How a growing tech company built a high-performing tech team in Frankfurt by relocating software engineers from across the globe.
Growing a tech team is exciting, until hiring becomes the bottleneck.
At first, recruitment feels manageable. You hire locally, tap into your network, and gradually build a team around your product.
Then the business starts to scale.
New customers come on board. Product roadmaps become more ambitious. Investors want faster delivery. Suddenly, the team that got you this far isn’t large enough to get you where you want to go next. For one technology company in Frankfurt, Germany, this was exactly the challenge. The goal was ambitious: build a world-class engineering team capable of supporting rapid growth.
The problem?
The local talent market simply couldn’t keep up.
When we first sat down with the leadership team, they believed they had a recruitment problem. Vacancies had been open for months. Hiring was slower than expected. Finding experienced software engineers had become increasingly difficult.
But after spending time understanding the business, it became clear that recruitment wasn’t the real issue.
Two factors were holding the company back.
The first was compensation.
For several engineering positions, the salary budget was around €10,000 below the market average in one of Germany’s most competitive technology markets, that immediately reduced the number of experienced candidates willing to consider the opportunity.
The second issue was geography.
The business expected Frankfurt alone to provide enough engineers to support an aggressive scale-up.
That wasn’t realistic.
Frankfurt has a strong technology ecosystem, but it’s also home to international banks, fintech companies, software businesses, consulting firms, and global enterprises—all competing for the same experienced professionals.
The company wasn’t struggling because recruiters couldn’t find candidates.
It was struggling because the hiring strategy no longer matched the reality of the market.
One question changed the entire project. Instead of asking: “How do we hire more developers in Frankfurt?” We asked: “Why are we only looking in Frankfurt?”
That shift completely transformed the recruitment strategy. Rather than limiting the search to one city or even one country we expanded the talent pool internationally. We started identifying engineers, product professionals, and QA specialists from across Europe and beyond who were open to relocating for the right opportunity.
Instead of competing for a few hundred local candidates, the company suddenly had access to thousands of experienced professionals.
Many companies underestimate what international recruitment really involves. You’re not asking someone to change employers. You’re asking them to change countries. That changes the conversation completely. Candidates wanted to understand what life in Germany would actually look like.
Would English be enough?
How would the relocation process work?
What support would be available?
Could their family relocate too?
What would their career look like in two or three years?
These weren’t side conversations. They were often the deciding factors. Helping candidates picture their future became just as important as discussing the technical aspects of the role.
One of the most valuable parts of the project wasn’t sourcing candidates. It was sharing market insight.
Because we were speaking with engineers every day, we could clearly demonstrate why offers were being rejected and where the company was positioned compared with competitors. Instead of relying on assumptions, hiring decisions became data-driven. Adjustments were made to compensation, messaging, and the overall employee value proposition. Those changes immediately improved candidate engagement. Sometimes recruitment isn’t about working harder.
It’s about changing the variables that candidates care about most.
Once the new strategy was in place, hiring gathered momentum.
Over the course of the project, the company recruited professionals across several technical disciplines, including:
I personally recruited 28 technical professionals, and after the initial success, the company continued using the same recruitment strategy to hire another 10 to 15 people.
What started as a difficult hiring project became a repeatable recruitment model that supported the company’s continued growth.
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The impact wasn’t measured simply by the number of hires.
With a stronger engineering team in place, the company increased its delivery capacity, expanded its product development capabilities, and established itself as a recognised technology employer within the Frankfurt market.
As the business continued to grow, it also secured approximately €20 million in funding.
Recruitment wasn’t the only reason for that success.
But without the right people in place, growth on that scale would have been much harder to achieve.
Every funding round, product launch, and customer success story starts with the people who make it possible.
Looking back, this project reinforced several lessons that apply to almost every fast-growing technology business.
If salaries aren’t competitive or the local talent pool is too small, simply asking recruiters to source more candidates won’t fix the underlying issue.
The best engineer for your company might live in another city—or another continent.
If relocation is an option, your hiring strategy should reflect that.
International candidates are choosing a new life, not just a new employer.
Talk about career growth, culture, relocation support, and what makes your company worth moving for.
Candidate feedback is valuable market intelligence.
Salary expectations, acceptance rates, and reasons for declining offers can help shape a stronger hiring strategy.
The goal isn’t simply to fill today’s vacancies.
It’s to create a recruitment framework that continues working as your business grows.
Building a tech team in a competitive market like Frankfurt isn’t impossible. But it does require companies to challenge their assumptions.
Sometimes the answer isn’t finding a better recruiter. Sometimes it’s expanding your talent pool, adjusting your market positioning, and creating a hiring strategy that reflects where the best people actually are. For this company, that shift made all the difference.
More than 40 technical professionals joined the business through a recruitment strategy built around international relocation, market insight, and long-term thinking.
The result wasn’t just a larger engineering team. It was a stronger business, one with the people, capability, and momentum to support its next stage of growth.
International recruitment significantly expands the available talent pool, allowing companies to access experienced software engineers, QA specialists, DevOps professionals, and product managers beyond their local market. In competitive hiring hubs like Frankfurt, Berlin, or Amsterdam, recruiting internationally often reduces hiring delays and improves candidate quality.
Yes. While remote work has become common, many experienced engineers are still willing to relocate for the right opportunity. Competitive compensation, relocation support, career growth, and a strong employer brand remain major drivers of relocation decisions.
One of the biggest signs is when vacancies remain open despite consistent recruitment activity. Low application rates, rejected offers, slow interview pipelines, or repeated feedback about salary or location usually indicate that the hiring strategy—not the recruiters—is limiting results. Regular market benchmarking helps identify these issues early.
Salary is only one factor. Candidates also evaluate career progression, engineering culture, technical challenges, flexibility, relocation assistance, leadership quality, and long-term business stability. Companies that clearly communicate these advantages generally achieve higher offer acceptance rates.
Businesses should consider expanding internationally when local hiring becomes consistently slow, specialist skills are difficult to find, salary inflation makes local recruitment unsustainable, or growth plans require hiring multiple technical professionals within a short timeframe.
International recruitment works particularly well for high-demand technical positions such as Software Engineers, Backend Developers, Frontend Developers, DevOps Engineers, QA Automation Engineers, Data Engineers, Product Managers, Cybersecurity Specialists, Cloud Architects, and Engineering Managers.
Specialist recruiters provide access to passive candidates, real-time salary benchmarking, local market intelligence, relocation guidance, and established talent networks across multiple countries. This enables companies to hire faster while reducing the risk of poor hiring decisions.
Also read: Why Most Hiring Demand Targets Vocational and Entry-Level Talent