What we are seeing in the markets we work in. Short, opinionated and written for the leaders doing the actual hiring - not the broader recruitment-industry audience.
We read several hundred CVs a week. Three signals separate the ones we read in full from the ones we close inside ten seconds. None of them are what most candidates think they are.
Most candidates spend three weeks preparing for the questions a firm will ask them. The strongest candidates spend the same time on the questions they will ask the firm. Here are the ones that matter.
Quant trading firms still hire engineers using a process designed for an era when the bottleneck was finding people. The bottleneck has changed. The process has not.
The same equity offer is worth radically different things at different company stages. Most candidates evaluate the headline number and miss the four variables that actually determine what their grant will be worth.
Retained search has become shorthand for C-suite. It should be shorthand for any role where the wrong hire costs more than the right one's fee - which is most of them.
The Head of Engineering at a regulated digital bank is not the Head of Engineering at a consumer SaaS firm. Briefing it as if it is, is how you end up hiring the third one in eighteen months.
The build-out is happening in places the engineering talent does not currently live. Most firms are pretending this is a recruitment problem. It is not - it is a relocation problem dressed up as one.
Most counter-offers are not retention strategies. They are exit interviews paid in advance. We have seen too many to recommend accepting one.
Citizenship and clearance are not nice-to-haves on a defence-tech brief. They are the variable that determines whether the role is fillable in three months, twelve months, or never. The firms that win in this market treat clearance as a capital decision.
Most firms recruit governance, risk and compliance talent the same way they recruit operations talent. The two markets look nothing alike.
The hires that made sense in the analytics-everywhere era make less sense now. The structural mistake is treating the team you have as the team you would build today.
Candidates spend, on average, twelve to twenty hours on a single senior interview process. A surprising fraction of that time is invested in processes that were never going to result in an offer. The signals are visible early - if you know to look.
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