Alex Staff Agency

Brand Advocates

Promoting a front-end developer position at an online casino
The Client and The Challenge
We cooperated with a Latvian developer of the largest online casino in Europe. When hiring technical staff, they often see job seekers' reluctance to get into the gambling business. The shortage of local candidates, as well as the fact that the candidates from nearby markets like Russia or the CIS often appear unwilling to move to Riga became additional factors affecting the hiring process.
Our help
We focused on the search for candidates from the post-Soviet space, first of all Russia. Also we launched a marketing campaign to promote Latvia’s attractiveness for relocation, demonstrate the reliability of the business and upsides of working for our client.

The company was looking for employees based in Russia and the CIS countries who’re ready to relocate to Riga. Latvia isn’t the most popular destination to move to, although it has at least two significant advantages over other EU member states:
  • low cost of living: about 1,500 euros per person in 2021, and 1,350 euros at the time we were searching (2019);
  • easy process of adaptation of Russian immigrants: and cultural proximity between two nations and the fact that Russian is a widely-spoken language in Latvia helped to make it an attractive option.
The search for candidates started before the lockdown, that’s why among the advantages were also named affordable travelling across Europe and the opportunity to go abroad for a weekend.

In terms of tech stack, the vacancy wasn’t too demanding: a frontend developer with a high level of English, excellent knowledge of both JavaScript and React, and slicing experience.

To promote Latvia as a country to relocate to, we wrote several articles on the pros:

Since we focused on candidates from Russia and the CIS countries, those articles were written in Russian. Aside from our website, they were posted on social networks to reach more views. We asked potential candidates to read them so they could get a better idea of a new life in a new place.

Along with posting job advertisements on popular job boards, social networks, we conducted an active search for candidates via LinkedIn. Many job seekers have never worked on similar projects, so it was necessary to dispel myths and stereotypes about "illegality, scam and fraud" of online casinos. In order to do so, we:
  • discussed in detail the industry and its legal regulation (in general and for client’s company in particular);
  • presented the company’s projects, showed its ratings compared to those of the competitors;
  • for promising candidates, we scheduled additional meetings with the client’s development team so that they could get to know soon-to-be colleagues and assure themselves about the reliability of the team.

The openness of the company and its commitment to dialogue were among the decisive factors that made a selected candidate accept the job offer.
The Result
We successfully closed the position in 6 weeks (from the day the search started to the candidate’s onboarding). Later on, we helped our client to find more talents for other positions as well.