Embedded talent partner
We build your product, tech and design team from the inside.
Three to twelve months inside your team, on a fixed monthly fee. We learn the product, the people and the bar before a single search opens, then run hiring like it's ours.
The problem
Hiring got faster. It also got thinner.
Most agencies run on volume. A spec goes in, a stack of CVs comes back, and nobody who touched that stack has read your roadmap or met the team the hire is going to sit in.
AI made the stack bigger. Auto-sourcing, auto-screening and generated outreach mean a single role now collects hundreds of applicants in days, and almost none of them have been read by a person. On the other side, candidates generate their applications the same way. Both ends of the process are now writing to a machine.
That's fine for roles where anyone competent will do. It falls apart on the hires that decide whether your product ships, because those turn on judgment and fit with one specific team, and neither shows up in a keyword match.
We work the other way round. We sit inside the team long enough to know what good looks like there, then go and find it.
The bar
Three things a keyword match will never tell you.
Product judgment
What did this person actually own, at what scale, and what did they decide when it was genuinely unclear. We ask for the decision, not the job title.
How they work with other people
Craft is the easy part to check. This is the part that decides whether they last, so we ask the people they shipped with.
Whether they'd thrive in your team specifically
Culture fit is a match between how someone does their best work and how your team actually operates. Someone excellent with a platform team under them can drown in a team of six. We know how yours operates because we've been sitting in it.
How we work
Two ways to work together.
Embedded
We join your team for three to twelve months on a fixed monthly fee. Your hiring plan becomes our job. We run the whole function: market mapping, sourcing, screening, interview design, offer strategy, and the follow-through to start date.
Best when you're hiring eight or more people a year, or your in-house team is underwater.
Fixed monthly cost, so you can budget it. No per-hire spike when you have a good quarter.
Search
One role at a time, retained, fixed price agreed before the search opens. Banded by seniority, so a principal and an analyst aren't priced the same.
Best when you have one or two hires that matter and no appetite for a retainer.
90-day replacement guarantee on every placement.
The process
How it works.
Two weeks inside your team before any search opens.
We read the roadmap, sit in on standups, and talk to the people the new hire will work with every day. You get back a written brief you'll recognise as your own team.
We map the market for each role.
Who's out there, where they are, what they cost, and who is realistically movable. The map is yours whether or not you hire from it.
Weekly shortlists.
Every candidate read for depth and fit before they reach you, with a written argument for why they're on the list. Interview loops designed with your team rather than handed to them.
Offer strategy, and contact through to day one.
Counter-offer handling, relocation and visa where it applies. Then a check-in at 30, 60 and 90 days.
Fit
Who this is for.
- Founders and product leaders hiring product, engineering and design
- Companies at any stage where the hire still changes the company, from a founding team's first product hire to a platform org inside a listed one
- Teams hiring across borders, or hiring into MENA and Southeast Asia from anywhere
- High-volume operations roles
- Contract and temp staffing
- Anything where speed matters more than the person
We'd be the wrong choice for those and we'll say so on the call.
The tooling
The engine reads. People decide.
We built our own matching engine. It scores real experience against the real requirements of a role: what someone owned, at what scale, and whether that transfers here. Keyword matching gets you a long list. This gets you a short one.
It runs on every search we take, which means it's tested daily rather than demoed quarterly.
The judgment stays human. The engine is the reason we can read four hundred profiles properly instead of forty.
Not looking, but curious.
Most of the people we place weren't applying to anything. If you're senior in product, engineering or design and you'd move for the right thing, tell us what that is. We'll come to you when it exists.
Join the networkGet 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.