Client: A leader in food and grocery delivery, aggressively expanding in Kazakhstan.
Task for Lavoro: Find two unique specialists for accounting document flow: one for the headquarters in Almaty and one for a new back office in Astana. We needed not just accountants, but “paperwork strategists”: people with accounting experience, yet without knowledge of 1C, willing to work exclusively with primary documents, on their personal laptops, and with no career prospects within the role. Essentially — find professionals who see value in monotonous but critically important work.
Why the classic search failed for 5 months:
A Paradoxical Profile. Required accounting experience, but rejected the accountant’s main tool — 1C. This ruled out career-oriented specialists.
A Dead-End Position. The deliberate lack of career growth within the role deterred 99% of active job seekers. The client also vetoed recent graduates, rightly fearing that monotony would quickly demotivate them.
Logistics as a Barrier. The requirement to have a personal laptop ruled out part of the audience. And the location of the Astana back office (essentially a warehouse space) became a factor that scared off candidates after interviews, leading to silent refusals and disappearances.
A Lone Ranger. The Astana position implied complete autonomy: the entire accounting team was in another city, with online-only communication. We needed a hyper-responsible, self-organized individual.
Our Move: Breaking Patterns and Expanding Horizons.
Understanding that the sought-after ideal practically didn’t exist in nature, we stopped stubbornly beating our heads against a wall. Instead, we began strategically re-evaluating the candidate profile together with the client.
We transformed the search into research into adjacent niches:
The HoReCa Sector. We looked for office managers or administrators drowning in primary documents for restaurants and cafes.
“Paperwork” Professions. We considered archivists, records managers, data entry specialists — those whose strength lies in perseverance and attention to paperwork.
Networking and Career Centers. We activated word-of-mouth in professional circles to reach those seeking stable, low-stress routine work.
We conducted interviews jointly with the client to calibrate expectations in real-time and find compromises between the “theoretically ideal” and the “practically workable” candidate.
The Result That Exceeded Expectations:
Almaty: A Diamond Found That Shone. We found a candidate with modest experience but with a spark in his eyes and a desire for stable work. His motivation for high-quality task execution was so high that within 3 months, despite the initial lack of a career path, the client himself promoted him, recognizing his engagement and responsibility.
Astana: Mission Accomplished After 5 Months. After a series of collapsed offers, we found our lone ranger. The candidate wasn’t perfect on paper (had a career break), but possessed the key traits — mature responsibility, self-discipline, and full acceptance of the working conditions. He became the very autonomous paperwork strategist who has been successfully holding the fort for several months.
Key Takeaways for Our Business:
A Rigid Profile is a Signal to Reset the Search. If the perfect candidate isn’t found for months, it means they don’t exist on the market. Professionalism lies in the ability to find a viable and effective alternative.
Sometimes the Best Motivation is Stability, Not Growth. Shifting the focus from career ambitions to the values of stability and quality of life opens a pool of loyal and reliable specialists.
Direct Communication with the Client is the Key to Compromise. Joint interviews and honest dialogue about each candidate help quickly adapt requirements to market realities and make balanced decisions.
A Candidate’s Success is the Best KPI. The story of the Almaty specialist’s promotion proved that correctly identified motivation and potential can turn even a “dead-end” position into a springboard for growth within the company.
