A SaaS scale-up needed to grow fast. Leadership knew the hires they needed, but hiring was ad-hoc, interviewers were few, and no real process existed. With a fixed budget, every decision mattered.
They didn’t need recruiters, they needed a trusted partner who worked as they would themselves designing, building and bootstrapping the hiring system, bringing existing staff along for the journey.
We anchored workshops around three hard questions:
- What do we need? A shopping list of roles, levels, costs, urgency.
- Where will they come from? Agencies, agreements, targeting.
- How will we choose? Interview framework, rigour, decisions, capacity.
Once agreed, we acted autonomously updating only at key decision points while iterating the plan as new market data arrived.
- Boots on the ground. We started hiring immediately: building pipelines, talking to candidates, interviewing ourselves. Senior hires landed early, boosting capacity and proving the model. AI note-taking cut admin while raising accountability.
- Framework. Alongside execution, we stood up the basics: job descriptions, interview loops, scripts, rubrics, and debriefs. Lightweight but predictable, designed to train others.
- Leave a working solution. We trained staff and new senior hires to become interviewers, coached evidence-based interviewing, and transitioned ownership to in-house recruiting so the system would persist.
- ~85% of roles hired or under offer.
- 400 candidates reviewed, >150 screened, 8+ perm hires made, 1 offer open.
- Contractors added for critical gaps (SWE, SRE, recruiting).
- A trained interviewer pool, leadership hires to run loops, and in-house recruiting capacity established.
- A working hiring engine that leaders could trust to keep scaling.
Gave reliability work the same visibility and priority as product features, ending the cycle of recurring incidents across 50+ product teams.
Orchestrated a zero-downtime big-bang Kafka migration across 40+ teams that even the cloud provider adopted as their playbook.