Five years of hiring that flexed with the business, including down to zero

Hiring at a company this size is lumpy and unpredictable. A retained agency costs the same in a quiet quarter as a busy one. A contingency agency is cheap when nothing is happening but has no reason to learn the product, the team or the market, so every new role starts from zero again. Neither model matches how the business actually behaves.

What we did

We made the cost follow the work. At the end of each month we report the percentage of time actually worked, split by role, and that is the invoice. In a month where the split was eighty per cent product designer and twenty per cent data engineer, that is what gets billed. In a month with no open roles, nothing gets billed at all. We keep the weekly call running through the quiet periods anyway, at no cost, because the whole point is that nobody has to be re-briefed when the next role opens.

Across five years the searches have been full-stack and frontend engineers, data engineers, data UI engineers, product designers, product owners, platform engineers, manual QA, automation QA in both Selenium and Playwright, software engineers and development leads. Ten distinct markets. A specialist agency per role type would mean ten relationships, ten briefings and ten different standards of screening.

What we did

One partner, and the scope flexes rather than the supplier. Each new role type gets its own intake document and its own written screening criteria before anyone is contacted, so a QA automation search is run as carefully as a data engineering one. Twenty intake documents on file. The cost of learning a new market is ours, not theirs, and it is paid once rather than every time the mix changes.

Being bought changes the hiring picture completely. New parent company, new products, new engineering standards, new stakeholders above the person you have been working with, and a new set of roles that did not exist before. This is normally the moment a supplier relationship ends, because the reasons it was set up no longer apply.

What we did

We carried straight through it. The searches widened from one.network’s original stack to Causeway’s: C# and .NET alongside Java, junior intakes of five at a time, development leads, a senior engineering lead, an AI engineer. Because the recruiter was already inside the business rather than pitching to it, the acquisition did not cost anyone a re-briefing, and the engagement never paused. Five years and two company identities later, it is still the same arrangement.

Two questions came up that block hiring completely and that no job advert answers. Is our existing engineering team paid correctly for Lisbon? And should this next role be opened in Portugal or in the UK? A supplier scoped strictly to filling roles has to say that is not what we do.

What we did

We built them a compensation model and answered it with data. It takes a US benchmark for the role, applies a country factor covering 169 markets, an experience factor and a contract-type factor, and returns a tenth-percentile, median and top-decile salary for that role in that city. We ran their entire existing engineering team through it, role by role, alongside proposed increases. Separately, when they were choosing between the UK and Lisbon, we sent candidate volumes for each location and the searches behind those numbers, so the decision was made on market size rather than instinct. None of that is recruitment, and all of it is why they still call us.

A remote role can be advertised to everyone. A hybrid role that needs someone in the Lisbon office once or twice a week cannot, and posting it broadly mostly generates applications that will fail on the office requirement. Running both the same way means doing one of them badly.

What we did

The method flexes with the role. Hybrid roles are treated as targeted searches: they go on our own site and not on LinkedIn, because a public post on a hybrid role attracts the wrong people and burns the employer brand. Remote roles are the ones we advertise publicly. Either way we source against written screening criteria agreed up front, with explicit no-go conditions, so the office requirement is settled at first contact rather than at offer. And when a search is genuinely hard, we send the evidence: how many people were contacted, how many replied, and how many declined on salary, on the hybrid requirement, or on availability.