Technology Operator
Every portfolio company eventually hires its own engineers. Most hire the wrong one first.
We define the roles against the estate you actually run, assess candidates with engineers who have done the job, and keep the function running while the new team learns it. Then we hand over on a date and leave. It is the one thing we sell that is designed to end.
What happens when you hire it yourself
Not a criticism of anybody's HR function. It is being asked to buy something it has no way of assessing.
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The spec is written by somebody who cannot mark the answer
A finance lead or an HR manager writes a job description for a network engineer, and then cannot tell a strong CV from a plausible one, because nothing in their career equipped them to.
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Agencies send volume, not judgement
They are paid on placement, so they optimise for placement. That is not a scandal, it is the incentive, and it is the wrong one here.
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The first hire defines the next three
A senior engineer hires in their own image. Get that one wrong and you find out about it a year later, with a team around them.
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Nobody onboards them into anything
They arrive at an undocumented estate and spend months discovering it, which is time you have now paid for twice.
Why not just use a recruiter?
A fair question, and for a commodity role the answer is that you should. This is not that role, and these are the four reasons it is different.
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A recruiter screens the CV, not the estate
They cannot test whether somebody can actually configure the thing you run, because they have never seen one. Nobody expects them to.
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You are hiring for a company you have owned a month
You do not yet know what the team should look like. The first spec is usually wrong, and it is wrong in a way that takes a year to show.
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The bench matters more than the search
We run these estates, so we know which two of the six roles you actually need first, and which two can wait a year.
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Placement is where a recruiter stops
It is where the risk starts. The twelve months after the start date are what decide whether the hire worked.
What we take on
The hiring, and then the part that decides whether it was worth doing.
The hiring
- Roles defined against the estate you actually run
- Sourcing, screening and technical assessment
- Interview panels with an engineer who has done the job
- Offer, negotiation and start date
- The order to hire in, and what can wait
- A view on which roles you should never hire
The handover
- Onboarding into a documented estate
- Training against the standard we run elsewhere
- Shadowing while we still hold the function
- A handover date agreed at the start, not discovered
- Support after it, for an agreed period
- The documentation stays with you
What changes
The deliverable is a team on your payroll and us gone. Everything here follows from that being the actual objective.
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Assessed by somebody who has done the job
The technical interview is run by an engineer who operates that estate, rather than by a keyword match against a job description.
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They arrive to documentation
Not to an archaeology exercise, so the ramp is weeks rather than quarters, and the second hire is faster than the first.
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You keep the capability
The team is yours, on your payroll, running to a standard that exists in writing rather than in one person's habits.
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A fallback while it settles
If a hire does not land, the function does not fall over, because we are still holding it until the handover date.
When to start
Two of these argue against us keeping the work, which is the honest position and worth saying out loud.
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Before a managed agreement becomes the permanent answer
For a company that will grow into its own function, us running it indefinitely is not the cheapest outcome available to you.
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While the estate is being documented anyway
The documentation a new hire needs gets produced during the work rather than assembled afterwards.
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Before exit, rather than at it
A buyer pays more for a company with its own function than for one dependent on a supplier, and we would rather you had the former.
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Ahead of the growth, not behind it
A team hired after the pain arrives is a team hired in a hurry, and hurry is what produced the first wrong hire.
The rest of what we run
Where to start
A two week audit. One document. No obligation.
Fixed scope, fixed price. It reads your systems and tells you what is wrong, what each fix costs, and what to do first. You keep the report either way.
What it turns up
- Licences paid for and not used
- Firewall rules nobody has reviewed since install
- Administrator accounts with no owner
- Reports built on a source that stopped updating
- An integration failing quietly, nobody alerted
What it reads live
- Licences, systems and what they cost waiting
- Network, remote access and segmentation waiting
- Cloud tenant, identity and admin rights waiting
- Core systems and how they connect waiting
- Reporting, data quality and access waiting
One document: what is wrong, what it costs to fix, and what to fix first.