14 years, 500+ hires, £7.2M in agency fees eliminated.

I build hiring functions and run them from the inside. This page is the record and the resources. The service lives at A Player Talent.

The record

Every engagement, and what came out of it.

Ministry of JusticeGovernment technology · 2016 to 2018
200+ hires57% faster£5M+ eliminated

Direct sourcing function built from nothing across product, UX and technology.

Attorney General's OfficeGovernment · 2018 to 2019
57% faster39% less agency spend

Recruitment function rebuilt. First KPI dashboards giving HR leadership live visibility.

Nationwide Building SocietyFinancial services · 2019 to 2020
52 specialists9 months£1B programme

Data engineering, infrastructure and cybersecurity hiring for a digital transformation.

Frontiers EMEAResearch publishing · 2021 to 2022
£1M+ eliminated20 months2 continents

Sales, commercial and digital hiring across EMEA and the Americas. No job board spend.

MicrosoftTechnology · 2022 to 2023
100 hires£1.48M saved40% faster

Embedded team delivering technology hiring in a heavily contested candidate market.

Equal ExpertsTechnology consultancy
100 hires£1.25M saved60% quality gain

Direct sourcing strategy and technical assessment frameworks, plus hiring manager training.

EYProfessional services
56 offers£250K saved

End-to-end delivery across the UK advisory practice.

PupilProptech scale-up
30% faster

Product, engineering and commercial pipelines built through GitHub, Stack Overflow and direct search.

Also: 3M, Attorney General's Office, APT Portfolio, Inflights, Baxter Williams.

In aggregate

The same 5 gaps, in almost every company.

14 years of briefs and the failures repeat. Growing companies overpay per hire by £15,000 to £30,000, and rarely because they hire bad people.

500+
Hires placed
£7.2M
Agency fees eliminated
5
Hiring functions built from zero
14
Years in-house
  1. Briefing agencies without a scorecard.
  2. Accepting the first shortlist rather than building a parallel pipeline.
  3. Negotiating salary without benchmarking data.
  4. Skipping structured interviews because a leader liked the candidate.
  5. No process to repeat whatever worked last time.

Direct sourcing with a structured process closes all five. That is the whole job.

Free resources

The frameworks behind every engagement.

Built for founders making their first 15 hires.

Got hiring ahead of you?

The service, the pricing and a calculator that runs your own numbers all live at A Player Talent.