How a mobility leader staffed its digital centre through a landmark merger: 40 roles in 12 months

The Client

Our client operates at the centre of the European mobility industry: a full-service leasing and fleet management group managing millions of vehicles across more than forty countries, owned by one of France's largest banking groups. Its strategy is explicitly technology-led — building an integrated global mobility platform, self-service digital tools and the connectivity that a modern fleet business depends on.

The Romanian digital centre exists to build and run that technology backbone for markets across the group.

The Challenge: Technology Staffing Under Merger Conditions

This mandate ran while the group was absorbing one of the largest mergers its industry has seen — the combination of two major leasing organisations into a single company, with a single brand, a single operating model and, critically, a single technology estate.

That context shaped everything:

Integration work is infrastructure work. Merging two multinational organisations means merging networks, identity systems, device management, collaboration platforms and CRM environments. The mandate reflected exactly that: networking specialists, Level 2 support engineers for Microsoft tooling, Microsoft 365 specialists, Salesforce professionals and the team leads to run them.

These are unglamorous, fiercely contested roles. Infrastructure, workplace technology and enterprise platform specialists rarely appear in "hottest tech jobs" lists — yet every large organisation in the market needs them, and the experienced ones are permanently employed and permanently approached. Microsoft 365 and Salesforce specialists in particular sit in small, well-mapped communities where everyone is already talking to everyone.

Support roles were not junior roles. Level 2 support on Microsoft tooling in a multinational merger environment means diagnosing problems across two merging estates, under service commitments, for users in multiple countries. The profile required is a genuine engineer, not a first-line agent.

Stability mattered more than usual. Hiring into an organisation mid-merger requires candidates comfortable with ambiguity and change. Assessing for that temperament was as important as assessing technical skill.

Our Approach

Treating platform specialists as the scarce resource they are. Microsoft 365, Salesforce and networking specialists were sourced through targeted mapping of the communities where they actually sit — enterprise IT departments, managed service providers, systems integrators and consultancies — rather than through open-market advertising that reaches only the actively searching minority.

Honest positioning of the merger. We did not present the integration as a footnote. For the right candidate, working on a landmark merger is a career-defining experience: exposure, scope and complexity that ordinary roles cannot offer. Presenting it honestly attracted people who wanted exactly that, and filtered out those who did not.

Leadership recruited alongside the teams. Team leads were part of the mandate, not an afterthought — so that incoming specialists joined structures with defined ownership rather than a growing pool of individual contributors.

Assessment for change tolerance. Alongside technical evaluation, we assessed candidates for their ability to operate productively in a shifting environment, because an excellent engineer who needs stability to function is the wrong hire for an integration programme.

The Delivery

40 roles closed in 12 months, spanning networking, Level 2 Microsoft tooling support, Microsoft 365, Salesforce and team leadership.

The contested profiles delivered. Microsoft 365 and Salesforce specialists — consistently among the hardest enterprise-platform hires in the market — were closed alongside the broader infrastructure and support roles.

Teams with leadership in place, giving the digital centre defined ownership over each capability rather than an undifferentiated support pool.

The Long View

The merger our client was executing during this mandate has since completed, creating one of the world's leading sustainable mobility companies: a diverse global community of around 15,700 employees, a direct presence in 44 countries, and a fleet of more than three million vehicles under management. The group's stated strategy is to lead the industry's decarbonisation and digital transformation through an integrated global mobility platform — precisely the technology estate that the teams recruited in this mandate help operate.

Key Takeaways

• Integration programmes are staffed with infrastructure people. The technology work behind a merger is networks, identity, devices, collaboration and CRM — and the specialists who do it are scarcer than headline engineering profiles.
• "Support" is a misleading label. Level 2 engineering in a multinational estate is a technical discipline that deserves technical assessment, not volume screening.
• Enterprise platform specialists live in closed communities. Microsoft 365 and Salesforce professionals are reached through mapping and relationships, not advertising.
• Match temperament to context. Hiring into a live merger requires people who find ambiguity energising. Screening for that is as decisive as screening for skills.