By MOTIFE Insights, 29 June 2023
Raymond Van der Wal: First Advantage is a leading global provider of employment background screening and verification solutions supported by award-winning customer care. Operating across almost all industries and serving small, medium-size, and large businesses, First Advantage performed over 100 million screens on behalf of approximately 33 000 customers spanning the globe during 2022. We chose Krakow as the location to build a new team in Europe and started onboarding our initial set of employees in the first half of 2022. By the end of 2022, our presence in Krakow has grown to more than 60 people, including product and technology, operations, customer care, and HR shared service roles.
Raymond Van der Wal: With a reputation as an emerging tech hub in Europe, the expansion into Krakow furthers First Advantage’s commitment to developing and delivering innovative solutions and insights that help customers manage risk and hire the best talent across the globe.
We chose Krakow as the location for our new team as we felt that the city and its talent could play an important role in our global strategy to help our clients hire smarter and onboard faster. Our ambition to build product platforms at scale required us to rethink our talent needs and to prioritize cloud and full-stack engineering. We knew that we could find this talent in Central Europe, and Krakow and Poland stood out as prime locations.
We were drawn to Poland due to the quality of the talent pool and several appealing cultural aspects, such as open mindedness, curiosity, a desire to add value, as well as a naturally collaborative mindset and strong communications skills.
We also needed to consider the niche market segment that First Advantage operates in, the legal framework that guides us, and our global strategic goals. This meant that we had to find a location where we could find stability and continuity, build trust, and proceed at a speed that made sense for our business. Due to its attractiveness as a city, the modern infrastructure, outstanding academic ecosystem, and thriving international business scene, Krakow has become an exceptionally appealing place for businesses and expats to move to. The steady growth and diversity of the talent pool means that we’re able to fulfill a variety of hiring needs here, not just tech roles.
Setting up in a new location, however appealing, is a major undertaking – you can’t overstretch your existing resources by trying to do everything yourself, and you need to be able to tap into local knowledge and experience in order to make the right choices and get set up quickly and efficiently. The role of our softlanding and recruitment partner in Poland and the relationship we developed definitely played a big part in our decision to choose Krakow and the smooth operations we’ve enjoyed since arriving.
Check out also: Krakow IT Market Report 2024
Raymond Van der Wal: When it comes to tech roles, we have 3 Agile product development pods, comprising tech leads, product owners, UX designers, QA experts and a mix of senior-, mid-level, and junior developers. Beyond tech, we’ve also built a team of multilingual customer-care specialists. The combination of an outstanding academic ecosystem here and the appeal of Krakow to expats means we’ve been able to enhance the local-language services we provide to some of our biggest clients as well as our ability to verify the backgrounds of international candidates. That’s been a real benefit to First Advantage.
Raymond Van der Wal: The tech teams mainly work in three key areas – building a cloud-native platform for capturing and managing orders from clients, re-designing and re-building our candidate-experience app, and working on how to integrate our services with API-based data providers such as tax offices, courts, payroll companies, and more. Our Krakow teams are at the heart of First Advantage’s strategy and the disruption of the industry. That says a lot about the quality of people we’ve hired and the trust we’re able to place in them.
Raymond Van der Wal: We grew very quickly in 2022 and so our first goal is to get everybody up to full productivity. Although we officially only opened our office here in October 2022, it feels like we’ve always been here, which is an indication of how smooth the ramp up has been and how seamlessly the Krakow teams have integrated into our global workforce. I look forward to building on strong foundations in Krakow and to First Advantage contributing to the thriving tech and business community here.
Learn more about what international companies have achieved with their Krakow tech labs by downloading the Krakow IT Market Report 2024.
If you are interested in setting up your own engineering hub in Poland, contact us at MOTIFE to learn more.
If you are looking for interesting job opportunities in tech companies in Krakow and remote, check out open roles at motife.com/jobs.
Explore essential data on Poland's tech landscape.
View all job offers
Download the report
Read the full client story
