The starting point
The company already had an open Data Engineer role requiring Snowflake, but after months of internal search no candidate had reached the final stages. The market felt empty.
What we saw
During calibration it emerged that deep Snowflake experience was flagged as must-have, while what was truly critical was solid experience with cloud data warehouses and mature data pipelines in general. That narrowed the market several times over.
What we did
- Recalibrated the requirements: separated the truly critical from the merely desirable.
- Built a market map around the adjacent cloud data stack, not just an exact Snowflake match.
- Ran a direct search for passive candidates who do not respond to inbound roles.
- Checked not only the technical profile but the level of autonomy and fit with the client architecture.
- Coordinated communication with the hiring team so the final stages moved quickly.
What the client gained
A focused short-list selected on the real technical and business context of the role, plus a revised role profile reusable for future hiring on similar positions.