PathMaker Group is a specialized Identity and Access Management (IAM) consulting firm that provides a range of assessment, planning, implementation, and managed services. Focused on implementing identity technologies such as IAM, CIAM, and PAM, the firm also provides consulting services in areas such as identity governance. Founded in 2003, the firm is based in Texas.

Sailpoint Growing Pains in the IAM Gold Rush

In early 2020, PathMaker Group had a problem. An established IAM consultancy, PathMaker already had a proven track record of helping customers plan, launch, and maintain identity programs. The Group had its sights set on building a new practice from the ground up, based on leading IAM tool Sailpoint.

The timing was perfect. As the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic kicked in, suddenly PathMaker’s customers needed to support mass remote working. Many of these organizations were adopting a formal IAM solution for the first time, and needed help to plan, implement, and maintain their fledgling programs within very tight timescales.

As a proven IAM partner, PathMaker Group had great success in acquiring new customers. However, there was a problem: the Group had no shortage of potential customers, but their needs were extremely tough to service. Suddenly, IAM professionals were in enormous demand, so finding the specialist talent needed to implement and maintain solutions like Sailpoint became bitterly competitive.

PathMaker Group had aggressive expansion plans, but was struggling to keep up with its sales pipeline due to the global scarcity of IAM talent.

The gold rush for IAM talent created a series of challenges for PathMaker Group, including:

• Unavailability of strong IAM candidates on the open market (e.g., architects, engineers, PMs)
• Difficulty securing IAM talent on short notice and reliably resourcing in advance
• Lack of clarity on what it needed to offer to secure and retain IAM candidates

In short, PathMaker Group needed to scale its Sailpoint practice while protecting customer experience and service delivery in an extremely competitive and fast-moving market… all while ensuring its IAM talent wasn’t poached by equally ambitious competitors.

Building a World Class SailPoint Implementation Practice

In early 2020, PathMaker Group began working with Cloud International to source candidates for its Sailpoint practice. After meeting to discuss their plans and needs, our consultants began sourcing Sailpoint engineers, architects, and project managers to support PathMaker’s sales pipeline.

“We had a healthy sales pipeline for Sailpoint implementations, but we’d been held back by the lack of available candidates. Cloud International helped us source many more qualified candidates than we’d been able to find ourselves. They also protected our ability to serve our customers by driving candidates through the hiring process and getting offers extended quickly at reasonable rates.”— Keith Squires, CEO, PathMaker Group

Sourcing Skilled Candidates in a Seller’s Market

The success of a recruiter-client relationship hinges on candidate quality.

At the time of this engagement, IAM talent — including the Sailpoint architects, engineers, and project managers PathMaker Group needed — was in extremely high demand. Finding skilled candidates at various levels of experience was tough, and PathMaker had struggled to manage it in-house.

To overcome the lack of availability, our consultants had to find an alternative to the open market. As a result, almost all Sailpoint talent placed for PathMaker Group consisted of “passive” candidates — individuals already employed elsewhere, who were headhunted-to-order for specific requirements.

To achieve this, we deployed our team of specialized IAM recruiters; the largest of its kind, with 50+ consultants and decades of experience. Our team had pre-existing relationships with many experienced Sailpoint candidates, and were able to source and place many more due to its specialized knowledge of the space, active participation in the identity ecosystem (e.g., IDPRO membership), and our IAM database; the largest database of identity professionals worldwide.

Crafting Offers that Close and Retain Candidates

Success requires more than sourcing lots of candidates. Running a successful Sailpoint practice required balancing several factors, most notably, customer costs vs. the rates needed to secure and retain talent.

At that time the IAM market was highly competitive, as organizations around the world were forced to adopt remote working capabilities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Determining what rates to offer to make a role appealing and retain candidates was far from straightforward.

Our team leveraged their decades of experience in the IAM space to advise PathMaker Group on how to structure offers in a way that balanced their costs with the needs of individual candidates — for example, setting base and bonus rates, signing bonuses, etc. Our consultants cultivated strong relationships with their candidates, enabling PathMaker to secure Sailpoint talent at a cost that kept candidates happy while protecting its profit margins.

In some cases, our consultants had to negotiate candidates down on rates, as well as advising PathMaker Group when a candidate may be a flight risk. This gave PathMaker the opportunity to pass over certain candidates in favor of others — or, in some cases, to accept the risk while communicating regularly with the candidate to avoid unpleasant surprises.

Best of all, our consultants consistently achieved outstanding retention rates for the candidates they placed. This ensured PathMaker Group could deliver customer work and projects without disruption, and avoided the need for additional time-consuming and costly interview processes.

Optimizing the Interview Process for Speed and Efficiency

The candidate interview process can make or break a consultancy’s ability to deliver predictably and reliably for their clients. Delays and inefficiencies can lead to disrupted projects, wasted resources, and lost time for senior personnel. An efficient interview process requires seamless cooperation between recruitment consultants and the customer’s internal hiring team — especially when the customer is delivering a project-based service to customers of their own.

PathMaker Group ran a tight operation, providing prompt feedback on candidates and restricting interviews to a maximum of 2-3 rounds over a roughly 2-week timeframe. Our consultants took pride in understanding the specifics of each role, and identifying candidates that closely matched PathMaker’s needs. This resulted in consistently strong submission-interview and submission-offer rates throughout the engagement.

As the relationship between Cloud International and PathMaker Group evolved, our consultants were able to achieve close to a 2:1 ratio of submissions to offers — and due to our consultants’ support in crafting offers, very few candidates declined their offers or took counter offers.

Overall, the drive was to maximize efficiency in the recruitment process, helping PathMaker Group save a substantial amount of time and money that would otherwise have been wasted due to high-level personnel spending time in unnecessary interviews. Most importantly, the relationship ensured PathMaker Group was able to consistently deliver for its Sailpoint customers.

Supporting PathMaker Group Through to Acquisition

Over the course of two years, our team helped PathMaker Group build its Sailpoint practice from the ground up, and keep up with its aggressive sales pipeline. This required helping PathMaker scale its operations up and down to suit customer needs, and secure talent in advance for planned projects.

However, the ultimate success was realized when PathMaker Group was acquired by one of the industry’s largest IAM managed service providers (MSP), Simeio. The acquisition was described by Simeio as a “strategic move that complements Simeio’s successful organic strategy of expanding into new industries and talent pools and adding new capabilities around identity orchestration and automation”.

In its official announcement of the acquisition, Simeio specifically called out PathMaker Group’s expertise in SailPoint implementations—the same practice Cloud International partnered with PathMaker Group to build from the ground up.

“Without Cloud International’s help, it would have been extremely tough for us to build and grow our SailPoint practice at the rate we did. Ultimately, Cloud International was instrumental in our ability to deliver for our SailPoint clients, and that was definitely a factor in our acquisition.”— Keith Squires, CEO, PathMaker Group