Internal recruiters and Talent Acquisition leaders for technology scale-ups

We hire the people who will do your hiring. Founding Recruiters, Talent Acquisition Partners and Heads of Talent for venture-backed technology companies, placed by a team who assess recruiters from inside the discipline.

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What this service is

Hawkwood recruits Talent Acquisition professionals into technology companies. That means the first internal recruiter at a start-up, additional recruiters as a team scales, and the Head of Talent Acquisition who leads them. We have placed hundreds of these hires across the UK, Europe and the United States since 2016.

Worth being clear about what this is not. We are not a talent acquisition consultancy and we are not an RPO. We do not run your hiring for you, redesign your process from the outside, or place a team of our people into your business on a retainer. We find the person who will do that work as part of your company, and then we step back.

Recruiters we have placed, and the companies who trusted us

We have helped Ophelos, Little Journey, TransFICC, Sano Genetics and Oxford Ionics hire their first internal recruiter, and placed hundreds of Founding Recruiters into technology companies across the UK, Europe and the United States since 2016.

Those companies are backed by Index Ventures, LocalGlobe, Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Albion VC and Octopus Ventures, several of whom recommend us directly to their portfolio companies.

300+ successful People & Talent hires into growth companies including

When companies make this hire

Agency fees have become the largest line in the hiring budget.

At three hires a month on typical agency terms, that is around $720,000 a year. An internal recruiter costs a fraction of it.

Founders are spending their week on recruitment.

Screening, scheduling and chasing, instead of the things only a founder can do.

A funding round has just closed.

Headcount plans that looked ambitious are now commitments with dates attached.

The hiring process is inconsistent.

Different interviewers, different questions, no structure, and candidates dropping out somewhere in the middle of it.

The employer brand is doing no work.

Nobody owns how the company is presented to the market, so every search starts from cold.

An existing TA function needs a leader.

Recruiters in place, but nobody setting strategy, building process or managing the relationship with the business.

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Who we place

Founding Recruiters

The first in-house hire, who will build the process everyone after them inherits.

Internal and in-house recruiters

Individual contributors at every level, from first hire through to senior.

Talent Acquisition Partners

Recruiters who work as an embedded partner to a function or business unit rather than a service desk.

Talent Acquisition Managers

Leading a small team while still recruiting themselves.

Heads of Talent Acquisition and TA Directors

Owning strategy, process, employer brand and the relationship with the executive team.

Sourcers and recruitment coordinators

Where the volume of hiring justifies specialisation.

Recruiters are harder to assess than they look

Every recruiter interviews well. It is the job. They are practised at building rapport quickly, at telling a persuasive story about their own experience, and at knowing what an interviewer wants to hear. That is precisely why hiring one is difficult if you have never done the job yourself.

The questions that separate a strong recruiter from a plausible one are specific. How did they actually source their last five hires, rather than how do they describe their sourcing strategy? What did they do when a candidate accepted a counter-offer? How do they handle a hiring manager who keeps moving the specification? What does their pipeline look like when nothing is landing?

We ask those questions every day, because it is the only market we work in. We have been recruiting People and Talent professionals since 2016, and a recruiter cannot tell us a version of events that we have not already heard from both sides.

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What an internal recruiter actually saves

Most agencies charge between 25% and 30% of a candidate's first-year salary. On a typical technology hire that is around $20,000. Three hires a month, sustained across a year, comes to roughly $720,000 in fees.

An in-house recruiter's salary usually falls between $120,000 and $160,000. On that arithmetic a good one should return their entire annual cost within the first three months, and everything after that is margin. The savings are the obvious part. The compounding benefits, a consistent process, a pipeline that belongs to you, and a market presence that outlasts any single search, are the reason the hire tends to be permanent once it is made.

How we run the search

The same six-stage methodology we use for every People and Talent search, refined across more than 50,000 hours of recruiting in this market.

What changes for a recruiter search is the assessment. We test sourcing capability rather than sourcing vocabulary, and we take references from the hiring managers a candidate actually worked with, not only the ones they nominate.

See the full methodology

01 Vacancy briefing

02 Candidate identification

03 Candidate outreach

04 Assessment

05 Interview management

06 Offer management

“Summaya placed me as Oxford Ionics' first talent hire and helped us build the world-class team that carried us through rapid scaling to acquisition - she's now supporting our next stage of growth globally.

Elliot Dower

Director of International Talent Acquisition, IonQ

“I've worked with Peter and Summaya previously at Hawkwood and always highly recommended them. We've just completed a super fast and brilliant search for a People Partner through Jade, and couldn't be happier. Amazing service, quality and speed, everything we needed and more - thank you Jade! We look forward to welcoming our new starter very soon.

Kaija Barnes

Head of Talent Acquisition, Kaluza

Recommended to CEOs by VCs & PEs including

Questions we get asked

When should a start-up hire its first internal recruiter?

Usually somewhere between twenty and forty people, or when agency fees start exceeding what a recruiter would cost in salary. The other common trigger is a founder spending more than a day a week on hiring. If either is true, the hire has probably been due for a while.

What is the difference between talent acquisition and recruitment?

Recruitment is filling a role that is open now. Talent acquisition is the longer game: building pipeline before roles exist, owning employer brand, designing the interview process, and understanding the market well enough to advise on what a hire will realistically cost and take.

In practice most people use the terms interchangeably, and most in-house recruiters do both. The distinction matters when you are hiring, because a recruiter who has only ever filled open roles will struggle in a company that needs someone to build the function itself. That is a different skill set and it is worth testing for deliberately.

How much does an internal recruiter save compared with using agencies?

At typical agency rates of 25 to 30% of first-year salary, roughly $20,000 a hire, three hires a month costs around $720,000 a year. An internal recruiter at $120,000 to $160,000 should cover their annual cost within about three months of joining.

What should you look for in a first recruiter hire?

Someone who has built rather than inherited. A first recruiter arrives to no process, no employer brand and no pipeline, so previous experience of operating inside an established function is less useful than it sounds. Look for evidence of sourcing passive candidates directly, comfort with ambiguity, and the confidence to push back on a hiring manager.

How do you interview a recruiter properly?

Test the work rather than the description of it. Ask how they sourced their last five hires, name by name. Set a live sourcing exercise against a real role. Ask what they did when a search stalled. Recruiters interview well by profession, so a conversational interview will tell you almost nothing.
Read our full guide to interviewing a Founding Recruiter

Can you bring in a recruiter on a fractional basis?

Yes. Where the hiring volume does not yet justify a permanent recruiter, or where you need cover for a defined push, we place recruiters on a fractional or embedded basis from the same network.
Explore fractional and embedded expertise

Hiring the person who will do your hiring?

Tell us what you are building and we will come back within 24 hours with an initial view on the market, the profile and what it will realistically take.

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