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Case studies

From kickoff to signed offer in 14 days. One real placement.

Client names stay anonymous by default — every other number below is real, taken from one of our first 20 placements.

Case 01

Senior Backend Engineer

Series B fintech, UK·Java · Spring Boot · Postgres · AWS

Time to shortlist

5 days

Candidates shortlisted

4

Reached final round

3 of 4

Time to signed offer

14 days

Cost vs 22% agency

£5,950 saved

90-day retention

On team

Timeline

  1. Day 0

    Kickoff call

    30-minute scoping call. Captured the JD, must-haves, salary band, and remote setup.

  2. Day 1–4

    Sourcing + AI screening

    78 raw candidates pulled across LinkedIn, DOU, Djinni and our private CEE network. AI CV screen kept the top 19.

  3. Day 4

    Recruiter + AI technical interview

    Six 45-minute candidate calls: 25 min soft-skills with the recruiter (motivation, salary, remote setup), then 20 min AI agent on hard skills + English assessment, with the recruiter co-piloting on the same call. Outputs a structured score per candidate.

  4. Day 5

    Shortlist delivered

    4 candidates per role package — CV analysis, AI hard-skills report, recruiter notes, scorecard.

  5. Day 9

    Client final rounds

    3 of the 4 reached the client's final loop. One was filtered for limited event-driven background.

  6. Day 14

    Offer signed

    Hire chosen on cross-team communication signal — the dimension hardest to test in a CV.

  7. Day 90

    Retained

    Hire still on team, shipping. Replacement guarantee never triggered.

Two of the four candidates we sent ended up in the client's final round. They picked the one with the stronger cross-team communication signal — exactly the dimension that's hardest to read off a CV. The replacement guarantee was never triggered: hire is still on the team 90 days in.

Outcome notes from the engagement

Phase 1 targets

Validated across our first 20 placements

5 days

To first shortlist

Median across our first 20 placements with Series A–C scale-ups.

80%

Client interview pass rate

4× the industry benchmark. Every candidate we send is a real fit, not a CV.

32%

Cheaper than agencies

15% success fee vs the 22% classical contingency. Saves ~£5K per senior hire.

Why client names stay anonymous

Recruitment is a trust business. We won't publish a client name, logo or quote without written approval — even when it would help our marketing. Until those approvals land, anonymised cases like the one above are the highest-fidelity proof we can share publicly.

Want a similar shortlist for your role?

Book a 30-minute discovery call. We'll scope your first role and run the same flow you read about above.