How PresenceLearning scaled their team by 150% in 3 months with Terminal
- Senior Software Engineer, Backend
- Fullstack Engineer
- Frontend Engineer
PresenceLearning is the leading provider of live online special education related services for K-12 schools nationwide.
As specialists in online services for students, they’ve seen a large increase in demand during the pandemic. To meet this new demand, they needed to double their engineering resources, and do it fast.
PresenceLearning turned to Terminal, who helped them expand their engineering team by 150% in a three-month period. Key among PresenceLearning’s objectives was to bring in a broad range of ideas and perspectives to help shape an innovative strategy with a diverse talent pool that aligns with the company’s mission driven culture. Other requirements included finding candidates who work in the same time zone and were able to get up to speed quickly.
With the new engineers engaged, PresenceLearning is on track to meet the demands of the post-pandemic online education landscape and ensure that students get the services they need to grow and thrive.
PresenceLearning needed to scale quickly to meet demand
For Russ Greenspan, CTO of PresenceLearning, the last 12 months have been a whirlwind. The pandemic shut down K-12 schools for much of the year, creating massive demand for PresenceLearning’s services nearly overnight. To keep up with demand, scaling the engineering team has been one of Russ’ highest priorities.
Fortunately for Russ and his team, PresenceLearning had already embraced a distributed approach to staffing before the pandemic, which laid the foundation for expanding his team when the pandemic hit. But scaling with no outside help presented issues. His team needed engineers who would bring a diverse set of creative perspectives to the project, whose values matched the company’s, and who worked within the same time zone.
PresenceLearning turned to Terminal
In early 2020, PresenceLearning partnered with Terminal to help build a remote global tech team, and today the company has a unique remote setup, with teams distributed across the US and Latin America.
“Turning to Latin America has significantly expanded the candidate pool for us,” Russ says. “There’s so much good talent. I studied in Latin America myself, so I know firsthand the kind of creative thinking and quality engineers that you’ll find there.”
Terminal’s customized interview process ensured that the PresenceLearning team only interviewed candidates who met the requirements for their open roles. And the Terminal Talent Hub, Terminal’s one-stop portal for tracking recruiting efforts and managing remote teams, meant Russ had a high level of control over and visibility into the candidate pipeline throughout the process as well.
“The applicant tracking system in the Terminal Talent Hub is great,” Russ says. “All the video interviews are recorded, and it’s been super easy to follow along as much as I’d like to.”
Beyond the talent pool, Russ and his team found another benefit of sourcing talent in Latin America: time zone alignment with their New York and San Francisco teams.
“When you look at places like Mexico or Colombia, one of the best things is that everyone is on the same clock as the U.S.,” Russ says. “It’s a huge plus.”
“Terminal is ‘team augmentation’. It’s anti-outsourcing. The people that Terminal finds are integrated into our team, work-wise, culturally, in every respect, and help us build products and services we are proud of”
Russ Greenspan
CTO, PresenceLearning
5 new engineers in three months
By partnering with Terminal, PresenceLearning has been able to augment its team with 10 engineers, successfully ramping up its workforce over the last several months to meet the increased demand for its services. In one stretch, five new engineers joined the team in just three months. In all, Terminal added three senior software engineers, four full stack engineers, and three frontend engineers to PresenceLearning’s team.
“Terminal is ‘team augmentation’,” Russ says. “It’s anti-outsourcing. The people that Terminal finds are integrated into our team, work-wise, culturally, in every respect, and help us build products and services we are proud of.”