Building London’s biggest moblie engineering team

Accessorising the ASOS TA team with extra firepower:

Bond was brought on board to help ASOS meet its recruitment target of 48 hires. The goal was to find high-quality candidates who would strengthen ASOS’s mobile engineering team and align with their growth and innovation objectives. Challenge accepted!

Bond supported by plugging resource gaps, which included:

• Time constraints: The need for quick hiring to meet project deadlines, which placed pressure on the existing recruitment team.
• Niche skills shortages: iOS and Android development, especially at a senior or specialized level, was proving to be a challenge. There was a particular need for engineers with experience in certain mobile frameworks or technologies that were critical to ASOS’s future projects.
• Volume & Quality: While ASOS needed to hire in volume to meet business demands, they also sought candidates with a deep level of expertise, which made the search more challenging.

We successfully handled several niche and complex hiring challenges, which included:

• Senior Mobile Engineers: ASOS was looking for experienced engineers who could not only write high-quality code but also bring a strategic perspective to mobile development, helping to shape the direction of the apps.
•  QA Engineers with Specialized Skills: Testing for mobile apps requires specific knowledge of mobile testing tools and frameworks, which posed an additional challenge. We helped identify candidates with experience in automated testing for mobile applications, an area where finding skilled professionals can often be difficult.

Leaving our print on ASOS:

The relationship between Bond and ASOS evolved significantly over time. Initially, our role was primarily focused on meeting the immediate need for hiring. However, as we began to establish a solid understanding of ASOS’s culture and technical requirements, the relationship expanded.

Over time, we expanded our role to take on a larger share of recruitment responsibilities across multiple technical teams within ASOS, not just mobile engineering.

We also became involved in supporting ASOS with longer-term recruitment strategy projects, such as workforce planning, diversity and inclusion efforts, and internal process optimization.

Some examples of project work include:

• Candidate interview confirmation templates: Previously, candidates received a generic email with basic interview details. We enhanced it to include guidance for paired programming exercises, links to download the ASOS app, and advice on evaluating the app’s strengths, weaknesses, and potential improvements. This improved general performance of candidates under interview and helped the top ones stand out even further.
• ASOS Candidate packs: Branded document showcasing “everything ASOS” office locations, benefits, quotes from engineers, ASOS values, and much more.
• Process improvements: We identified gaps hindering scalable hiring, such as low interviewer capacity (2 interviews/week). We decided to expand the pool of interviewers and refine eligibility criteria, increasing capacity to 5 interviews/week.
• Interview improvements: The original interview process included a 1-hour initial interview and a 2-hour 45-minute final stage. We streamlined this to a 1-hour 15-minute Stage 1 and a 2-hour Stage 2, improving candidate experience and aligning with competitors.

Numbers were proud of:

• Time to hire Reduced by 77.7%
• 29 offers 27 hires
• Cost per hire was reduced by 75%

Our partnership story continues…