When the pandemic hit, UK’s develop realized there was a software engineering gap – including in the U.S.
By Yousra Benkirane
The software industry is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, especially since the pandemic induced traditional companies to migrate to online and digitization. According to one estimate, the three counties of South Florida – Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach – are now home to 44,000 software engineers and programmers. And yet, software development skills are more in-demand than ever.
Enter develop, a software recruiting firm that saw an opportunity when the world came to a standstill in early 2020. The UK-based company switched gears from broad technology recruitment, to specializing in software engineering after realizing that the demand for people with high-level software skills was greater than the supply of suitable candidates – and growing.
While the firm’s headhunters still call themselves consultants, their job is to recruit candidates skilled in specific software coding – such as Java, Python, JavaScript, and Change – for clients ranging from startups to major multinationals. Recruits can be hired on a permanent or contract basis, depending on a client’s needs. “Our consultants spend their days networking,” explains co-founder Joey Tait. “They spend days speaking to hundreds of JavaScript developers so that they’ve already built those relationships. When you’re working with someone like us, you’re buying access to our network.” develop claims to give clients access to the top five percent of software engineering talent, offering services like technical testing of potential recruits in the UK, Germany, and now the U.S. vis-à-vis Miami.
Notably, develop’s recruiters are required to have strong software literacy, learning to code in the languages they recruit for, such as Java. Tait says this allows recruiters to “have better conversations with the candidate community and better understand what a client is trying to achieve.” As technology constantly evolves, each week the company trains their employees with all new software updates. “If I go to France, and I start to speak French, even though my French is not the best, they will respect me because I’m trying to learn the language, I’m trying to be part of the community. So that’s why everyone learns to code in the language they recruit for,” Tait says.
For develop, tech recruitment is like being a sports recruiter, “If you’re the Miami Heat, you need the best players in the country. It’s the same from a technology perspective,” he says. Some clients are willing to go above and beyond in this war for talent, offering to handle all immigration documentation and relocation costs to find the best candidates in the world.
With $15 million in gross revenue last year, the recruitment firm’s offices in the UK, Germany, and Miami employ about 50 people; in July 2022, the firm opened its office in Miami’s Brickell financial district, where it employs eight consultants, two of whom were brought from the UK.
Like other tech firms expanding to the Greater Miami area, develop’s founders were sold by Mayor Francis Suarez’s commitment to make Miami the international hub for finance and technology. “I looked at other cities and the leadership in each area,” says Tait. “I felt that Mayor Suarez was the right person at the right time in Miami. I think he’s so front-foot from a technology perspective, and he’s aggressively looking to create something in Miami. That really resonated with us.”
