By Jonathan Siddharth, CEO

We now live in a remote-first world

Every company today is in a race to reap the benefits of remote talent. For example, we recently heard that LinkedIn is going fully remote. Similarly, Shopify and Spotify announced they were going to allow their people to work from anywhere (WFA). Other tech giants, including Twitter, Dropbox, and others, determined that WFA was here to stay and good for their companies and their people. Even multinational industrial conglomerates like Siemens, Ford, etc., have decided to go remote-first. 

An entirely new category of products, including Turing that helps companies at all stages source, vet, match, and manage software engineers, are powering this transformation.

The reasons are obvious

Firstly, companies can access a planetary pool of engineers and tap into hundreds of thousands of untapped Silicon Valley caliber developers to increase their development velocity. Secondly, companies also win on talent retention as our data shows that churn is lower for remote developers. On top of all that, there are significant cost savings. Many engineering managers tell us that as work culture has evolved, remote distributed teams are better positioned for success. This perspective was not mainstream pre-pandemic. 

But remote is hard

As a VP of engineering, how are you going to build a global pipeline to find the best developers? As the head of technology in a startup, how would you source the top engineers in Brazil, Argentina, Ghana, India, or Vietnam? How are you going to vet all of those remote developers efficiently? Especially when you don’t see a Stanford or Berkeley in their educational background and a Google or Facebook in their work experience. There are incredible people globally, but vetting them takes time and effort. Engineering leaders tell us that they spend up to 40% of their time on hiring. Think of what you can do with the time you don’t have to spend interviewing developers.

Even after you find that perfect remote developer, there are many questions to answer – how will you solve communication and timezone issues? How do you ensure a productive collaboration in your distributed team? How do you track productivity? How do you solve HR/legal compliance? How do you handle payroll?

A partner like Turing can help you solve all of this.

The old solutions don’t work for a remote-first world

The old way of using headhunters and staffing companies is no longer efficient. Neither of these has a global reach. They don’t do any specialized vetting of engineers, and more often than not, you’re just inundated with tons and tons of resume spam.

Recruiting marketplaces are hit or miss in quality

In our conversations with developers, we found that highly skilled developers strongly prefer long-term engagements rather than gig work. Marketplaces attract more “nights and weekends” hobbyist developers. Additionally, gig-oriented people may not provide companies with the continuity they require for building complex products. One of the key challenges we hear from engineering leaders is that they need to interview up to thirty developers to hire one with many marketplaces. At Turing, we use AI for vetting and matching to solve these challenges.

IT service companies don’t have silicon valley quality developers

Engagement models of traditional IT service companies are rigid and opaque. They find local talent from one city like Bangalore or Shanghai but cannot leverage the global remote talent pool. 

What if you could solve all of this with software?

What if we built software to:

• Source talent planet-wide
• Vet to a Silicon Valley standard 
• Optimize matching via AI
• Make it easy for managers and remote talent to collaborate securely
• Abstract away the complexity of hiring global workers

We see a new category emerging to build precisely this across roles and verticals: the Talent Cloud. Talent Clouds use software to automatically source, vet, and manage talent worldwide.

Turing is a leader in this new category and is an intelligent Talent Cloud of developers. We serve many startup and enterprise customers from Silicon Valley to other major US cities and match them with developers around the world. Thus providing a speed, retention, and cost advantage to their engineering teams.

The rise of the Talent Cloud 

We are now seeing Talent Cloud built for many verticals. Examples of Talent Cloud are cutting edge companies like Workstream for hourly employees, Jyve for retail workers, Flockjay for Salespeople, WorkRise for Oil & Natural Gas Workers, Trusted Health for Nursing, Dribble and Behance for Designers, Publicist for Marketing Talent, Uber and Lyft for Drivers, and of course, as mentioned, my company, Turing, for Software Developers.

Companies can now spin up engineering dream teams in the cloud as easily as spinning up servers on Amazon Web Services. 

In much the same way a company can choose or configure custom VMs on AWS, a hiring manager can input their needs like roles, tech stacks, seniority, etc., into Turing’s intelligent Talent Cloud and get pre-vetted engineers on demand

In the case of Turing, we’ve found that a typical engagement lasts one to three years which our developers love. Over 200 companies have already leveraged the technology to spin up their engineering teams, including enterprises like Johnson and Johnson, Disney, Coinbase, Rivian, and others.

Companies are flocking to the Talent Cloud for three reasons 

Speed of hiring

Intelligent Talent Clouds like Turing take a hiring process that typically requires months and shortens it to two days, often on the same day, for many roles. 

Spend zero time on interviews

Companies typically save over 50 hours per engineering hire on interviewing alone with Turing. Our interview-to-hire ratio is industry-leading and, in many cases, an order of magnitude better.

