Eleven hires for a utility-scale solar and storage developer, from a UK talent pool of fewer than 500 people

At a glance

The brief

The client had a development pipeline of 1.2GW across solar and co-located battery storage, secured land, and investor pressure to move projects through grid connection and into construction. What they did not have was the technical team to do it.

The bottleneck was specific. Grid connection applications, and the negotiation with distribution network operators and the transmission owner that follows them, require people who have done it before. There is no adjacent skill set that translates cleanly and no training route that produces one in under three years.

Why this market is genuinely different

We are wary of any recruiter who claims a market is uniquely difficult, because it is usually a preamble to an excuse. In this case the constraint is arithmetic.

The population of UK professionals who have personally taken a utility-scale project through a grid connection offer, negotiated a modification application, and managed the DNO or TO relationship through to energisation is small. Our own mapping puts it below 500, and the number who are both competent and mobile in any given quarter is a fraction of that.

Everyone in that population is employed. Most are approached weekly. Salary inflation in the segment has run well ahead of the wider engineering market, which means candidates are frequently well paid where they are and counteroffered aggressively when they resign.

Advertising into that market does not work. It is not a volume problem that a bigger job board spend solves.

What we did differently

We mapped the entire population, then mapped the routes into it.

We built and maintain a named map of the UK grid connections community, structured by employer type: independent power producers, the major utilities, the distribution network operators themselves, National Grid, tier one engineering consultancies, and the developer side of the OEM community.

Then we did the part that most energy recruitment misses. We mapped the adjacent populations from which a grid connections engineer can realistically be built inside six months: DNO connections planning teams, consultancy engineers who have delivered connection studies without owning the client relationship, and HV design engineers with substation experience who understand the electrical engineering but have not carried the commercial negotiation.

Four of the eleven hires came from those adjacent groups. That required the client to accept a shaped role and a defined ramp period rather than a perfect CV. We put that argument to them in week two, with the population arithmetic attached, and they took it. Without that decision the search does not complete.

Of the remaining seven, five came from direct competitors: two other independent power producers and one battery storage developer.

We ran a phased plan rather than eleven simultaneous searches.

Attempting eleven roles at once in a pool of 500 means approaching the same people for multiple positions and burning the market inside a quarter. We sequenced it: head of grid first, because that hire influences every subsequent one, then the grid connections engineers, then HV design, with development and asset management running in parallel on a separate candidate population.

The head of grid was involved in every technical assessment from month three onward. Three of the later hires were people he knew professionally and we had already mapped, and the combination of our approach and his credibility closed them.

We embedded with the internal team.

The client had one internal talent partner covering the whole business. We worked to her process, in her ATS, and she chaired the weekly pipeline call. We produced the market intelligence, including a salary benchmarking pack for the grid and HV roles that she took to the board to get the bands corrected before the first offer went out.

That last point mattered. Two of the original bands were roughly 15% below market. Going out at the original numbers would have cost the search three months and two candidates.

The one that nearly got away

The head of grid took fourteen months from first contact to start date.

We identified him in the first fortnight of the mapping exercise. He was in a senior role at a competitor, mid-way through energising two projects he had personally taken through connection, and had no intention of leaving before they were live. He told us so directly, and we believed him, because a candidate who abandons projects at that stage is telling you something about how he will behave later.

We kept in contact for a year. Quarterly conversations, no pressure, honest updates on the client's pipeline and funding position, and one introduction to the CEO with no offer attached and no expectation of one.

He came back to us in month thirteen, two weeks after his second project energised, and started six weeks later. He then brought three further hires with him through the process.

Nobody who works on a transactional model stays with a candidate for fourteen months. That is the entire point.

The results

• 11 of 11 roles delivered across 12 months
• 5 hires from direct competitor developers and IPPs
• 4 hires developed from adjacent talent pools into grid-facing roles, all still performing at 24 months
• Salary bands corrected on two role families before offer stage, based on our benchmarking
• Grid connection application throughput increased from 4 to 11 applications per year
• 340MW moved from early development to connection offer inside the engagement period
• 10 of 11 hires still in seat at 24 months

In the client's words

"We were told by three other firms that the people we needed did not exist. Synerjy came back with a list, told us honestly which ones we would never get and which four roles we would have to build rather than buy, and then delivered against it."

Chief Development Officer, utility-scale solar and storage IPP