Three years. Three embedded recruiters.One IT department built from scratch.
A multi-year, subscription-based partnership across niche IT specialisms in a market OLX had no prior experience in.
The challenge
Hiring into a new market, with traditional recruiting that wasn’t working.
OLX was expanding their tech operations into Spain — a market they had no internal experience in. The brief was niche IT talent: Salesforce, Oracle HCM Fusion, Cloud, Anaplan, SAP — the kind of roles that don’t exist in volume even in mature tech markets.
They had already tried traditional recruiting solutions. The results hadn’t worked. Worse, the hiring needs themselves were unpredictable: intense growth phases interrupted by quieter periods, with no way to forecast when they’d need to scale up next. A fixed internal headcount was too rigid; a per-hire agency model was too transactional. Neither shape fit the problem.
The approach
Three embedded recruiters, a subscription model, and three years of working as one team.
Workfully matched OLX with three senior recruiters from the marketplace — Isa, Edyta and David — each chosen for the specific shape of OLX’s niche IT hiring. They didn’t work as agency suppliers sending CVs over a fence. They embedded into the OLX talent function, used OLX’s tools, attended OLX’s standups, and learned the company’s engineering culture from the inside.
The commercial model was a subscription, not a per-hire fee. That meant when OLX needed to scale recruiting power up, they could. When the pipeline quieted, they could pause without penalty. The relationship ran intermittently for three years — picked up when needed, paused when not, picked up again. No re-onboarding tax. Same recruiters. Same context. Same trust.
The outcome
A specialist IT team built from zero — and the structural ability to scale recruiting on demand.
Across the engagement, OLX built out their Spain-based IT department from scratch. The roles filled spanned more than ten distinct specialisms — Salesforce administrators and engineers, Oracle HCM Fusion managers, senior cloud engineers, Anaplan engineers, HRIS engineers, IT operations, product roles, and SAP Basis engineering.
Just as importantly, the partnership gave OLX a structural answer to a problem most growing tech companies don’t solve: how to scale recruiting capacity in step with hiring need, without carrying fixed internal cost between cycles. The team they built includes contributions to one of the largest GenAI teams in Europe.
Get results like OLX.
Find a recruiter who can embed with your team — or post a role and let the right people come to you.
