Hiring is a procurement category.
I built the firm that
treats it like one.
After ten years of strategic global talent work inside high-growth technology
companies, one thought never left my mind: we are not managing talent acquisition
the way we should - as a procurement category. So I built a consultancy which
adopts the approach I believe in, measuring each hire as a unit, with a clearer
view of quantifiable cost & benefit to the P&L.
The back-story
Early in my career I stumbled on a web app called “The Salary Calculator”. Any
employee in the UK could type in a gross salary and see, in seconds and for free,
exactly what net pay would land in their account after tax, pension and benefits
deductions.
Over the years, I often thought to myself: why does this not exist for
founders?
The person receiving the salary could see their real number instantly. Yet the
business paying the salary - the founder signing off the hire - had no such tool
at their disposal. No free tool showed what that hire would actually cost across a
year: the employer taxes and pension on top of the salary, the tooling per seat,
the interview hours pulled from the most expensive salaried people in the company,
and the revenue opportunity cost for every week the role sat empty.
So I decided to build a set of free tools, like “The Salary Calculator” tool which
was so helpful to me in my employment years - but for founders. I built a set of
free tools which show founders the visible costs of a new hire - and the invisible
ones too.
Why did I choose to create these resources and the Talent Ascent consultancy
My work, for years, has focused on global strategic talent acquisition inside
high-growth technology companies - supporting brilliant, ambitious, ingenious
leaders, with the vision and drive to build and deliver exceptional plans. Yet
staffing the teams was often a critical blocker - struggling to find the right
people, hiring too slowly, or hiring people who failed within months.
I always saw hiring as a critical issue of strategic enablement - not a matter of
filling empty seats.
I found the most critical difference I made in my work with business leaders
throughout the years came from asking the most important questions before any
recruitment ever commenced:
- What are we planning to achieve?
- What are our commercial timelines?
- What is the most significant blocker right now?
And once I knew these answers, I could plan strategically and investigate the
market and the current team structure.
Often, this produced results different to what the leaders I worked with might
have expected:
- I delivered competitive talent architecture reports that revealed that the
experience we sought did not exist in a like-for-like format - because other
companies with this capability structured teams differently.
- I recommended team restructuring or role rescoping and relevelling which
allowed us to move forward, instead of trying to double down on structures which
did not work.
- I reviewed attrition records and identified that the target profiles we had
pursued over the prior year did not work for the business - and proposed
alternatives, which proceeded to deliver much greater work once employed.
- I audited hiring process inefficiencies, redesigned assessment and interview
frameworks to improve conversion rates in interviews to free up staff bandwidth
to focus on their core work.
In my career, I have hired across tech and non-tech, and designed and built new
teams from scratch - from experienced professionals to executive leadership hires
in highly sensitive and confidential contexts, with comp packages up to $1m per
year. Invariably, knowing what we want to build has been the single most important
question that has ensured the rest of the process falls in line. To get us where
we need to go, I have audited and identified blockers, and rebuilt hiring processes
and systems in the ways which accelerate our momentum to getting where our vision
and ambition are.
I have always been comfortable with challenging the status quo because I care
more about working in a way that unblocks and accelerates the business. This very
approach is what has made my career a thorough intellectual pleasure. I have found
working with busy leaders facing extremely challenging targets and objectives,
where errors are costly, and where making good decisions is essential - to be the
most interesting and exciting area of work for me.
And so, after a decade of working with some fantastic companies, I decided it is
time to build the consultancy that allows me to continue engaging with businesses
specifically in that stage of rapid, thrilling building, where, with the right
mindset, creative chaos can become the fertile ground for impact, progress, and
legacy.
The thesis for Talent Ascent
Hiring is usually the largest controllable spend category in a venture-backed
company, and the only one run without procurement discipline. IT procurement knows
its cost per licence. Services procurement evaluates suppliers and holds them to
terms. Recruitment borrows the vocabulary - talent sourcing - and yet it is run
with the philosophy of a people-support function, and without the discipline the
word “sourcing” implies: no clear cost per unit of hire, no total cost of ownership
on the tooling, and suppliers (such as recruitment agencies) being paid a
percentage of the cost of the hire they recommend - which is an incentive structure
a serious procurement function would question if buying any other category from a
vendor.
A soft, ambiguous practice, sitting on one of the most critical cost vectors for a
scaling business. That is the gap Talent Ascent was built to address.
Why scaleups
Scaleups are alive and thrilling: a founding team with a vision, a fresh round, a
plan bigger than the company - the velocity, the ambiguity, the pioneering rush of
building something that can change an industry.
It is also where hiring discipline pays the most and, yet, is applied least often.
A company at fifty heads doubling in a year makes more consequential hiring
decisions in twelve months than a mature company with 5,000 or 10,000 employees
makes in five. Scaleups make these decisions with less process, less data and less
room for error. Getting the cost basis, the structure and the assessment right
before the wave arrives is worth more at Series A or B than it will ever be worth
again.
The calculators
The first things this firm shipped were the answer to that first question:
These tools are free by design. If you are early enough in your scaling journey
that spending constrained cash on advisory or a workforce-planning licence would be
too expensive - you should still be able to know what a hire costs. Use them
without a sales call attached, as often as you need. They exist for exactly that
stage, and they will stay free.
What the firm is
Everything past the calculators is the Talent Ascent thesis, productised: defined
artefacts, a known cost per hire, and an honest disqualification on every page,
because a procurement-grade supplier tells you when the purchase is wrong.
Diagnose audits your hiring system,
Design builds or re-builds it, and
Direct guides you as a strategist, until your team
takes over.
If you are a founder, you are approving the largest recurring commitments your
company makes. There should be a number under each one, including hiring.
And there can be.
If you are the COO or chief of staff who inherited hiring, our reports are
bookable by card, inside your budget authority, and deliverables are
board-legible.
If you run a portfolio, five companies reporting hiring five different ways is a
methodology problem. We can help the businesses you support with a methodology
focused on cost-visibility and optimisation.
Talk to us →
