FINRA needed a steady pipeline of AWS-skilled engineers to support one of the largest cloud migrations in the securities industry, but qualified candidates were scarce and hard to vet. ASCENDING built a specialized, AWS-informed recruiting process that delivered a 60% higher candidate success rate than other staffing firms and grew into an ongoing, long-term staffing partnership.
Background
Founded in 2007, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Inc. (FINRA) is a private corporation that acts as a self-regulatory organization, and the successor to the National Association of Securities Dealers, Inc. and the member regulation, enforcement, and arbitration operations of the New York Stock Exchange. FINRA is one of the largest independent securities regulators in the United States, established to monitor and regulate financial trading practices nationwide.
To keep pace with rapidly changing market dynamics, FINRA moved about 75 percent of its operations to AWS, using the platform to capture, analyze, and store a daily influx of 75 billion records and give its analysts interactive tools to query multi-petabyte datasets. That shift created sustained, year-round demand for Cloud Engineers, Data Engineers, and Software Engineers with hands-on AWS product experience.
The Challenge
FINRA's move to AWS created a large, ongoing hiring need at exactly the moment when AWS-skilled engineering talent was already in short supply.
- The supply of engineers with real AWS product experience was scarce industry-wide, well before accounting for FINRA's specific requirements.
- The nature of FINRA's business — regulating securities trading at massive scale — narrowed the pool of candidates even further, since not every AWS engineer could meet its domain and compliance expectations.
- FINRA needed AWS-equipped engineers continuously, not as a one-time hiring push, requiring a staffing process built to run all year round.
- Generic staffing approaches were producing candidates who looked qualified on paper but didn't hold up under FINRA's actual technical bar.
Why ASCENDING
ASCENDING is an AWS Select Consulting Partner with an AWS Lambda competency and Public Sector Partner designation, giving it the AWS product depth needed to evaluate candidates the way FINRA's own engineering teams would. Rather than treating this as a generic staffing engagement, ASCENDING leaned on that AWS background to understand exactly which tools FINRA's best performers used and to what extent, which shaped every part of the recruiting process that followed.
The Solution
ASCENDING started by studying FINRA's existing team, then built a recruiting process specifically calibrated to FINRA's AWS technical bar.
- ASCENDING requested resumes and profiles from FINRA's best-performing engineers and interviewed the team to identify the key tools they relied on and how deeply each one was used.
- Using that insight, ASCENDING formalized accurate, on-target job descriptions designed to attract applicants who were a genuine fit rather than a broad, generic pool.
- The team built key metrics to evaluate candidates against FINRA's actual requirements, then conducted an additional hands-on technical interview before submitting any candidate to FINRA.
- Over time, ASCENDING began training promising engineers to customize their skills to FINRA's specific needs, turning strong-but-not-quite-ready candidates into qualified placements.
The Outcome
ASCENDING's AWS-informed recruiting process gave FINRA a reliable source of qualified engineers and turned a single staffing engagement into a long-term, expanding partnership.
- Delivered a 60% higher candidate success rate compared with candidates submitted by other staffing companies.
- Placed 6 engineers with FINRA within a 5-month span.
- Earned excellent performance reviews for placed engineers and secured a contract extension with no issues.
- Established a long-term staffing relationship that both ASCENDING and FINRA see continuing to expand.
Technology Used"ASCENDING team members are able to demonstrate exceptional software development, data ETL, testing, support experience on the AWS cloud. They are always responsive to any incident and issue, and able to quickly find a solution in real time. We are extremely pleased and satisfied with our partnership with ASCENDING LLC, and see this partnership only expanding in the future." — FINRA
