Semiconductor hires are named-target searches, not job ads
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 map the Australian senior semiconductor market carefully. The pool of practising senior IC designers - RF and mixed-signal, analog, digital design and verification - is somewhere between seventy-five and ninety people at any point in time. Adjacent groups - silicon validation, physical design, DFT - add another few dozen. The concentrated core, the group of people who could realistically move into a senior role at a fabless firm in the next six months, is smaller again. It fits in one very long WhatsApp group.
If you are trying to hire senior IC talent by advertising, you are working the wrong end of the process.
What the network looks like
Almost every senior IC designer in Sydney has worked at one of a small set of firms - Broadcom, Qualcomm, Apple, ST, sometimes NXP - either directly or by extension through mentors and manager chains. Most have then joined one of the current Australian fabless firms: Morse Micro, Silicon Quantum Computing, one of the RFIC startups that came out of UNSW’s electrical-engineering pipeline. The community is dense enough that when a person quietly leaves one company, several senior engineers at other companies know within a fortnight. The Sydney community is more socially interconnected than the London community and much smaller than the Bay Area equivalent.
A search into this pool is not a search. It is a set of named conversations, run over a compressed timeframe, in the right sequence.
What a real semiconductor search looks like
A real search into this market involves four things in order.
A candidate map before we begin. Before we take a brief we know who the twenty realistic candidates are. Not “who might apply”. Who they specifically are - which firm, which specialism, when they last moved, what their public and private track record looks like, whether there is a mutual contact who can broker a warm introduction. We already have this map. So do most of our competitors in this specific market. The brief is fit to the map, not the other way around.
A conversation sequence rather than an advertisement. We approach the top of the shortlist first. We do this because the top of the shortlist is small and the conversations are consequential - if the top three candidates hear about the role from us, from a colleague at the client firm and from a third recruiter in a week, the role starts to look like a low-conviction search. That kills interest. The sequencing matters.
Compensation transparency early. In this market, everyone knows what everyone else earns. Candidates walk into first conversations already knowing what the client is likely paying because they have worked with someone who worked at the client. A brief that quotes soft language on comp - “market competitive” - gets discounted. A brief that quotes a real band the client is prepared to move on gets serious engagement. We push clients to be specific.
A serious answer to why the candidate should move. The candidates worth hiring are almost never underpaid or unhappy. They are usually reasonably paid, doing interesting work, and being courted by three international firms with US relocation packages every year. Why they would move to another Sydney firm is a question that has to be answered with substance - the technology, the tape-out roadmap, the founding team, the equity structure at the current stage. If the answer is “similar work, similar money”, they will not move.
What we push clients away from
We consistently push clients away from three moves.
The first is a public job ad. It does two things poorly. It signals to the candidate community that the internal network has come up empty. And it produces a pipeline of applicants who are systematically weaker than the passive candidates we can reach. Both effects compound.
The second is a “trial” retained search that skips the mapping stage. Skipping mapping saves two weeks and destroys the search. In a candidate pool this small, you cannot recover from a lost first-conversation with the top candidate.
The third is contingency search. The economics do not work for either party in a pool this thin.
Every senior IC search we have run in Sydney across the last five years has closed inside sixteen weeks. Every one of them was named-target from day one.