How a Startup Beat Big Tech for Top Engineering Talent
A venture-backed startup couldn't compete with Big Tech salaries. They found a better strategy: tap a global talent pool others ignored.
The Situation
LinkedField is a venture-backed SaaS platform serving the construction industry - think change orders, document control, safety orientation, and project management. They were pre-product, burning runway, and racing toward a funding milestone.
The problem wasn’t finding engineers. It was keeping them.
Every time LinkedField found a promising candidate, Big Tech swooped in with a counter-offer that a startup simply couldn’t match. The few engineers who did join kept one eye on the door, waiting for the next recruiter to call.
The Challenge
LinkedField faced the classic startup talent trap:
Budget constraints. They couldn’t compete on salary with Google, Meta, or Microsoft. Period.
Recruiter spam. Job boards delivered volume, not quality. HR was drowning in unqualified applications that took hours to filter.
Retention anxiety. Even when they hired someone good, the constant fear of losing them to a better offer made long-term planning impossible.
Time pressure. Every week without a full engineering team was another week of delayed product development - and another week closer to running out of runway.
The Approach
The answer wasn’t to outspend Big Tech. It was to go where Big Tech wasn’t looking.
Worca expanded LinkedField’s talent pool internationally, focusing on Taiwan - a market with exceptional engineering talent, strong English proficiency, and far less competition from US tech giants.
Instead of posting jobs and filtering spam, LinkedField received pre-vetted candidates matched to their specific requirements. Every resume came from our database of 25,000+ English-proficient university graduates - the top 5% globally.
And with Worca’s 90-day hiring guarantee, LinkedField had downside protection. If a hire didn’t work out, we’d replace them.
The Results
Key Outcomes
- 5 qualified resumes weekly - no more spam filtering
- Weeks, not months to fill critical roles
- 95% employee retention rate - talent that stayed
- 10:1 candidate-to-offer ratio - efficient pipeline
- Zero increase in cash burn while scaling the team
LinkedField went from struggling to hire to building a stable engineering team without blowing their budget. They progressed from pre-product to paying customers, positioning themselves for their next funding round.
The 95% retention rate wasn’t luck. It was the result of hiring people who actually wanted to work at an early-stage startup - not people using LinkedField as a stepping stone to Big Tech.
Why It Worked
Three reasons:
Right market, right talent. Taiwan has world-class engineers who aren’t flooded with offers from every US tech company. LinkedField got quality without the bidding war.
Pre-vetted pipeline. We didn’t send resumes and hope. Every candidate was screened for both technical skills and startup fit. LinkedField’s hiring managers spent time on interviews, not filtering.
Commitment alignment. Our talent works 60 hours a week. They’re in the office. They’re in US timezones. That level of intensity matches the startup mentality - and it shows in retention.
LinkedField couldn’t outspend Big Tech. But they found something better: a talent pool of exceptional engineers who wanted to build something that mattered. That’s the arbitrage Worca provides.
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