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.