Nine senior engineering hires in 19 weeks, after two agencies had spent nine months delivering three

At a glance

The brief

The client had closed a Series B on the promise of shipping a new real-time settlement product inside twelve months. The engineering roadmap required a near doubling of the backend team. The CTO had a clear technical bar: production Go at scale, Kubernetes in anger rather than on a certificate, and prior exposure to regulated payments or similarly unforgiving latency and correctness requirements.

The internal talent team was two people covering the entire company, including a commercial and operations hiring plan of its own. They were not short of applications. They were short of the right ones.

Why it had stalled

We ran a diagnostic before agreeing terms, because taking a brief that has already failed twice without understanding why is how you become the third agency to fail.

Three things were happening.

First, the incumbent agencies were working the active market. Every candidate submitted had a live CV, was in three other processes, and was being used as leverage on a counteroffer. The engineers who actually matched the bar were employed, well paid, and not looking.

Second, the technical screening was being done at the wrong point. Candidates were reaching a two hour system design session before anyone had established whether their Go was production-grade or a side project. That burned roughly 40 hours of senior engineering time a month and made the hiring managers reluctant to interview at all.

Third, and most damaging, the internal talent team had been cut out. Agencies were going direct to the CTO. There was no single view of pipeline, two candidates were approached by two different suppliers in the same week, and the internal team had lost confidence in the numbers they were reporting to the board.

What we did differently

We mapped the competition by name, then went and got their engineers.

We built a map of fourteen engineering organisations that we knew ran comparable stacks at comparable scale: direct payments competitors, two card issuing platforms, a clearing house, and three infrastructure businesses whose engineers we knew were being squeezed by post-acquisition change. That produced a named universe of 340 engineers, of whom 112 met the technical bar on evidence rather than assertion.

None of them were on a job board. All of them were approached directly, individually, with a reason to take the call that was specific to their current situation rather than a generic pitch about an exciting opportunity.

Of the nine engineers ultimately hired, six came from businesses the client would name as direct or adjacent competitors. Two came from a payments business twelve weeks into a difficult integration, where we had identified that the platform team was being consolidated into the acquirer's stack. That is not luck. That is knowing the market well enough to be there at the right moment.

We worked inside their team, not around it.

We asked for a seat in the internal talent team's weekly pipeline meeting and a login to their ATS. Everything we sourced went into their system, under their process, visible to them before it was visible to the hiring manager. The internal lead owned the candidate experience and the board reporting. We owned the sourcing engine.

That decision removed the duplication problem inside a fortnight and, more importantly, meant that when the client eventually took the remaining requirements in-house, they inherited a mapped market rather than a dependency on us. We are comfortable with that. A talent function that gets stronger is a client that comes back with the next headcount plan.

We restructured the assessment before we sent a single CV.

We proposed a 45 minute technical screen run by a Synerjy technical consultant against a scorecard agreed with the CTO, covering concurrency patterns, failure handling, and one deliberately underspecified problem to test how the candidate handled ambiguity. Only candidates who cleared it reached the hiring team.

Senior engineering interview hours dropped from roughly 40 a month to 14. Interview to offer ratio moved from 7:1 to 2.4:1.

The one that nearly got away

The engineering manager hire took four months and eleven separate points of contact.

The candidate we wanted was a lead at a competitor, three months from a vesting cliff, with a partner mid-way through a house purchase. She said no in month one. She said no again in month two.

We did not close the file. We kept a light, honest cadence: a note when the client shipped something relevant, an introduction to the CTO with no agenda attached, a straight answer when she asked what the equity was actually worth. In month four, her employer restructured her team and removed two of her reports. We had a conversation booked within 48 hours because we had never stopped talking to her.

She accepted, then received a counteroffer at a 22% premium. We had prepared the client for exactly that scenario six weeks earlier, so the response was immediate and non-financial: a defined scope, a board-visible product, and a start date that respected her vesting. She started six weeks later and has since hired four of the team herself.

The results

• 9 hires delivered in 19 weeks against a brief that had produced 3 hires in 9 months
• 6 of 9 hired directly from named competitors
• Time to hire reduced from 74 days to 41
• Cost per hire down 34% against the previous supplier arrangement
• Senior engineering interview time reduced by roughly 65%
• 8 of 9 hires still in seat at 18 months
• Settlement product shipped one month ahead of the board commitment

In the client's words

"We had been told repeatedly that the market was empty. It was not empty. It was employed. Synerjy went and had the conversations nobody else was prepared to have, and they did it with our team rather than behind our team's back."

CTO, Series B payments platform