Chef is the leader in Continuous Automation software, an innovator in application automation, and one of the founders of the DevOps movement. Chef works with more than a thousand of the most innovative companies around the world to deliver their vision of digital transformation, providing the practices and platform to deliver software at speed. Their mission is to help the most enduring and transformative companies use Chef to become fast, efficient, and innovative software-driven organizations.

Chef’s high-profile client list includes Alaska Airlines, Azure, Barclays, Capital One, Carfax, Facebook, Google, IBM, and Target.

Sometimes a client can do everything right and still struggle to fill specific roles. Chef has an experienced and talented hiring team, a strong employer brand and company culture, a compelling value proposition, great messaging, and content—yet several key roles eluded them. Unable to close several critical hires they needed in a timely manner, Chef brought Bandwidth onboard to own full-cycle recruitment for high priority and challenging-to-fill roles. One role, Customer Success Manager – Federal, required such deep technical acumen and top security clearances, it had gone unfilled for several months with no qualified candidates in the pipeline.

We love a challenge like this! We started by helping to establish a partnership process where we could work seamlessly within Chef’s internal systems and in tandem with their internal recruitment team. By partnering closely with Chef’s hiring teams, we established clear criteria and expectations of requirements for the roles and got to work.

The Bandwidth team then executed on sourcing, screening, and candidate management through to offer acceptance – the full-cycle of recruitment. We maintained clear and frequent communication between Chef’s hiring teams and us, delivered regular progress updates, and held weekly meetings to ensure alignment, to adjust role requirements, and update messaging as needed.

In just a few months, we hired five critical roles for the Chef team, including a business development manager, senior operations engineer, recruiting manager, customer success manager – federal, and product manager.

The Customer Success Manager, Federal role, was perhaps the most challenging. The role requirements included both deep technical acumen and top-secret security clearance. “By partnering with the Chef team and using creative sourcing strategies, Bandwidth persisted until the role was filled, where other contingency agencies would have given up,” said one of our clients.

Similarly, our team also helped to fill a challenging Senior Operations Engineer role. Internally, Chef uses their products to build, run, and deploy products, so they needed someone who was already near expert-level with Chef software and who could have an immediate impact on the team. While being aware of the partnerships Chef has in the market, we executed a strategic, targeted search to identify candidates who could bring immediate value to the role. By partnering with Chef on such challenging roles, we were able to reduce the average cost-per-hire to less than half the cost of using a contingency firm.

“Thank you, Bandwidth, for your perseverance and diligence and for not giving up on our difficult roles.”
– Jennifer Armstrong Owen, VP of People