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.
There are four questions that separate a real Sales Director candidate from an impressive one. If your interview process does not answer them, you will find out at end of quarter three, when the pipeline has not materialised.
It is not just a six-month wait. It changes the shape of the work you can do for the next several years - and the ease with which you can leave. Understand what you are signing up for before you sign.
The temptation is always to widen the pool by sponsoring a promising uncleared candidate. Sometimes that is the right call. Often it is not. The economics turn on three variables most hiring managers do not calculate.
Silicon designers routinely tell us their CV "is out there" and nothing happens. The problem is usually not that they are being ignored. It is that the CV is not giving the recruiter the signal they need to justify the call internally.
The realistic Australian pool of senior IC designers is around eighty-five people. Everyone in it knows most of the others. A job ad in this market is an admission that the network came up empty.
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.
Five signals that separate the engineers who succeed in advanced-technology environments from those who quietly leave inside eighteen months.
The job ad you replied to was probably placed by a Head of Engineering who owes their board a hire in a fortnight and has already exhausted their network. That is not the job you want.
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.
There is a hire we see medtech founders make, then unmake. It is the first Head of Engineering at a Series A / B firm building a Class II or III device. The person hired is impressive on paper. They leave, or are asked to leave, inside eighteen months.
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.
There is a specific class of engineer we are placing more often than we were two years ago. They came from grid infrastructure, they moved into cleared work, and they are one of the most valuable and hardest-to-find hybrid profiles in the current market.
Everyone talks about defence, semiconductors and quantum. Meanwhile the Australian civilian aerospace sector has been running a very serious senior hiring cycle for eighteen months. It is one of the tightest specialist markets we cover.
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 debate usually gets framed as "cost vs quality". That is the wrong frame. The real question is which model produces the right economic outcome for the specific hire you are running. For most senior specialist searches the answer is not close.
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.
Every scaleup we work with is trying to hire the same person: a senior IC who wants to move into management and knows how. There are fewer of them than the market thinks.
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.
The published numbers get quoted a lot. The actual mechanics of a first-year package at Optiver or IMC Sydney are more nuanced - and understanding the mechanics matters if you are a candidate choosing between them.
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.
Three structural changes have converged this year. Understanding them changes both how clients should be running their cleared cyber searches and how candidates should be thinking about their next move.
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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