you has now moved from being an individual contributor to more of a team lead role. We were very picky, to begin with, but you guys worked with us on the pickiness to make sure the person had the team fit and not just a skill set, which is important to us and we couldn’t be happier with the end result.
I know it took a little bit of time but to us, it was definitely worth it as we believe we have the right team members now.
DJ: So how hard were they to manage in comparison to local employees?
MB: Not very difficult. At the time we had a team lead that was remote as well, and it was someone that I had worked with previously, so it helped facilitate that. He helped wrangle the group as he then transitioned off.
That’s when we promoted the DistantJob candidate and he has stepped in and has been managing the team for me, all the remote employees, by himself. So I’ve been very lucky in that it hasn’t been any different managing someone local versus remote.
DJ: What value do you feel that this person DistantJob found you added to your company?
MB: We actually have 3 DJ employees right now. Phenomenal. We believe that for the dollar value that we are spending, we are far ahead of what we would find locally or offshore. We are very happy with the cost of production.
The language barrier doesn’t appear to be a problem. For most of the candidates, one of the criteria was strong English speaking, as well as the ability to work during our time zone. Those were two of our top priorities, team fit being the other, and the highest. Then came the technical skillset, because we can always train technical skillset, and in doing that, with the focus on the language itself and giving them the tools and the communication capabilities, well, we haven’t had any problems there.
