A CTO said something to me last month that has stuck.
“I do not have an applicant problem. I have a time problem. I am drowning in CVs and none of them are right.”
He had three agencies on the role. Between them they had sent him forty two CVs in a fortnight. He had interviewed nine people. He had hired none of them. What he had actually lost was the thing he could not get back. Two weeks of his own attention, pulled away from the product, spent reading documents that were never going to lead anywhere.
That is the real cost most founders carry, and most agencies never talk about it.
So when people ask why they should work with me rather than the agency already in their inbox, this is the honest answer.
Most agencies sell volume. I sell judgement
The standard agency model rewards activity. Send more CVs, fire off more InMails, get more candidates into more processes, and hope something sticks. It looks busy. It feels like progress. It is mostly noise.
I run the opposite model. Founder led, hands on, and intentionally low volume. I stay personally involved from the first brief through to offer and onboarding. I do not hand you to a junior researcher once the contract is signed, because I am the person doing the work.
If you want a stack of CVs by Friday, I am not the right partner. If you want a short list of engineers who have been properly assessed, with context on why each one fits, we will work well together.
That is a deliberate choice, and it is the same instinct that the best engineers have. The candidates I rate most highly are the ones who interrogate a role before they accept it. I do the same with a brief before I start a search. If the role cannot survive hard questions about ownership, success criteria and what the first ninety days actually look like, the search will fail no matter how many CVs anyone sends.
I am also embedded in the communities I hire from, not observing them from the outside. I have given two lightning talks at ElixirConf EU, one in 2023 and one this year, on the hiring mistakes I see most often at the start of an Elixir search. I would rather help teams get this right than simply bill them when they get it wrong.
The cost of getting it wrong is the whole argument
Hiring slowly is expensive. Hiring badly is far worse.
The Recruitment and Employment Confederation found that a single bad hire at manager level, on a salary of around forty two thousand pounds, can cost a business roughly one hundred and thirty two thousand pounds once you count wasted salary, training and lost productivity across the team. SHRM puts the cost of replacing an employee at anywhere from fifty to two hundred per cent of their annual salary depending on seniority. For the senior and founding level engineers I focus on, you are at the top of that range.
Set that against an average agency fee and the maths is not close. The expensive decision is never the fee. It is the mis hire you make because someone optimised for speed and volume instead of fit.
This is why I would rather present you with three engineers I genuinely believe in than fifteen I am hoping you will sort through yourself. Fewer, better decisions, made with more information. That is the entire point.
The proof is on the record, not in a brochure
I could tell you I am responsive and thorough. Anyone can. What matters is what has actually happened, and whether the people who have worked with me say the same thing without being prompted.
Since founding AG Talent in March 2024 I have made more than forty hires, spanning software engineers, founding engineers and engineering leaders. Five of those were Elixir specialists, a niche where most generalist agencies cannot even build a credible shortlist. Several were leadership and principal level appointments, the hires where getting it wrong is most expensive.
The number I am most proud of is not on that list, because it is harder to fake. Clients keep coming back. Blinq has hired through me four times. Henry Schein One five times. Track24 and Ivoflow twice each. Nobody re-hires an agency that wastes their time. Repeat business is the only trust signal that cannot be manufactured.
I also have ninety three recommendations on my LinkedIn profile from clients and candidates. They are public. You can read every one.
A few themes come up again and again. Speed without corner cutting. Honesty even when it is awkward. Preparation that makes the difference at offer stage.
Take Track24. On a complex Elixir contractor search, a niche where most agencies would still be sourcing, we were at offer in under a fortnight. As Tayla Saffhill, their People and Operations Lead, put it: “We were able to offer a candidate in less than two weeks of our initial outreach. Given the complexity of our search, we have been incredibly impressed.”
Candidates say the same about the parts of the process clients rarely see. One senior data engineer told me his prep materials “clearly stood out compared with anything I have experienced before,” with detailed company context and interviewer profiles, and that “feedback came within hours of each interview.” Another said the communication was “exceptional, always prompt, clear and proactive,” so he never had to chase an update.
That last point matters more than it sounds. The candidate experience is your employer brand. When a recruiter goes quiet, ghosts people or fumbles the feedback, that reflects on you, not just on them. The engineers I represent walk away speaking well of your company whether they take the job or not.
I treat your search like it is my company
Responsiveness is not a slogan for me. I have taken candidate calls on a Sunday because a counter offer was about to be accepted on the Monday and waiting until office hours would have cost my client the hire. When a brief has been urgent I have sourced and qualified candidates over the weekend rather than lose three days the client did not have. When a process is live and a good person is in play, momentum is everything, and I do not let it stall because it happens to be the weekend.
That is what acting like an owner actually means. Not a line on a website. A willingness to be available when it counts, to give you straight feedback when a search is not working, and to tell you when the honest answer is that you should fix the role before you hire for it.
I have spent over fourteen years in tech recruitment, with a background in computer science, and I have supported and scaled engineering teams for businesses ranging from early stage and Series A startups, where one wrong hire can set the company back materially, through to established names like TikTok, easyJet, TrueLayer, S&P Global and Genius Sports. Through AG Talent I have placed engineers for teams including Blinq, Track24, Ivoflow, Light, RCS Global and Dentally across the UK, Europe and the US, working across Elixir, JavaScript, Ruby, .NET, Python, Go, Rust, C++ and beyond.
The bottom line
The agency in your inbox will get you more CVs. I will get you fewer hiring mistakes.
If the next hire needs to be right the first time, if a role has been open too long, or if your shortlist looks busy but keeps missing the mark, that is exactly when I am worth a conversation.
Book a call and tell me what you are building. https://cal.com/arjgillard/hiring
