The following blog post was written by Avanade alum Mahnaz Javid.

At Avanade, our business is helping yours. And we strongly believe that the foundation of our business lies in the talented and dedicated people collaborating across our 80 global offices in 23 countries. Here’s a story of success and hard work as multiple virtual teams in our growth markets partnered to hire over 60 people in two months.

In September we had an unexpected demand for an additional 60 new hires to meet one of our client’s immediate needs. Led by Daniella Camara, Manager, Talent Acquisition & Integration, Brazil, and Christina Gerstung, Manager, HR Shared Services, the teams mobilized to meet this challenge.  Needless to say, they were excited to address this challenge as the first test of our talent acquisition capability delivering the Imagine 2020 mission in Brazil.

They knew that the key to delivering results would be to work across borders effectively and efficiently as one team, while engaging and collaborating very closely with the business and the hiring managers.  Then as a team, they sourced and scheduled multiple assessment days with support of several business leads in Brazil, fielding a large number of qualified candidates.

I am so thrilled to share that the collaboration of Daniella, Christina, HRSS team, and most importantly engagement with the business, has led to 51 hires and 3 open offers by November 25^th – and they have a strategy in place to meet the remaining objectives by the end of December.

Given the success of this difficult task I asked the team to share what steered them to success. Christina and Daniella agreed that success stories are the product of hard work. Their task wasn’t easy, but they turned on the “recruiting engine” which they had worked hard to build in the past several months, and achieved the results needed to support the business.

From their perspective, the keys takeaways:

1. Shared goals – with everyone working on the clearly-defined business-defined goals from the Growth Markets leadership team, we operated with maximum efficiency
2. Teamwork – seamless partnership between the Brazilian Recruitment Team and our offshore team in Buenos Aires helped us work effectively
3. Communication – regular exchanges and updates between the virtual teams along with buy-in from the business led to solid collaboration
4. Engagement – although we were working cohesively internally, we also needed to keep the candidates informed and engaged throughout the interview process
5. Planning – we created a structured approach for assessment/interview days to manage the sheer increase of volume while building a plan for execution.

I am thrilled with the outcome; this experience has been a good test of our operating model evolved to realize our talent vision for the next phase of Avanade’s growth. CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL for great team work, and for great results.

At Avanade, we create change for a living. If you’re interested in learning more about creating change at any of our worldwide locations, please visit us at www.avanade.com/careers