Choosing a recruitment partner is an unusual purchase, because the thing you are buying is judgement, and judgement is invisible until after you have paid for it. Pitches all sound the same for exactly that reason.
So rather than describe ourselves, here is the evidence.
You see a shortlist, not a stack
On a sales role for a manufacturing client we screened more than forty profiles. The client saw eight, sent in two deliberate batches of four. They hired from the second batch.
The number that matters there is not the eight. It is the thirty two you never had to open. Screening is the work, and if we pass that work back to you by forwarding everything that loosely matches, you are doing our job while paying us to do it.
On a marketing role for a SaaS startup the shape was the same: twenty to thirty screened, six shared after the first batch of four was rejected, one hired. On a D2C brand search, thirty plus screened, five shared, one hired.
Speed, where the role allows it
That same sales search closed in ten days across three interview rounds, the last one at board level. The candidate joined fifteen days later, which was their notice period. Twenty five days from intake to someone sitting at the desk.
The marketing search ran twelve days to offer, then fifteen days of notice. Roughly twenty seven days intake to joining.
We quote those with the notice period broken out on purpose. An agency that tells you twenty five days without saying that fifteen of them were the candidate's notice is managing your impression rather than your search.
The search we did not do well, and why we publish it
A factory manager search took over a hundred profiles screened and twenty to twenty five shared. Around forty five days to joining. Three times the submittals of the sales role and nearly twice the timeline.
Same recruiter, same method. What changed was that the mandate moved mid search, so every profile screened against the original definition stopped counting.
We publish that one because it is the honest counterweight to the numbers above, and because it is the single most useful thing we know about hiring cost. If you want a search to be fast and cheap, the highest leverage hour you will spend is the one before sourcing starts, getting the brief right. More on that in why your search went long.
Software narrows. A person decides.
Our AI sources, screens and assesses at a scale and speed no manual team matches. On a developer search it ran eighty plus profiles down through an AI interview stage to ten candidates, one of whom was hired.
But nobody is rejected by software alone. A recruiter reviews every shortlist before it reaches you, because the questions that actually predict success are not keyword questions. On that developer search the useful ones were simple: is the project live, did you personally own this part, and what problem were you solving. Those separate the people who built something from the people who were nearby when it was built.
We tell you the uncomfortable thing early
If we think the compensation band will not clear the market, you hear it in week one rather than week six. If we think the role as written will not attract the person you actually want, we say so before sourcing rather than after four rejected batches.
That is a harder first conversation and a much cheaper overall one. It is also the main reason our submittal counts stay low: we spend the disagreement upfront instead of spreading it across weeks of wasted screening.
What you can hold us to
- A shortlist with written reasoning against a scorecard agreed at intake, not a forwarded pile.
- An update every Friday, including the weeks when the update is that nothing moved.
- An honest read on compensation, early, even when it is not what you want to hear.
- Reservations included with candidates we recommend, not just the flattering parts.
- No upfront fees, with terms confirmed in writing before any sourcing begins.
Fair questions to ask us, or anyone else
If you are comparing agencies, these four surface more than any pitch will:
- How many other clients are you running this same brief for right now?
- How many profiles will I see, and how many will you have screened to get there?
- What is your submittal to hire ratio, and can you show me a search that went badly?
- What happens if you decide the compensation band will not clear the market?
The last two are the revealing ones. An agency that cannot tell you its ratio has never measured it, and an agency with no failed search to describe is either very new or not being straight with you.
Our full answers, including what we need from you for any of this to hold, are on how we work. What we charge and why is in what recruitment agencies actually charge in India.
Read next: How we work, and what we commit to ยท What recruitment agencies charge in India