Among our clients there are real legends that deserve special attention. One of them is Ubiquiti Networks company, which exists since 2005. Skillers has been searching for candidates for this company since February 2018, and during this time we managed to find 8 strongest specialists, who successfully passed the trial periods and became part of the team.

Who is our client?

Ubiquiti Networks is an American technology company founded by talented engineer Robert J. Pera in 2005 in San Jose. Right after university, long before Ubiquiti was founded, Robert J. Pera worked at Apple on the AirPort Wi-Fi project. But his desire to achieve more at an accelerated pace has forced Robert to quit and open his own company. And already in 2013, he took the 10th place in the list of billionaires under 35 years old, according to Forbes Magazine. More information about Robert and his work can be found in his official blog.

But let’s back to the company itself. Ubiquiti's core business profile is the production of wireless data products for enterprises and wireless broadband providers. At the same time, the company focuses on spheres with low involvement and emerging markets, with which work rare companies. A distinctive feature of all Ubiquiti equipment, except, of course, it’s quality, is the design. This is not just server hardware, but a real masterpiece, that stands out from the competition. 

The mission of Ubiquiti is: "Effectively create excellent products."

Feature of working with the client community

Ubiquiti actively uses the capabilities of social networks as an important part of its business model, and this is a rather progressive approach for equipment manufacturing companies. Tactics allowed creating a real community of more than 110 thousand evangelists who are not only interested in the topic, but fully involved in the processes as well. Ubiquiti takes advantage of this trump card, raising awareness without additional spends on sales managers. The community has the opportunity to exchange a variety of ideas on any topic: from the features of software updates to the development of payment schemes. Several company engineers are constantly checking the forum, which, in essence, is a full-fledged technical support department. Thanks to this contact, Ubiquiti is significantly ahead of the competition in the development of new products.

The company has been able to maintain leadership positions for more than 10 years, and a clear understanding of the client's wishes is the basis of such success. In addition, Ubiquiti offers a quality product at an affordable price in comparison with the closest competitors in the workshop in the segment of powerful industrial network devices.

All this makes the company attractive for applicants who are looking for opportunities for professional development, and prefer to combine career growth with good conditions. Moreover, as a rule, for such specialists the question is not just about money, but about the desire to do something significant for their level. They want to get and fulfill challenges.

The specifics of the company as an employer

Among the main advantages of Ubiquiti as an employer, we distinguish:

1. Innovative, complex and interesting R&D projects;
2. Horizontal control system;
3. Processes sharpened by efficiency;
4. Direct access to communication with the founder;
5. The interest of all participants in the production of cool products with excellent design;
6. Global scale of the company;
7. Humanity approach to employees.

Imagine a company management model where any ordinary employee can personally offer his idea to the founder or CEO. This is how the work at Ubiquiti is built. The autonomy and independence of employees is cultivated here. The developer must choose the approach to the task, how to solve it, and what resources will be required for this. Ubiquiti always gives its employees as much responsibility as a person can take on. Self-esteem is an additional motivation for team members. Often, taking on such a level of responsibility is a worthy challenge and not everyone is ready for such a job. We can say that the entrepreneurial spirit remains in the company thanks to such approaches, and it helps to refresh products and make them innovative, developing and evolving them all the time.

The company fairly has high requirements for applicants, which are fully justified by its status. Here are some details about Ubiquiti:

• the highest profitability among all public IT equipment manufacturers – 26% (according to FactSet Research Systems), which is on 2% more than Apple;
• the company owns an innovative product line (AirMax, EdgeMax, UFiber, UniFi, etc);
• the yield for the last 4 quarters is much higher than expected.

 Features requirements for candidates Ubiquiti or recruiting insights

An important place in the corporate life of Ubiquiti takes cultural fit. To become a part of the team it is not enough to be a strong specialist, it is also important to be on the same wavelength with the team. Since everyone inside the team treats each other with great respect, to some extent, this point is an unspoken selection criterion. The company itself refers to employees, one can say individually and reverently. That is why candidates for key positions are interviewed personally with Robert Pera, even despite the fact that the number of company employees around the world in 2018 has exceeded 800 people (this figure reached 843 people on June 30, 2018).

Such a person-oriented approach allows not only to gather a dreamtime of professionals, but also to achieve the coordinated work of people who are close in spirit.

In addition to the requirements for soft skills, Ubiquiti is extremely demanding in the matter of the professional level of a specialist. And it doesn’t even apply to the number of years of experience. So, we had a candidate with more than 20+ years of commercial experience with suitable stack and devices, but after a technical interview it became clear that he was completely unsuitable for Ubiquiti, because his level of qualification was rated as inappropriate for several important parameters, and the current experience is not applicable in the development of those products. It was the saddest feedback for us, because he seemed the perfect resume and vast experience. Although with all this, the candidate ended up in another reputable company and there they are most likely satisfied with it.

If we consider the vacancies of the company from the IT recruiting side, then we have the following situation. According to rough estimates, today in Ukraine there are about 5000-7000 embedded developers (firmware and software engineers). Only 5-10%  of them will be able to consider Ubiquiti, and only those with a minimum of 5-6 years of commercial experience should be selected among them. In addition, it is required to confirm the real level of technical seniority; and it’s not to mention cultural fit.

Then, only those specialists who are involved in the development of routers, switches, and other network equipment (including radio telescopes, radars, etc.) are selected.

This category, in turn, is divided into three types:

1.     employees of competing companies, who do not seek to change jobs;
2.     defense specialists who do not share information about employment and skills;
3.     developers who previously emigrated abroad to relevant foreign companies, but are considering returning.

As for the complexity of the technical stage, here you have to fight for the vacancy, competing with really high-level professionals.

The specialist who is expected at Ubiquiti should know and have:

•       own experience in product development, with a global view of the project;
•   a clear individual vision of the product and be ready to solve difficult problems;
•   the level of an independent specialist, that is, to be a ready-made working unit that does not need to be trained and trained;
•       knowledge in networking, wireless technologies, Linux kernel, Linux drivers, firmware.

This is only a small but very important part of the mandatory requirements for the candidates the company is looking for.

According to the head of the Kiev R&D office, the main reason for opening an office in Kiev is the technical level of Ukrainian developers. Moreover, initially there were no goals to open offices anywhere other than San Jose, but the company managed to attract outstanding people around the world and over time, teams and offices around them grew up around the world. Initially, Ubiquiti was needed by Senior Embedded Engineers, and later, when they got more developers, they needed QA Engineers.

Our results:

• The average vacancy closing cycle is 60 days.
• The client was shown 24 candidates for the position of Senior Embedded Engineer, 7 of whom were hired.
• 4 candidates were shown for Wireless QA, and 1 was hired.
• No replacement was made, all candidates successfully passed the trial period, which indicates a high-quality selection process of candidates from both sides.

Interesting details

Almost all the candidates had difficult negotiations. So, one of the developers has already signed an offer with another company. He was of great interest to Ubiquiti, so we put a lot of efforts to convince him to meet with them, and this directly affected his decision to move to the company. Today he is a member of the Ubiquiti team.

There was a story of a candidate moving from another region. All this process took several months, but his skills were worth waiting. He worked in the scientific field, so it took a lot of efforts, organizing the moving of the candidate himself and all his numerous professional equipment.

We hope to help meet many candidates with the dream team of Ubiquiti!

If you are interested in current Ubiquitiы vacancies, you can contact us:

E-mail: [email protected]

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