“We assumed it would take around 6 – 12 months to fill 60 vacancies. We were wrong. After 6 months, we’d taken on a second floor and hired around 85 people and expect to grow to over 150 strong following the next round of recruitment,” said Warren Hughes, Head of Systems Development, bet365 Manchester.
bet365 selected Manchester because of its excellent reputation as a tech centre and the opportunity to attract people from a large pool of technical talent.
"Manchester’s deep talent pool has enabled us to keep the bar high and attract a fine calibre of developer. We've been impressed by how quickly the new office has become productive. The team has established a solid working relationship with our developers in Stoke and their close collaboration has successfully delivered significant pieces of work including our new HTML5 desktop website," said Hughes.
During the next phase, bet365 will be recruiting at all levels including junior and senior developers, software testers, team leads, tech leads and project managers.
“We’ve found that the unique technical challenges on offer are helping us to attract Manchester’s top talent. An average Saturday for us is busier than most e-commerce sites are on Black Friday. There are few places where you’ll be as challenged and stretched,” said Hughes.
In addition to increasing the size of the team, the company will also begin to broaden the development work in Manchester, enabling developers to cross train in new technologies including programming languages such as Erlang, Elixir and Go.
"We currently have 5 teams providing software development and testing across sports, gaming, trading and customer account management. This year, we will be looking to extend these and also look at mobile and middleware expansions if there’s a good case to doing so," said Hughes.
bet365's recruitment efforts have been fast and efficient with developers joining from Manchester and further afield.
“Manchester's strong commuter links mean we have developers and software testers travelling in from Leeds, Liverpool, Bolton and Wigan. It's also rewarding to see organic growth with current developers directly recommending programmers to join us,” said Hughes.
With communication between sites a high priority, bet365 is ensuring its teams can collaborate no matter where they are based.
“One of the key challenges when opening a satellite office is enabling effective communication between teams across different sites. To ensure this didn’t cause us any problems and more importantly not slow down our delivery, we invested heavily in multiple Microsoft Surface Hubs to enable slick video conferencing across sites. I can honestly say communication has been far more straight-forward than I had envisaged.” said Hughes.
Since establishing its Manchester operation, the company has found the city is fulfilling its potential as one of the UK's foremost technology centres.
"We've enjoyed enormous support from the city itself. There's a growing technology culture that promotes and encourages innovation and collaboration," said Hughes.
For more information or interview requests, please contact Alex Moscow at 9mm Public Relations: alex@9mmpr.com
About bet365
Founded in 2000 in North Staffordshire, bet365 is the world's largest online gambling company. The company employs more than 3,000 people, is live in 18 languages and delivers an unrivalled online experience to over 21 million customers worldwide. Giving its development teams the freedom to innovate is key to its success. Today bet365 continues to push technological boundaries and break new ground in software innovation.
