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Three hires in 2020. All three are still there.
A fintech whose CTO was running hiring on top of his day job, after generalist agencies had sent him IT support people for senior engineering roles. Nineteen candidates in, nine interviewed, three hired, and five years later none of them has left.
3Hires, all three still in place
5 yearsRetention on every one
19 → 9 → 3Shared, interviewed, hiredTL;DR
- Who. Chaser, a London fintech whose platform automates accounts receivable and credit control, chasing invoices so finance teams do not have to.
- What they needed. A small engineering team built from nothing, in Node.js. No internal recruiter; the CTO was doing it between everything else.
- Why it was hard. They had already been burned. Generalist agencies had sent them candidates so far off the brief that the CTO had stopped believing recruitment agencies could help. And a London company paying European rates rather than London ones cannot search everywhere.
- What we did. We screened hard and shared little. Nineteen candidates reached them across three roles, and we ran enough interviews on our side to make sure that every one of those nineteen was worth the CTO's time.
- What happened. Three hires: two in Portugal, one in Ukraine. All three are still at Chaser five years later.
About Chaser
Chaser is a London-based fintech. Its platform automates the unglamorous and expensive part of getting paid: chasing invoices, tracking receivables and managing credit control, so that finance teams stop doing it by hand and companies get paid sooner.
Like a lot of companies its size, it had no talent function. Engineering hiring sat with the CTO, alongside everything else a CTO does at a company that small, which meant it was always the thing that got done last.
They came to us on a recommendation, and the first conversation was not a warm one. The CTO opened by saying he was not looking for help, because he had already worked with agencies and they had sent him candidates that were nowhere near the brief.
The brief
Build a small engineering team from zero. Three roles: one more frontend-leaning, two full-stack, all Node.js and all backend-heavy in practice. Fully remote against a London headquarters, permanent, with the candidates employed directly by Chaser rather than through us.
The 4 problems we had to solve
Problem #1: "The last agencies sent us IT support people for senior developer roles."
This is the actual reason the account nearly did not happen. Chaser had used generalist recruitment agencies, the kind that recruit for anything, and received candidates who were not remotely close to a senior engineering brief. The cost of that is not the wasted CVs, it is that the CTO stopped trusting the channel entirely.
What we did
We inverted the usual approach and shared as few candidates as possible. Instead of forwarding everything that half-matched, we ran more interviews on our own side and passed on only what we would defend. Nineteen candidates reached Chaser across three roles. Nine of them were interviewed. Three were hired. A conversion rate that high from shared to interviewed is what rebuilding trust looks like in practice.
Problem #2: "Our CTO is the recruitment team."
There was nobody whose job was hiring. Every screening call, every scheduling email and every rejection came out of the CTO's week, and every hour spent on a candidate who was never going to work was an hour taken from the product.
What we did
We took the whole process except the decision. Sourcing, screening, technical questions, coordination and candidate management sat with us, and the CTO's involvement started at the point where a real candidate was in front of him. That is why three roles could run in parallel without the engineering roadmap stopping.
Problem #3: "We are in London and we are not paying London rates."
The budget was set at European rather than London levels. In London it would not have bought a senior Node.js engineer, and searching all of Europe with it would have meant spending most of the search on people who were never going to accept.
What we did
We limited the search to the markets where that band is genuinely competitive rather than merely possible: Portugal, Spain, the Balkans and parts of Eastern Europe. The three hires came from Portugal and Ukraine. Restricting the geography up front is what made the budget work, and it is a decision that is much cheaper to make at intake than at offer.
Problem #4: "We want to employ them ourselves."
Chaser wanted a direct relationship with the people they hired, not a contractor sitting between them. They already used an employer of record in other countries and preferred to extend it to Portugal rather than take on staffing.
What we did
We ran it as permanent placement and stayed out of the employment relationship. They hired through the employer of record they already had, and our job ended at the offer. It meant more interviewing on our side and no recurring revenue on ours, and it is why the relationship is still alive five years later: they got exactly the arrangement they asked for.
How we actually ran it
- A written intake per role. Three roles, three briefs, taken from the CTO directly, because there was nobody else to take them from.
- Geography decided before sourcing started. The budget set the country list, not the other way round.
- Heavy screening, deliberately. More interviews on our side than the search strictly needed, because the client had already been burned by volume.
- Only defensible candidates shared. Nineteen people across three searches. Every one of them a candidate we would argue for.
- We stayed out of the employment. Permanent placement, hired through the employer of record they already used.
What Chaser ended up with
An engineering team of three, built from nothing, with a CTO who kept his week.
Every one of those three still in the company five years later.
Nine interviews for three hires, at a company that had previously been sent candidates it could not use at all.
A budget that worked, because the search was pointed at the markets where it works.
The direct employment relationship they wanted, with no supplier in the middle of it afterwards.
