Meet Transmax:

Transmax is a full-service Intelligent Transport System (ITS) solutions provider that develops, deploys, and supports the international award-winning ITS platform – STREAMS, and related technologies. Transmax works with road network managers to give millions of Aussies smoother travels each day. And by digitising roadways, they’re also paving the way for the roads of tomorrow!

At a glance:

HQ: Brisbane | Employees: 170 | People hired: 17 | Teams: 3 | Tech stack: AWS, Terraform, C#/.NET Core, Linux, Kubernetes, Docker, Elasticsearch | Work: Hybrid

The Catalyst: Elevating road data to the cloud

In 2022, Transmax received funding to rebuild all of their data infrastructures so it could sit in the cloud. This led them to face a unique challenge. They needed to hire for a high volume of incredibly difficult and niche roles across three different teams: ITS, Next Gen (future product builds), and STREAMS (their core application).

At the time, they only had one talent acquisition specialist to juggle a large influx of hires within the year. With a complex tech environment and niche requirements, Transmax needed a partner who could understand the ins and outs of their business, culture, and technology.

Having partnered with affix previously, Transmax trusted affix’s approach and expertise in the niche Brisbane Cloud, Infrastructure, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) spaces to help them with their latest hiring spree.

The Challenge: High demand, niche market

The complexity in scaling three unique technology teams (ITS, Next Gen, and STREAMS), across a variety of niche roles, while managing multiple stakeholders was an exciting challenge for affix! Each tech team had varying needs across varying levels of seniority, and the roles were highly specialised with particular requirements.

These roles included:

• Site Reliability Engineers (SRE)
• SRE Architect
• Front End (React) and Back End (.NET) Devs
• Infrastructure & Automation Engineer
• Data Engineer
• Senior Ops Support
• Applications Support Officer

To add to the challenge – inflated salaries born out of the pandemic tech boom, combined with increasing demands for remote work, made it difficult to obtain candidate interest at the start. Due to the nature of the work, all Transmax roles were hybrid, requiring 2 days in their Brisbane office.

And although many were captivated by the amazing opportunity at Transmax, they often requested inflated salary packages that exceeded Transmax’s approved budget by 20-30%.

The Solution: An unwavering understanding 

The complex and niche nature of the roles required an unwavering and holistic understanding of Transmax’s business, culture, and technology. To fully unpack the nuanced requirements for each role, we held one in-depth Discovery Workshop for each key stakeholder to reacquaint ourselves with the business’s growth trajectory, goals, and more. We also collaborated with their marketing team to ensure consistent messaging and brand positioning across all content and comms related to the roles.

Understanding the role requirements allowed us to get granular with the technical requirements. We prioritised candidates with experience in SaaS, C#.NET, AWS, and cloud-native environments, and recognised the need for expertise in Elasticsearch, Terraform, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

By staying closely connected with our network over the years, folks trust us and tend to keep the opportunities we present to them top of mind.

Because if there’s one of many things we know about recruiting great technologists in Australia, it’s that to gain their trust, respect, and attention, you have to demonstrate that you’re interested in supporting them throughout their career, show that you did your due diligence with personalised messages, and share information about jobs that go far beyond the job ad. And fair enough.

With empathy and understanding of our audience, and the knowledge that there’s a limited number of people in Brisbane with the required experience, we developed various data-informed touchpoint opportunities to keep the information fresh and engaging. This included personalised and targeted messages, a social media campaign and more.

We spoke proudly about the business as if we were Transmax employees ourselves, offering new perspectives each time. We highlighted the impact the candidates could make, the product roadmap, and Transmax’s culture to help candidates truly understand the incredible opportunities Transmax was offering.

For six months, affix became an extension of the team at Transmax, connecting amazing humans to Transmax’s mission of improving people’s lives by providing industry-leading transport solutions.

The Highlight: Six months of support

Unlike our previous partnership with Transmax in 2021, this project spanned across six months and had support from affix recruiters across both Brisbane and Melbourne. The beauty of collaborating for an extended period of time is the opportunity to grow and evolve with the business in real time.

Managing a great relationship with each stakeholder required a dedication to frequent touch points, clear communication, and transparency. Throughout our 6-month partnership, we conducted weekly work-in-progress meetings (WIPs) with each hiring manager to discuss the evolving market information we were gathering, candidate feedback, salary data and more.

This frequency enabled us to shift our focus as and when required to ensure the best possible outcomes for Transmax and the best possible recruitment experience for candidates.

The Learnings: Staying top of mind

We gained valuable insights into the complexities of hiring in a market marked by inflated salaries and numerous remote-based opportunities. To us, these challenges reaffirmed the value of staying top of mind with our network. In recruitment, timing is everything. You never know when someone will be more receptive to new opportunities. This was the case with most of the roles, but one in particular took the cake.

The Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) Architect role had an incredibly limited number of qualified candidates available in Brisbane. This person was vital to building real-time cloud-native applications, deploying, monitoring and progressing the tech that underpins Transmax’s products, and leading the SRE practice.

By taking the time to know our market, staying connected with our network over the years, and actively engaging with these candidates over a period of time, we gained the trust needed to ensure opportunities like these remain top of mind for them. Additionally, leveraging new insights we gathered during WIPs and retrospectives allowed us to successfully sustain candidate engagement.

The Result: An iterative road to success

In just 6 months, affix’s national team of recruiters helped Transmax scale by 17 people, filling a variety of unique and challenging roles across three different teams. Despite the challenges the market presented, we leveraged our deep understanding of the business, culture, and technology to successfully grow the business.

Thanks to these new hires, Transmax improved their capability to build a cloud-native microservices application so their data infrastructure could sit in the cloud, along with maintaining their business-as-usual operations.