Introducing - Beam It Recruitment

Hey everyone, you may have seen that I announced that I will be launching my own business venture focused on Erlang & Elixir recruitment...

Record scratch, freeze frame... you're probably wondering how I got into this situation..

Well here's the story for anyone that loves context...

In 2014, a colleague introduced me to Functional Programming, something that myself & a lot of other 'non-techies' mistook as a 'new' concept. I'd never heard of Erlang, Scala, Clojure etc... so surely it must be one of those emerging fads from Facebook or Google that become hyped overnight?

I couldn't have been more wrong, my research indicated that Scheme first appeared in 1975 with Erlang arriving just over a decade later in 1986..

This intrigued me, who is using this 30 year old programming language & why?

A quick search led me to realise that I was using it, every day in fact. I used Whatsapp to communicate with friends & Bet365 for sports betting, not to mention Vocalink (now Mastercard) powering popular payment systems with it too.

As it turned out, there was a community of Erlangers that were strong advocates for the language & when I began to speak with them, they seemed pleased but also somewhat surprised to hear that someone was interested in recruiting within their market. 

I quickly engaged with new clients who were keen to see if I could find these elusive developers to join their teams, the niche nature of the market allowed me to keep my focus very narrow & just speak with the candidates that had at least expressed an interest in Erlang in their profile/CV (a drop in the Ocean compared to those favouring more popular languages such as Java or C#). 

Not long after, candidates began to ask about Elixir, this emerging technology that was described to me as 'the next Ruby, but functional', I was a little skeptical as I'd been told this before about Haskell & F# which are still incredibly niche to this day. Anyway, as time went on I saw that the Elixir community was growing & would inevitably overtake Erlang's users (whilst giving it a lot of fresh interest along the way too). So I began to focus on both on languages whilst keeping a keen interest on the growth of Elixir.

I published an article a couple of years back noting that fact that the Elixir Slack channel had just overtaken the Erlang for members, interestingly now it sits at Erlang 3,150 & Elixir 26,000, making it clear that the language had attracted a mass of new interest in the Beam.

Anyway, I saw some success in the market, finding myself placing candidates from: UK, Ireland, France, Germany, USA, Italy, Romania, Hungary, Poland, India, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Finland, Colombia, Argentina, Slovakia, Slovenia, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, Netherlands & Czech Republic (27 different Nationalities off the top of my head! Sorry if I missed you!). How's that for diversity? :)

I took a short break from agency recruitment to see life from the other side (not the dark side, don't say it!) & after learning exactly what tech start-up life is all about, (sadly, half of our team being laid off) I have decided to return to the Beam community in the form of my new business, Beam It Recruitment.

What can I help with?

• Provide consultancy including but not limited to: Sourcing & screening candidates, helping you plan your hiring process effectively, managing your own recruitment pipeline
• Help you to find your next Erlang/Elixir role
• Provide in-depth insights about the Beam employment market

So if any of that sounds interesting, please feel free to reach out via LinkedIn or e-mail me on [email protected]