Got Questions?

Like many businesses we work with a variety of people, but the most common relationships for us are with tech startup and scaleup founders.

That could be anything from fintech to femtech, with an increasingly large part of our clients in impact sectors like climatetech and healthtech, plus a considerable amount in AI & deeptech.

We commonly work with founders with 5-50 employees, who are moving from a founding team to hiring at scale. They value the people we find for them, but also the support and advice we can give them on their talent strategy to help them hire better in the longer term.

For a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s out of frustration from working with transactional recruiters, who are looking to send CVs, make a placement, and move on to the next. Some founders choose partnerships because they value the support on talent strategy, for example helping with org chart design and reward strategy. Others like it because of our embedded talent partner model, where we engage with candidates as one of your team not simply a service provider.

We’ve talked internally about a shift in how we view our relationships, from short term transactions to long term partnerships. Moving from a Tinder-style approach where you move quickly on, to a longer-term Tiffany-style engagement!

Increasingly the answer is no, but it’s still part of our business. We have seen the brilliantly different results from our partnerships model than the traditional no-win no-fee contingency, so feel this is the future.

But we know it’s a model that isn’t as common and you might want to take some smaller steps towards it. The core principle for us is one commitment from both sides, so if you believe that’s important then we can chat about different models.

We invest significant resources into helping you get ready to hire and putting effort into reaching the whole of the market. In order to do this well we need commitment from both sides.

There’s a lot of scope to what we can do for you apart from simply sending CVs, and we’ll talk to you about what you want as part of our engagement and onboarding process. Some clients lean on us for job description design, others for salary benchmarking, as well as building a microsite to engage candidates across all your roles. Lots of clients benefit from all these things and more!

Because we’re using your brand to showcase your roles there’s a good chance this happens. We want every candidate to be treated fairly, so would recommend filtering them through us so that we can shortlist them.

When we are engaged on a retained basis (our Base_Down model), we have two elements to our fees; a launch fee and a success fee. 

Our launch fee comes at the start of a campaign. It allows us to invest upfront in helping you get ready to hire, and means we can put the resources into engaging with the whole of the market to find you the best talent. 

Our success fee comes when the role is filled.

When the role is filled - whether our candidate, direct applications, referrals or internal moves.

This only applies to roles we're engaged on. 

But there's two reasons for this. Firstly, co-branding means you’ll be more likely get candidates applying directly as a result of our efforts.

Secondly, by engaging us in partnership we are helping you make the best hire using a variety of channels, not just giving you options from our database. This means you can reach the whole of the market and give everyone a fair chance.

Yes, you’ve invested a lot of money and effort in your brand so why hide it! It’s also a massive boost to help engage and excite candidates. We see 3-5x more engagement when we use your company name, rather than hide behind anonymous adverts.

Across a variety of channels. We will advertise on popular sites, like LinkedIn and Indeed, as well as our website. If you have particular sectors or communities you’re looking to reach then we can explore more focused channels, like cyber or women in tech.

We will also advertise the roles on your channels, including your LinkedIn page, so that we can reach people who already have an affinity with your brand.

Yes, as it helps transparency and diversity. We will agree ranges and flexibility with you before you post, and make sure that we’ve taken account of any internal sensitivities

We think recruitment works best when both sides are committed, so our partnership models are designed so that you get the most from working with us exclusively on specific roles.

We don’t prohibit you from working with other recruiters in other areas, and will always be realistic about what roles we feel confident hiring for you. So if you have roles that you want to consider other recruiters for let us know.

Thankfully the investment we make up front and our thorough qualification means this doesn’t happen too often. But we know that you can’t make perfect predictions when it comes to hiring, so if your new hire doesn’t work out then we will replace them for free.

Sometimes it’s days, sometimes it’s months. We design our process to find you the right person even if that takes a little longer, but also know there’s often an urgency to bringing new hires in. The time to fill a role will vary depending on factors like seniority, skills, and competing demand, but on average we fill roles in 4-8 weeks.

The launch fee, or initial retainer, is a non-refundable fee. It allows us to invest in getting you ready to hire and engaging with the whole of the market, and that takes us considerable resource.

We know some people get nervous about investing some money upfront for recruitment with no guarantee of results, so we can create service level agreements that give you assurance about the effort we will put in. We’d also encourage you to talk to our other clients so you can be reassured that our partnership models will give you the results you need.

It's unlikely, but we understand it's a concern. 

We will have weekly calls with you to give you feedback on our progress and insight into how your requirements match the market. Most of the time this means that you can think through different options and still make the hire you need. If we get to a point where it doesn’t look like we will be successful on a role, we’ll give you the option to engage with other recruiters and even recommend some if we can!

It's unlikely, particularly if we’ve spent time with you before going to market so that you are clear on what you need and how that matches into what’s available.

So far this year we’ve successfully filled 97% of our partnership roles. We’ll talk to you about our track record before you commit, and if we don’t feel confident hiring for a particular role we'll be honest with you. 

If we aren't having much success, we'll make reccomendations and iterate until we achieve the desired outcome.