Four searches, told without the agency spin. Problem. What we did. What happened.
B2B data infra · Series B · ~120 eng
“Best pipeline we've seen. Every candidate already knew our product — they'd actually looked it up.”
Helix had been running a self-serve hiring process for six months. Inbound was high-volume and low-signal. Their EM was spending 14 hours a week on screens that went nowhere. Two offers had fallen through due to comp misalignment they hadn't caught earlier.
We audited their JD first. Three requirements were scope-creep that was scaring off strong candidates. We trimmed it, rewrote the comp framing to reflect the actual equity story, and ran outbound against infrastructure-specialist candidates who'd worked at companies with similar data throughput.
4 placed, 2 from outbound, 2 from our active pool. All 4 still at Helix at 14 months. EM reclaimed ~10h/week.
compliance SaaS · Series A · ~40 eng
“We were going to give up and bring in a contractor to cover. ProsCube saved us a quarter.”
Two critical hires both needed to start within 30 days or a customer delivery commitment was at risk. Previous agency had been running for eight weeks with nothing to show. Internal recruiter was maxed out on eng hiring for a different track.
Split into two parallel searches with dedicated matchers for each. PM search pulled from our pool of ex-eng PMs (Bramwell's product is technical). Frontend search focused on candidates with compliance or fintech domain experience to cut onboarding time.
Staff FE placed in 21 days. PM placed in 19 days. Customer delivery hit on time. Total agency cost was 40% lower than their previous retainer-based firm.
developer tools · pre-series A · 12 people
“Hired the first candidate they sent. Still here 14 months later.”
First non-eng hire at a 12-person company. Founders had never interviewed designers before and weren't sure what good looked like. They'd posted on job boards for three weeks with no useful applications.
Started with a two-hour brief session to calibrate what "founding designer" meant at Quill's stage — more product sense than visual polish, comfortable in code, opinionated about developer UX. Ran outbound against ex-eng designers and design engineers specifically.
Hired the first candidate we sent. She built the design system from scratch in 60 days, still leading design 14 months later.
infrastructure tooling · Series C · ~300 eng
“Six for six. We've never seen that from any agency.”
Scaling a niche: distributed systems engineers at senior and staff level. Mesh had tried three agencies. All three padded shortlists with candidates who had "distributed" in their resume but no real systems depth. Mesh's bar is high — their interviews have a 12% pass rate.
Ran a different brief process: instead of a JD review, we did a technical scope session with their principal eng. Built a filter rubric based on observable signals in CVs and portfolios. We pre-screened 40 candidates before sending six.
6 placed from 6 sent. All 6 cleared Mesh's full loop. Two staff-level, four senior. Average time to offer: 17 days per candidate.
Brief us in five minutes. Shortlist in 48 hours.