How One Company Filled 12 Roles in 60 Days by Rethinking Their HR Recruitment Services

In late 2024, a professional services company based in Dublin had twelve open roles across three departments. They were six months into a growth phase that had outpaced their internal talent acquisition capacity. Their HR team of two was managing the entire pipeline: posting roles, screening CVs, coordinating interviews, managing candidate communications, and trying to maintain relationships with three different recruitment agencies simultaneously.

None of the twelve roles had been filled. Eight of them had been open for more than ten weeks. Three had been reposted after initial shortlists failed to convert. The head of HR described the situation plainly: "We are spending all of our time on hiring and producing almost none of it."

When they engaged us, the initial assessment was not about which roles were hardest to fill. It was about why the process was failing across all twelve simultaneously, and whether the HR recruitment services they were currently using were the right tools for the specific searches they were running.

What followed was a redesign that did not require more budget. It required different choices. Sixty days later, all twelve roles were filled.

The Diagnosis: Three Services Doing the Wrong Jobs

The company was working with three recruitment agencies — one generalist, one with a stated specialism in finance, and one that had been recommended by the CEO after filling a role for a different company three years earlier. None of them had been selected against specific criteria. None of them had been briefed consistently. And critically, none of them were the right match for the specific roles they had been asked to fill.

The generalist agency had been given four technical roles. Their network was not deep enough in the specific disciplines required. They were presenting broadly qualified candidates rather than specifically matched ones — people who could technically do parts of the job but who had not done the actual work the roles required.

The finance specialist had been given three roles, two of which were in operations rather than finance. The specialism did not transfer. They were sourcing from the same channels they used for every search, producing candidates who were interested in finance roles and fitting the operations brief loosely at best.

The CEO-referred agency had been given five roles across different functions and was doing its best but lacked the depth in any of them to produce strong shortlists. It had been retained largely out of relationship inertia rather than performance evidence.

This is the pattern SHRM's talent trends research identifies as one of the most consistent drivers of poor recruitment outcomes: the mismatch between service type and search type. The problem was not that external HR recruitment services were being used — it was that the wrong services had been chosen for each search.

What Changed: Matching Service to Search

The restructure was based on a simple principle: each role type should be matched with a HR recruitment service whose demonstrated specialism covers exactly that discipline. Not broadly adjacent — exactly that.

We used the company's role inventory to create three distinct search categories. Technical and product roles went to a specialist tech recruiter with deep sourcing capability in exactly the disciplines required — similar to the specialist pipeline model used by platforms like LinkedIn Talent Solutions that segment candidates by specific function rather than broad category.

Finance, legal, and compliance roles went to a boutique firm with an exclusively professional services focus and a track record of placements in exactly those disciplines. Operations, customer success, and generalist roles went to a well-networked mid-size agency with strong local market depth in Dublin specifically.

None of the original three agencies were retained for the search. This was a difficult conversation. It required the head of HR to communicate clearly that the issue was fit, not performance — that the agencies had not underdelivered in absolute terms, but that they had been given searches they were not optimally placed to run. The conversation was handled honestly, professionally, and quickly.

The Briefing Overhaul

The second major change was the quality of the briefs given to each new HR recruitment service. The original briefing process had been a thirty-minute phone call followed by a job description. The new process was a structured ninety-minute session for each search category, covering six specific areas.

First: the role context. Not the job description — the actual business problem the role was solving, the team it was joining, and what success looked like at thirty, sixty, and ninety days. Second: the compensation range, pre-approved by the CFO, so no time would be wasted presenting candidates whose expectations would not be met. Third: the must-have criteria, clearly separated from the nice-to-haves, with explicit guidance on what the service should screen for and what they should not screen out. Fourth: the candidate profile — not just qualifications but career stage, working style, and context that would help the recruiter write compelling, specific outreach rather than generic messages.

Fifth: the employer brand narrative — what made this company and these roles genuinely interesting, specific to what a candidate in each discipline would care about. Glassdoor's employer research consistently shows that personalised outreach referencing specific role benefits outperforms generic recruitment messages by a significant margin. Sixth: the timeline and communication expectations — how quickly the service was expected to deliver a first shortlist, how candidate feedback would be given, and who had authority to move candidates forward at each stage.

The Technology Layer

All three HR recruitment services were required to manage their pipelines through a shared Greenhouse workspace, giving the HR team real-time visibility into candidate status across all twelve searches simultaneously.

This replaced a system of email threads and spreadsheet updates that had been creating information lag — the HR team frequently did not know a candidate had dropped out until three days after the recruiter was aware. Using a shared ATS platform eliminated that lag and allowed the head of HR to manage twelve parallel searches without twelve parallel administrative processes.

The transparency also changed the dynamic with the HR recruitment services. When their pipeline is visible, recruiters move faster. There is no buffer between their activity and the client's view of it. This accountability is not adversarial — it is simply the professional standard that good HR recruitment services should meet and be comfortable meeting.

Days One Through Thirty: The First Shortlists

Within seven days of the redesigned briefs, all three HR recruitment services had delivered first shortlists. Not preliminary longlists of broadly qualified candidates. Shortlists: three to five candidates per role, each of whom had been screened against the specific criteria, had confirmed their interest in the role and company, and had compensation expectations within range.

The interview-to-shortlist ratio was significantly higher than anything the company had experienced before. In the previous process, the HR team had been interviewing roughly one in five candidates presented. In the first two weeks of the new approach, they were interviewing three in five — a direct consequence of better briefing and better service-role matching.

By day thirty, six of the twelve roles had candidates at the offer stage. Three offers had been signed. The head of HR described the first month as "faster than anything we've run before — and we were doing less administrative work per hire, not more."

Days Thirty Through Sixty: The Close

The remaining six roles were filled in the second month. Two required additional sourcing because the first shortlists had not produced a candidate the hiring managers wanted to move forward with — in both cases, the feedback was used immediately to refine the brief rather than simply repeating the original search.

The verbal offer process was streamlined. Compensation approvals had been pre-staged for all twelve roles before briefing began. When a hiring manager wanted to make an offer, the call happened the same day. The formal documentation followed within twenty-four hours. Two candidates were considering competing offers during the process — both were closed before the competing offer moved to written stage because the company's offer process moved faster.

By day sixty: twelve roles filled, zero compromise hires, offer acceptance rate of one hundred percent. The total agency spend was comparable to what the company had been paying during the six months of failed searching — but distributed more efficiently, with clear return. Deloitte's Human Capital research describes this kind of partnership restructure as a shift from "recruitment as administration" to "recruitment as strategy" — and the difference in outcome is exactly what the description suggests.

Three Things That Made the Difference

Specialism matching. The single highest-leverage change was ensuring each HR recruitment service was running the searches it was genuinely best placed to run. This sounds obvious. Most companies do not do it because it requires the uncomfortable work of changing existing agency relationships.

Brief quality. A ninety-minute structured brief is not a significant investment. The difference it makes to the quality and speed of what a HR recruitment service can deliver is enormous. Recruiters work from the information they are given. Better information produces better results — every time.

Technology and visibility. Shared pipeline access eliminates information lag, holds all parties accountable, and reduces the administrative burden on the internal HR team. It is a basic professional standard in 2026. Any HR recruitment service unwilling to work transparently in a shared system is worth questioning.