What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about Turkey? For some it’s the soulful architecture, for others it’s the food, local delicacies; Cappadocia also features a place on most people’s bucket list. Tech offshoring? Not so much. 

I previously co-founded and ran a tech start-up with my Turkish friend many eons ago. Having spent 12 months in Istanbul, I was deeply embedded in the start-up scene there which gave me great exposure to the hiring landscape beyond mainstream Europe. 

Fast forward to the year 2018 at Bumper, as we actively started growing the business, I fondly looked back on my days in Turkey and decided to see if the landscape was still viable for attracting and recruiting talent. We also actively researched other countries in Europe and finally settled on a trial run with 2 developers which fledged into well-developed strategy of scouting talent in Turkey for the following reasons: 

1. According to the Global Innovation Index, Turkey has made immense gains to become a leading innovation economy. It has seen the most concentration of Teknoparks than any other country with Ankara and Istanbul both listed in top 100 science and technology clusters. 
2. Turkish start up eco system has greatly flourished in the last couple of years, with various incubators, accelerators and co working spaces which has resulted in significant exits and many unicorns  
3. Some of the largest companies in the world such as Microsoft, Atlassian, KPMG are heavily hiring in the Turkish tech market 
4. The time zone works extremely well for our UK and Europe operations where we receive a great deal of overlap in core working hours 
5. Turkey has great universities and a young tech savvy population that is rapidly developing as an emerging talent pool hub in Europe 

We started our journey in the summer of 2018 with 2 developers in Ankara to a team of 12 developers today working across our suite of product integrations and core platform as we expand into more European markets. We continue to hire and build our team in Ankara. 

To start your next adventure, visit the Bumper careers page. 

About the author

Pasha Jam, our CTO, joined Bumper in 2015. With over a decade of experience working with start-ups, Pasha excels in creation and execution of technical vision and strategy to propel businesses towards commercial success. 

Now celebrating 7 years with the company, Pasha led Bumper’s tech team from two hires working remotely in Turkey to a full team of developers based in our Ankara tech centre.