Executive searchBoutique firm, engineering mandate
How a search consultant found engineers who had done the exact migration
Twenty-three staff engineers who had scaled a payments platform past a specific threshold — sixteen new to the firm's ATS.
Names, companies, sectors and figures are anonymised. This study describes the workflow and the persona rather than the customer.
01Situation
The client needed a staff engineer who had taken a payments platform through a specific scale threshold and out the other side. The obvious candidates worked at four companies, and every one of them fields approaches weekly.
The firm's own database returned people whose titles matched and whose experience did not — days of a researcher's time per shortlist, most of it discarded on the consultant's first read. Searching by title finds people who hold a job; the mandate was about people who had survived a particular event.
02Search
Find staff and principal engineers who have scaled a payments platform past ten million transactions a month, currently outside the six largest processors, and plausibly open to a move.
Must have
- The scale event on record, in the person's own words or a talk
- Staff level or above
- Currently outside the six saturated employers
Ruled out
- The client's own employees
- Anyone the firm placed in the last twelve months
- Contractors and fractional engineers
Intended actionA first approach that names the scale problem rather than the salary, paced so no single employer saw more than three.
03Evidence
Why they fit
- The scale claim appears in a conference talk, an engineering post or a written role description — somewhere the person chose to say it.
- Level is corroborated by scope described rather than by title alone, which travels badly between companies.
- Seven were at companies the consultant would not have thought to look at.
Verified
- Current employer and level
- That the person is not at an excluded company
- That the firm has no prior placement or active candidacy on record
Still uncertain
- Whether any of them were actually open. Openness is a state of mind and the approach was written to find out, not to assume.
- Compensation expectations, which nothing public settles.
- For four candidates, whether the scale figure described their system or their employer's total.
04Action
- Each message opened on the specific engineering problem, which is what a saturated candidate actually reads.
- Replies were routed to the consultant, not a sequence — the firm's view being that a sourcing tool should stop at the reply.
05Outcome
Nine replies, four to first interview, one hired. The consultant's note afterwards was that the pacing and the opening line did more work than the list length.
- Engineers approached
- 23
- New to the ATS
- 16
- Hired
- 1
Elapsed5 weeks from prompt to offer accepted
Net newThe hire was one of the sixteen the search added to a database that had never held them.