Recruiting in a Market Where the Client Was Starting From Zero

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Quick Summary

Objective: Hire Customer Support Advisors at volume in Romania for a client that had no entity, no recruiters, no salary data, and no local market knowledge there.

Strategy: A fast Project RPO setup led by upfront market research and a flexible three-tier delivery model that the client could resize as needed. Serendi acted as advisor as much as recruiter, guiding the client through Romanian hiring regulations and pre-hire procedures.

Results: 30 hires in three months, 10-workday average time-to-hire, ~€1,030 cost-per-hire, 95%+ offer acceptance.

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A New Country, From Zero

Our client is a remote-first BPO that was growing fast. One of their clients experienced a demand spike that exceeded what the internal team could handle, and the answer was to hire Customer Support Advisors in Romania, fully remote and at scale.

The complication was that the Romanian entity was still being set up. The client had no recruiters in the country, no research on which job boards Romanian candidates use, no salary benchmarks, and no familiarity with local pre-hire procedures. All of it had to be handled at once.

Research First, Then a Proposal

The location was not even final yet, so Serendi led with a market study. We prepared salary bands, who else was hiring there, how much talent was actually available, and how Romania compared to a few neighboring countries. That research is what gave the client the confidence to commit to Romania.

What the client needed was flexibility. A new entity does not know how fast it will grow, so we offered a tiered model they could resize: one, two, or three Talent Acquisition Partners, with a defined notice period to scale up or down.

They paid for the capacity they needed at each stage, not the capacity they might need later. That flexibility is one of the practical reasons to outsource recruiting rather than build a local team from scratch.

More Than a Recruiter

A client opening its first operation in a new country needs more than candidates. It needs to know how hiring actually works there.

So Serendi worked as an advisor, not just a sourcing team. We guided the client through Romanian employment law, the pre-hire steps, and what it takes to get someone from offer to start date in a country they had never operated in.

Their legal setup was being built while we were hired, so the two ran in parallel. When their paperwork was delayed on the initial offers, we worked around it rather than letting the pipeline slow down.

How this RPO Project Ran

This was an RPO Project Sprint, our fast-track format for high-volume hiring under time pressure. The team was 2+1 Talent Acquisition Partners, a sourcing intern, and two interview coordinators. With no existing candidate base in the country, the early work was talent sourcing: building a qualified pipeline from the ground up.

Every stage had a deadline.

• CV screening took one to three days.

• First interview, within five.

• Language test, a day or two.

• Second interview, three to five days.

• Letter of intent, two to three.

Results

Metric	Result
Hires Delivered	30
Time to first shortlist	3 workdays
Average time-to-hire	10 workdays
Offer acceptance rate	95%+
Cost-per-hire	~€1,030

A 95%+ offer acceptance rate, in a market the client had never hired in, says the candidates we put forward were the right ones, not just the available ones.

Customer support has a churn problem by default. Getting the right-fit candidates is where retention actually begins.

Opening a new market and need a hiring partner that runs from day one?

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