Higher developer retention

Companies using an Intelligent Talent Cloud also have excellent retention. For example, our developer engagement success rate is 97% which means 97% of the time, when you take a developer from Turing, they’ll stay with you and get the job done, leading to the successful completion of the project. Most of our engagements get renewed with the same developers, which leads to continuity for our customers.

Turing has over a million developers signed up.

Over a million developers from 140 countries have already joined Turing’s Intelligent Talent Cloud representing a wide variety of job types, including full-stack, front end, back end, mobile, AI, data science, DevOps, and more. 

Our Intelligent Talent Cloud hosts highly-skilled developers capable of working with over 100 different technologies, including React, Node, Angular, Python, Java, and C sharp. 

Our core engineering team, which comes from Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Uber, and other top technology companies, has defined a Facebook and Google-style engineering ladder. This ladder helps hiring managers to identify engineers at the seniority level they need. 

Why developers prefer Turing’s Talent Cloud

Turing offers developers careers, not gigs. Our developers love Turing because they want to build a career while being remote. They get flexibility while solving critical engineering problems with the best companies in the world. At Turing, they get to progress in their career, learn, and grow.

Why would an engineer accept ultra-rigorous vetting?

Engineers get vetted once and become eligible for lifelong matching with some of the world’s most admired companies in the US and the world. Because they amortize the time they spend going through vetting across thousands of exciting jobs, they are comfortable doing this.

AI-driven vetting removes bias while validating skills and seniority

Our advanced vetting engine, designed by engineering leaders who previously worked at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, evaluates and creates a deep profile for every engineer. 

We evaluate developers for technical skills like CS foundations, systems design, specific tech stacks, and coding and soft skills like communication proficiency, ownership, and leadership. Our systems also automatically assess the seniority level of the developer.  

When evaluating their coding skills, we record their coding evaluation session on Turing’s platform, so you can see a developer’s coding performance replayed.

Imagine interviewing a developer when you have access to the performance reviews from all their previous projects. Turing’s Intelligent Talent Cloud captures performance reviews from every prior manager that the developer has had. These reviews provide scores on their strengths as well as their areas for growth. Turing is able to use on-the-job performance data to make highly accurate matches. 

Our deep developer profile is a detailed, comprehensive, and continuously updating representation of developers’ strengths and areas for growth. Therefore, a Turing deep developer profile is a lot richer than a typical resume or Linkedin profile. 

Deep Matching algorithms make optimal matches between the right developers and the right jobs.

In an Intelligent Talent Cloud, matching engines should index deep developer profiles and rank the best developers in the world in terms of fit for your specific job. You don’t have to spend time interviewing a lot of developers. Recommendations should deliver matches with very high precision. Operating at a global scale helps. It’s easier to find the right person when choosing from a pool of hundreds of thousands and not the 30 people who happened to apply for the job. 

Turing’s intelligent matching algorithm is based on deep, end-to-end data about the job requirements and the developer skillset. We leverage signals from our vetting engine as well as actual on-the-job performance data to make granular matches. Finally, we use machine learning to build models that weight the different features of the job and the developer’s in-depth developer profile to find the best match that ensures success for both the customer and the developer. 

Eliminate the complexity of hiring, paying, and managing a remote planetary workforce

After the match, a truly Intelligent Talent Cloud should make remote development easy, compliant, and secure, mainly by abstracting away the complexity of managing distributed teams. This simplification includes payment and payroll compliance, global taxation requirements, managing security, and the communication challenges that previously plagued distributed teams working across different time zones. 

In the case of Turing’s Intelligent Talent Cloud, we’re so confident in our matching capability that we offer every engineer we place on a zero-risk, two-week trial. Our trials have a 90% success rate, and overall developer engagement has a 97% success rate. Turing’s goal is to help you unleash the world’s untapped human potential.

The Talent Cloud will democratize opportunity

We believe there is an incredible number of amazing engineers all over the world. When you widen your recruiting radius beyond the Bay Area, you get to accelerate your engineering velocity and work with Silicon Valley caliber engineers for a fraction of the cost. The Intelligent Talent Cloud makes defaulting to a remote-first paradigm a simple, fast, and cost-effective decision for any engineering leader. 

We will see many more intelligent Talent Clouds for numerous other industries. Beyond the fact that they simplify many of the most challenging aspects of scaling a company or growing an enterprise, the remote-first paradigm is inherently positive. 

That’s because this change is good for companies, good for the planet, and good for people. When location is decoupled from opportunity, everyone wins. The planet wins when fewer people commute to work, reducing emissions. Companies win when their overhead costs, including rents for office space and salaries, are reduced. People win because where they live doesn’t dictate the opportunities they have access to. You don’t have to live in Silicon Valley to be a part of Silicon Valley. Companies like Turing are scaling Silicon Valley beyond the bay area to the entire planet. Finally, with this shift, the world wins because we are now able to build products that can improve people’s lives, faster than ever before.