How a US Fortune 500 built its Romanian tech center from zero, mid-pandemic

Roles covered: Supervisory / Leadership Team · Solutions Architect · Technology Lead · Lead Engineers (Node.js + React) · Java Developers (incl. WebSphere) · C# Web Developer · API Software Engineers · API Test Engineers (SDET) · ETL Developers (incl. Salesforce) · Senior BI Developer (MicroStrategy) · Data Analyst · Integration Analyst · Cloud Operations Engineer · Marketing Cloud Developer · Information Risk Consultant · Project Manager

The Challenge

In early 2020, one of the largest and oldest financial services companies in the United States decided to build its global technology center in Romania — a greenfield operation, starting from absolute zero: no local brand awareness among candidates, no local team, no office culture to show, no employees to vouch for the company. Then the pandemic hit. What was already an ambitious mandate — build the first 90 employees of a new tech hub, leadership included, within months — now had to be executed under conditions no one in the recruitment industry had ever faced:

• Everything went remote, overnight. Every search, every interview, every assessment, every offer, every onboarding — conducted entirely online, at a time when remote hiring at this scale was uncharted territory.
• A market frozen by uncertainty. In the spring of 2020, candidates were holding on to safe jobs. Convincing senior technology professionals to leave stable positions for a brand-new entity — one they could not even visit — required a fundamentally different level of trust-building.
• An unknown employer brand. The client was a household name in the US, but virtually unknown to Romanian tech talent. We were not just recruiting; we were introducing an employer to an entire market.
• Leadership first, at full speed. The center could not be built bottom-up. The client needed its local management team in place first — recruited through dedicated executive search — so that every subsequent hire would be joining a real organization with real leaders.

Our Approach

1. Executive search first: building the board. We began at the top. The initial phase was a dedicated search exercise for the center's leadership and supervisory team — the people who would define its culture, engineering standards, and growth trajectory. Only once this foundation was in place did we move to scale.
2. From leadership to individual contributors, in structured waves. With the management team onboard, we shifted to high-volume, high-quality recruitment across the full technology stack: software engineering (Java, C#, Node.js + React), data and BI, ETL and integration, cloud operations, QA/SDET, architecture, information risk, and project management. Eighteen distinct role families, each with its own sourcing strategy.

• Selling a vision, not an office. With no physical presence to show, we built the candidate narrative around what mattered: the caliber of the leadership team already in place, the scale and stability of the parent company, and the rare opportunity to be a founding employee of a tech hub backed by a Fortune 500 institution.
• A fully remote process, engineered for trust. We redesigned our entire delivery process for the online environment — tighter communication loops, more touchpoints per candidate, faster feedback cycles — because in a period of maximum uncertainty, process quality is the employer brand.
• Employer of Record: we didn't just find the people — we employed them. For the first six months of the project, while the client's local legal entity was being established, we acted as Employer of Record. The first employees were hired on our books — with full payroll, contracts, and compliance handled by us — so the client could start building its team from day one, without waiting for incorporation. When the local entity was ready, employees transitioned seamlessly to the client. This meant the client lost zero time to bureaucracy — and every candidate had a trusted local employer from their very first day.

The Results

90 employees in 9 months. ~130 in 12. Zero in-person meetings.

• The complete leadership team was recruited through executive search and installed first — the foundation on which everything else was built.
• 90 hires were delivered between April and December of the launch year, spanning leadership, engineering, data, cloud, security, and delivery roles.
• Approximately 130 employees were in place within 12 months of the project's start.
• The entire program was executed 100% remotely, during the most disrupted labor market in modern history — proving that quality recruitment does not depend on circumstances, but on process, judgment, and commitment.
• As Employer of Record for the first six months, we enabled the center to become operational months earlier than a standard market-entry timeline would allow — the first hires were productive while the local entity was still being set up. Retention, again, tells the real story. Five years after the center's launch, the management team we recruited in that first executive search phase is still there, still leading the organization. In a market famous for leadership churn, that is not luck — that is selection done right, under pressure, without ever meeting a candidate in person.

The Long View: What the Center Became

The organization we helped build from zero went on to become one of the most remarkable success stories in the Romanian tech market:

• It scaled into a major tech employer, growing from its founding team to several hundred employees across Bucharest and Cluj-Napoca in the years that followed.
• Just two years after launch, it was named the most appreciated employer in Romania — ranked #1 in the country's largest employee-review-based employer ranking, ahead of long-established multinationals. The distinction was based entirely on anonymous reviews from its own employees.
• It stayed at the top. In the following edition it ranked #1 in the IT&C sector and #2 overall nationally, and was recognized as the "Fastest Climber" among Romania's most desired employers — making it a multi-year fixture at the top of the market's employer rankings.
• It became a reference point for how to launch a tech hub, widely cited as proof that a strong culture can be built entirely remotely, from day one. A company's employer-brand awards are earned by its people and its leadership. But every one of those first 90 people — including the leaders who built that culture — came through our search. The foundation matters.

The Relationship: The Metric Beyond the Metrics

Perhaps the strongest validation came later. After the first year, the client built its own internal recruitment team — the natural evolution for a scaling organization. Yet whenever hiring volumes spiked or complex, hard-to-fill roles appeared, they returned to us with new mandates. Six years after the center's launch, we are still working together. In recruitment, there is no better testimonial than a client who built their own recruiting capability — and still calls you.

Key Takeaways

• Crisis is where recruitment partners are tested. Anyone can deliver in a stable market. Delivering 90 quality hires, fully remote, during a global pandemic, for an employer brand unknown in the local market — that is the real benchmark.
• Leadership-first is how you build organizations, not just headcount. Starting with executive search for the management team meant every subsequent hire joined a functioning organization with credible leaders — a decisive factor in both hiring speed and long-term retention.
• Adaptability is a deliverable. We rebuilt our entire process for a fully online world in weeks, without compromising on quality — and the five-year retention of the leadership team proves it.
• End-to-end market entry, not just recruitment. By combining executive search, volume hiring, and Employer of Record services, we gave the client a single partner for the entire launch — from the first leadership hire to a fully staffed, fully compliant local operation.
• The best client relationships outlive the mandate. From building the first 90 employees to remaining a trusted partner six years on, this engagement shows what recruitment looks like when it is a partnership, not a transaction.