Long-term collaboration with Discovery

Discovery is one of the biggest media companies globally, and at the beginning of 2021, legacy Discovery launched their streaming service Discovery+, which now exists in multiple markets globally and has several millions of subscribers. Discovery+ is one of Sweden’s fastest-growing streaming services and is, for example, used to stream the Olympics and Allsvenskan in Europe.

In Stockholm, the engineers mainly work with the backend platform for the global streaming service and use tech such as Java, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, and AWS. Discovery offers its employees a modern tech stack, great culture, competitive benefits, and the chance to be a part of delivering content that affects people all over the world.

“I enjoy working at Discovery because of its diverse, global, and high-paced environment. I have been here ten years, but it almost feels like it’s a new company every time you compare it to a year back.”
Pontus Hellgren, Group Vice President of Engineering

Collaboration

Ants and Discovery first started to work together in the fall of 2019 when we began recruiting Software Engineers to Stockholm. Back then, the team in Stockholm was very new, and we helped set up a recruitment process and recruited some of the first full-time employees. The collaboration went well, and when we finished the first round, we knew that we would work together again in the future. We started the second tenure in late 2020, this time together with a newly created internal TA team, and have since then had a fruitful partnership that continues to this day.

“I expected Ants to bring the know-how on how to scale and efficiently ramp up talent acquisition, helping us succeed in the highly competitive Stockholm market.”
Pontus Hellgren, Group Vice President of Engineering.

At Discovery, we have worked together with the internal TA team, Engineering Managers, VP’s, and P&C in Sweden, Poland, the UK, and the USA. We have recruited a large number of people, mainly Backend- and Frontend Engineers (ranging from junior to staff level) and Engineering Managers. We have also gotten the chance to recruit people within CRM, Product Designers, and MarTech.

”The success factors for our collaboration can be seen in the quantity and quality of the talent pool that was generated and fed the candidate pipelines. It also relates with the extremely professional and thorough manner with which all candidates were treated across the entire recruitment process.”
Apostolos Georgakis, VP Engineering

“I’d say the main success factors were: the RPO consultants have been outstanding at what they do, but they have also been an integrated part of Discovery, from day one, in the recruitment team and the business. They are literally acting and seen as full-time employees, which has allowed them to build the trust needed and required to guide stakeholders and hiring managers.“
Mikael Wikström, Recruitment Lead for Sweden and Poland.

Recruitment process

“We carefully pick individuals to excel in technology and match our culture and guiding principles. We collaborate closely within our teams, so there must be good chemistry, good diversity, and a mix of experience.”
Jens Zetterström, Engineering Manager

To find people matching Discovery’s profile, we worked with end-to-end recruitment. That includes:

● Starting up new roles and deciding on interview processes
● Intake meetings with stakeholders
● Sourcing through multiple forums, e.g., LinkedIn, Github, and StackOverflow
● Responsibility for candidate experience and management
● Referral strategies
● Conduct first interviews
● Loop (several independent interviews) management
● Community hiring decisions involving stakeholders and interviewers
● Helping with Visa and Work Permits
● Negotiating offers
● Closing deals with candidates

We have been given a lot of autonomy and freedom to do the work as we see fit and develop our ideas to improve the recruitment processes. We have had a great collaboration with the employees at Discovery.

“It’s all about setting candidates up for success in their future roles and, at the same time, allowing them to meet as many employees as possible and allowing them to make better decisions for themselves based on the full picture of the company.”
Mikael Wikström, Recruitment Lead for Sweden and Poland.

Employer branding

We’ve also helped Discovery create several EVP films that are used as employer branding. To make the videos, we worked together with a team at Discovery and the Marketing Team at Ants. The videos have been used on our website and social media and in our reach outs to attract great talent.

“Hiring in Stockholm is highly competitive, with lots of great companies out there. Candidates often have multiple options, and employer branding is important to help cut through the noise and create awareness about why they should be interested in us as a company.”
Pontus Hellgren, Group Vice President of Engineering.

Why work at Discovery?

In addition to all things related to recruitment, we have also had a great time working at Discovery! Just a few examples are dinners with the TA team, company events, Christmas parties, and getting some really cool merch (as you can see in the picture).

“It has been great working with Ants. The candidates have been picked with care, and nothing has fallen between the cracks.”
Jens Zetterström, Engineering Manager.

It’s been amazing working with these people who continually push us to evolve and are always there for a great laugh. If you’re thinking about joining, just go for it!

Thank you, Discovery, for all the great times we’ve had, and looking forward to all that is yet to come!