From the first leadership hire to a 180-person R&D centre in 18 months.
Everyone wanted to talk about the building. Recruise made us answer whether the engineers existed before we signed anything. That saved us.
The outcome, in numbers.
The situation
The group had a mandate to stand up an engineering centre but was making the classic first move — picking a site and a build partner before knowing whether the specific talent it needed was actually available at the depth it planned to hire.
Get that order wrong and you sign a lease against a talent pool that can’t fill the org chart. The centre needed senior anchors first, then depth, on a build-operate-transfer clock.
What we did
We built the talent runway before site selection: a supply map of the exact engineering profiles the centre needed across the candidate cities, so the location decision was made on where the talent was, not just cost.
Then we sequenced the build around anchor hires. The first fifteen — the leadership spine and principal engineers — were recruited to set the calibre and become the reason the next 165 would join.
- 01 Pre-site talent availability map across candidate cities to inform location.
- 02 A phased org design tied to the BOT timeline, not a flat headcount target.
- 03 Fifteen anchor hires (leadership + principals) recruited first to set the bar.
- 04 A transition-ready hiring playbook the client owns when the BOT converts.
The outcome
The centre went from an approved idea to 180 people in 18 months, anchored by a leadership team hired before the ramp rather than after it. The anchor-first sequence meant later hires were joining a real team, not a plan.
Because the hiring playbook was built to hand over, the client wasn’t left dependent on us when the BOT clock ran out — the capability transferred with the centre.
If a case like this looks like your problem, that's usually a sign.
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