A talent function built from zero

Where did they start?

The company had raised and had an engineering hiring plan to deliver. It also had a problem the plan did not mention: the team was already carrying bad hires, made fast and by gut, and everyone knew it. No recruiter, no applicant tracking system, no scorecards, no agreed interview loop, and no shared idea of what a good hire looked like. The founders were screening candidates themselves between everything else. The usual next step is an agency per role. They chose to build the function instead.

What did we build?

• The culture, first. Before a single search, two questions with the founders and the team leads: who here do you want more of, and which hires do you regret, and why. The answers became the profile every role was hired against. Not values on a wall. A scorecard.
• The ATS. Ashby, set up from scratch: pipelines, stages, templates, reporting. The company's own account, so everything stays with them.
• The scorecards. Every role defined with the hiring manager before sourcing started. Skills next to the culture profile, not instead of it.
• The interview loops. Structured stages, interviewers assigned, questions agreed, feedback due within a day. The same loop for every candidate on a role, so decisions could be compared.
• The pipeline. Outbound sourcing run from inside the ATS, screening calls, candidates kept warm between stages, offers managed through to the start date.
• The habits. Hiring managers coached on interviewing and on giving feedback fast. The part that keeps working after the recruiter is gone.

What did the numbers look like?

A median time to fill of 25 days, from a role going live to accepted offer, across every engineering role filled in six months. Six to eight weeks is typical for engineering roles.

The median matters more than the fastest hire. It means most roles closed in under a month, not that one did. The fastest time to hire was five business days: from the day the candidate entered the pipeline to the day the offer was accepted. Along the way, more than 70% of the people we reached out to replied, and more than half of the people we screened went to interview.

Every offer made was accepted.

That is not luck, and it is not a market. It is the candidate journey and the offer conversation designed for it: expectations set on the first call, compensation discussed early and in writing, the counter-offer conversation had before it happens, and no surprises on the day. Offer acceptance is the metric most teams do not track and most agencies cannot influence, because by the time the offer is made they are gone.

And every hire was made against the profile the team had written for itself, which is the number that does not show up in a dashboard: no new regrets.

What stayed behind?

The ATS, configured and populated. The culture profile and the scorecards for every role. The interview guides. The candidate pipeline and every note in it. The reporting. And a team that had run structured loops for six months and no longer needed someone to remind them to. When they hire an in-house recruiter, that person inherits a working system rather than a blank page.

What about before this?

At CoW DAO the team grew from 23 to more than 55 while the hiring process was built around them. Embedded and process work before that for Reaktor, WeTravel and Akkuro (formerly five°degrees), across Amsterdam, Berlin, Helsinki, Lisbon, Dubai, Riyadh and Cairo.

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Last updated 14 September 2026