Scaling an engineering team from 12 to 40

The company had closed a funding round on a plan that required tripling its engineering team, and had managed four hires in eighteen months. Adverts were returning volume but not quality, three agencies were sending overlapping CVs, and the interview process ran to six stages, by which point the strongest candidates had accepted elsewhere.

We started with benchmarking rather than sourcing, and found the salary bands were roughly twelve percent behind the market for the seniority being asked for. With the bands corrected we embedded two recruiters into the business under their employer brand, cut the interview process from six stages to three, and worked the market directly rather than waiting on applications.

Twenty-eight engineers joined over the following nine months, with average time to hire falling from over ninety days to thirty-four. Twelve months on, retention across the cohort stands at 96%, and the internal talent function we built alongside the engagement now runs the majority of hiring without us.