Case study: EPAM Anywhere Talent — copy (EN)

PR research · India and Colombia · engineering recruitment

How to find out what developers in India and Colombia read: ask them

Lead: The client needed employer-brand presence in two markets Europe knows almost nothing about. Rather than guess from rankings, we messaged 40+ developers on LinkedIn and asked the ones who answered.

• 30 publications sourced and vetted: 14 in India, 16 in Colombia
• 14 approved by the client for outreach
• The list came from developers themselves, not from directories

The third project handed to us inside the EPAM Anywhere ecosystem, after anywhere.epam.com and aw.club.

Find the publications where it makes sense to talk to developers in India and Colombia about EPAM Anywhere.

The difficulty isn’t finding websites. It’s that rankings and directories show you what’s popular, not what your specific audience reads — particularly when that audience is mid and senior engineers rather than people entering the profession.

Which step of the framework applied here

Our WEDGE framework opens with the question of where the client can win, and answers it with a competence map.

Here the direction was already chosen — employer brand on two specific markets. So the project began at the Decode step: understand the person you want to hire, and derive everything else from that.

In ordinary promotion, Decode means the person who signs the contract. In recruitment it’s the person who accepts the offer. The logic is the same: what they already know, what worries them, what they need to see to take the next step, and where they read it.

That last question became the entire project.

We didn’t rely on a single method. Four ran in parallel.

1. Our own contact network

We sent requests through our own contacts and through the Indian contractors we already work with on guest posting. People working a market daily know it better than any ranking does.

2. Subject-matter communities

We posted in two relevant Facebook communities.

3. Direct search, verified against data

Google, SparkToro and Similarweb — so that finding a site came with an immediate look at its real audience and geography.

4. ⭐ We surveyed the target audience directly

The step that mattered most. We sent over 40 connection requests to developers in India and Colombia on LinkedIn and surveyed the ones who accepted.

So the list of publications came not from what search returns, but from what the people the client wants to hire actually named.

Every publication was assessed against the same set of parameters and logged in a shared sheet with the client’s comments.

We also vetted what the client proposed

The publications suggested by EPAM’s own colleagues in India and Colombia were analysed against the same parameters as our own finds: two for India, four for Colombia.

An agency that vets the client’s suggestions with the same method it uses for its own isn’t doing redundant work. It’s the only way to compare them honestly.

Then into outreach

Enquiry letters went to five Colombian and two Indian publications. In those conversations we asked not only about placement pricing but about reach and whether they ran broader PR programmes for businesses.

The most popular option turned out to be wrong

The client’s colleagues recommended freecodecamp. It’s a genuinely large resource, and India is its second market by geography.

We didn’t propose it. The reason was in the brief: the target audience was mid and senior, while freecodecamp’s content is aimed at juniors and career switchers.

For Colombia it fell away for a different reason — the country isn’t in the site’s top five geographies.

That’s the substance of this kind of work. Large traffic and a relevant audience are different things, and turning down the obvious option can matter more than finding one more.

Two markets with no ready-made data

India and Colombia aren’t markets where you can pick up an industry report and work from it. Which is exactly why the search had to run on four sources at once.

The most accurate source is the audience itself. Forty LinkedIn requests and a handful of conversations produced a list no ranking would have given us.

Vet the client’s suggestions with the same method as your own. Otherwise you aren’t comparing — you’re just agreeing.

A big resource isn’t automatically your audience. freecodecamp was ruled out here precisely because it serves juniors.

Ask a publication about reach, not only about rates. And about wider PR options — sometimes they exist and aren’t advertised.

This was the third EPAM Anywhere direction handed to us. First anywhere.epam.com, then the aw.club community, then Talent.

Trust inside one ecosystem expanded after each result.

Entering a market you don’t know?

When there’s no ready-made data, the fastest route is to ask the people you want to hire or sell to. We’ve done it.

Питання