B&B/Process
Six stages, and you are only needed for four of them. Here is what happens in each, who does what, and where searches usually go wrong when nobody is watching.
Brief
We ask about the stack, the on-call rota, what broke last quarter and who left. We also ask for the salary band, because senior engineers will ask us in the first five minutes.
Calibrate
Anonymised, and chosen to disagree with each other. You tell us who is close and why. It is the fastest way to find out whether the brief in the document matches the one in your head.
Source
Most people worth hiring for infrastructure are employed and not reading job boards. We approach them directly with the range, the stack and the reason the role exists, which is why they reply.
Screen
We ask every engineer to walk us through an incident they owned and a piece of infrastructure they built. Then we confirm salary, notice period, location and right to work, so none of it surprises you at offer stage.
Shortlist
Every profile says what the person has run in production, where they are thin, what they want next and what it will take to hire them. If we could not find five, you get three and an explanation.
Hire
We schedule, collect feedback from both sides within a day, and handle the offer conversation including the counter-offer that senior engineers nearly always receive. We stay in touch through the notice period and the first three months.
The search is the same for both. What changes is the paperwork and who the engineer works for when it is over.
Permanent
Full-time hires into your team, from a first DevOps engineer to a head of platform.
Contract
Experienced contractors for a fixed piece of work or a fixed stretch of time, remote or on site.
No. Permanent searches are success fee only, and the fee is agreed in writing before we approach anyone.
No. Internal teams usually keep the roles they fill well and pass us the infrastructure ones. We work alongside them and share what we learn about the market.
That is common, and a good reason to call. A fair part of the first conversation is often working out whether you need a DevOps engineer, an SRE or the start of a platform team.
Across the EU and the UK. Every profile states where the person lives, where they can legally work and how much overlap they have with your working day.
Yes, though we will say so if we think a well-written advert would fill it for less money.
One call, about an hour, with whoever will manage the engineer.