For companies
Some hires change the company. Those are the ones we work on.
We embed with product, engineering and design teams, from a founding team's first product hire to a platform org inside a listed company, and we hire for them the way an in-house team would if it had the time.
The case
Why the volume model breaks on senior roles.
A contingency agency gets paid when someone starts. That single fact shapes everything downstream: the incentive is to submit fast and submit wide, so the profiles arrive fast and wide. Your hiring manager loses an afternoon reading people who were never close, while the two who are plausible are already sitting in other processes.
Nobody in that loop has read your roadmap or met your engineers. Nobody can tell you whether the person who looks perfect on paper will last eighteen months in a team that ships on Fridays and argues in public.
A senior hire who leaves inside a year costs you the search, the ramp, the months the seat sits empty, and the search again. Against that, the recruiting fee is a rounding error, and optimising for it is the wrong place to save money.
We take a different position: we work fewer roles, we work them longer, and we get paid whether or not we place quickly — the only structure that lets us say "none of these are right yet" without it costing us.
The models
Two ways in.
We join the team, not the vendor list.
Three to twelve months, fixed monthly fee, your hiring plan is our job.
What's included
- Market mapping for every open role, refreshed quarterly
- Sourcing and outreach, written per person rather than templated
- First-round screening and a written argument for every shortlisted candidate
- Interview loop design, scorecards and interviewer training
- Offer strategy, counter-offer handling, relocation and visa support
- Weekly reporting your leadership team can read without translation
- 30, 60 and 90-day check-ins on everyone who starts
When it fits
Eight or more hires a year, or an in-house team that is underwater, or a first senior hiring push where you have no talent function yet.
How it's priced
Fixed monthly, agreed up front, scaled to the size of the hiring plan rather than the number of hires. Budgetable, and no spike in the quarter you hire well.
One role, run properly.
Retained, fixed price agreed before the search opens, banded by seniority.
What's included
- The same market map, for the single role
- A shortlist short enough to read in one sitting, with a written case for each
- Interview support and offer strategy
- 90-day replacement guarantee
When it fits
One or two hires that genuinely matter, and no appetite for a retainer.
Side by side
Embedded vs search.
The process
What actually happens, week by week.
We learn the team before we learn the market.
We read the roadmap, sit in on standups, and interview the people the new hire will work with daily. We look at your last three hires into similar roles and ask what went right and what didn't.
You get: a written role brief and a calibrated bar, in language your team recognises.
We map who actually exists.
Who exists, where, at what level, at what cost, and who is realistically movable right now. Including the people who aren't looking, which is most of them.
You get: the market map, yours to keep whether or not you hire from it.
Weekly shortlists, each one argued.
Every candidate read properly before they reach you, with a written argument for why they're on the list and what the risk is. Loops designed with your team rather than handed to them.
You get: a shortlist of people who are genuinely in play, and honest reasons when it's shorter than you wanted.
Offer strategy before the offer goes out.
Not after it's rejected. Counter-offer handling, relocation, visas. Contact with the candidate through to day one, which is where a surprising number of accepted offers still fall over.
You get: a start date, and check-ins at 30, 60 and 90 days.
The tooling
It orders the list. It never rejects anyone.
We built our own matching engine. It scores real experience against the real requirements of a role: what someone owned, at what scale, whether that transfers.
It sorts a long list so a person can read the top of it properly, and it flags the profiles a keyword filter would have thrown away, which is where cross-industry hires tend to come from.
Every shortlist that reaches you was written by a person who read the whole profile and can defend it on a call.
Honesty
We turn work down.
Some of it is fit. High-volume operations hiring, contract staffing and anything priced on speed alone is a different business, and we'd do it badly.
Some of it is honesty. If your last four senior hires left inside a year, the problem is not sourcing, and taking your money to run another search would be taking your money.
We'll tell you which one it is on the first call.
Questions
The things people ask first.
How fast is the first shortlist?
It depends on the seniority of the role and how much of that market is actually movable, so we won't pretend there's one answer. You'll get a date on the first call, and we won't move it.
Do you work roles outside product, engineering and design?
Occasionally, for existing clients. It isn't what we're good at, and we'll say so before taking it.
What's the guarantee?
90-day replacement on every search placement. On embedded, the engagement is reviewed on a set cadence and either side can end it on notice agreed before it starts.
Can you hire in my market?
We work across Europe, MENA and Southeast Asia, and we've hired across borders for most of the last decade. Relocation and visa handling is part of the process, not an add-on.
Do you work with candidates directly?
Yes, through the talent network. We don't run a job board and we don't send unsolicited CVs anywhere.
What happens to candidate data?
It stays with us, it isn't sold or shared with anyone we aren't actively introducing them to, and anyone can ask us to delete it. Full detail on the privacy page.
Are you an agency or a consultancy?
An agency, structurally. The embedded model is borrowed from how consultancies work, because a fixed monthly fee is the only structure that lets us tell you a shortlist isn't ready yet.
Who actually does the work?
The same person you meet on the first call. There's no handoff to a junior team after signing.
Get in touch
Tell us what you're building.
We'll tell you on the first call whether we're the right people for it, before either side spends real time on it.