Founder story: how NGRS was built

I worked in a traditional recruitment agency, but I wanted a deeper understanding of what was happening inside the organisations we worked with. Very often, companies send recruitment agencies only job descriptions, making it difficult to fully understand the hiring managers, what they are trying to achieve, and why they need a particular role. Typically, agencies are full of people with sales skills — communicative and proactive people — but not necessarily specialists in research and sourcing. The conversion rates are often low. Recruiters are constantly expected to bring in new clients while filling existing vacancies, which means they can’t dedicate enough time to each one.

A few years later, Cisco hired me as Head of Talent Acquisition for the CIS region. It gave me the chance to experience recruitment from inside the business. I was involved in leadership meetings and gained a much better understanding of hiring managers and team leads — what kind of people they needed, the products they were building, and the company’s strategy. But when you’re working in-house, you have very little time to look at the market and find the right candidates. Your days are filled with meetings, calls, reports, and internal processes.

I also noticed something interesting: people don’t always trust internal expertise. As a recruiter, you say, “We have a problem,” and the response is often, “You simply aren’t working hard enough.” But when the same message comes from an external expert, people are much more willing to listen — especially when you can say, “Companies A, B and C solved this challenge this way, and you can too.”

Having experienced both worlds, I realised each had its own strengths and limitations. That’s when I had the idea to combine them: to have the influence and business understanding that comes from working inside an organisation while keeping the market focus and flexibility of an external recruitment partner.

First, we attracted outstanding recruiters from recruitment agencies by offering them direct access to clients and hiring managers.

Depending on the scale of each client’s hiring needs, our team could range from two to seven people. For companies, this model offered both cost savings and flexibility. They didn’t need to expand their permanent headcount, yet they gained access to an experienced recruitment team that could scale up or down as required.

The model initially worked particularly well for fintech companies because they often had large projects that required significant hiring capacity. At the same time, top talent wasn’t always interested in joining banks; many candidates preferred technology companies such as Meta or Google.

Our first client was Deutsche Bank. They offered me a Talent Acquisition position, but instead I proposed that they use our services. As a result, we worked together for more than ten years. We were able to identify top candidates, persuade them to move into fintech, and clearly explain the advantages of the sector.

This required a highly proactive, agency-style approach: going directly to the market, building relationships, and speaking with potential candidates. Internal HR teams were often too occupied with day-to-day operations to work this way. In many cases, they could do little beyond reviewing applications and interviewing candidates who had already entered the recruitment process.

Once we proved the model in fintech, we realised it could work anywhere organisations needed to scale hiring quickly.

We focus on hiring at scale. We can fill a large number of positions quickly without compromising quality. Hiring at scale requires a team with different skill sets. You need researchers and analysts who can map the market, but those people don’t always enjoy calling candidates, building relationships, or selling opportunities. That’s where consultants come in. They might find research repetitive, but they excel at interviewing candidates, advising clients, and closing hires.

Our consultants are highly experienced and help companies understand why something isn’t working and what they can do differently. In that sense, we’re similar to executive search firms that solve complex hiring challenges.

Our clients often call us a rescue team because we step in when critical business opportunities are at risk. If they don’t hire quickly enough, they miss those opportunities.

For example, at the beginning of the year, managers may be allocated fifty positions to fill. If they don’t hire by the end of the year, those positions are taken away. Or a company wins a major project and has to build a team faster than its competitors, who are racing to do the same. Another common scenario is a product company that has secured investment and now needs to deploy that capital quickly by hiring the right people.

The goal is always the same: build the team fast enough for the business to seize the moment.■