Four candidates, not forty.

We mapped the machining talent across a forty-mile radius before approaching anyone, identifying around 180 relevant engineers and prioritising the sixty who were realistically movable. Every approach was direct; nothing was advertised.

We ran the hires in two waves rather than eleven parallel searches. The first wave was the four senior appointments who would set the standard, and we deliberately delayed the volume hiring until those were in place so the seniors could be part of interviewing their own teams.

Every candidate was screened by a consultant who could hold a technical conversation, and we declined to send anyone we would not have hired ourselves.

We rewrote the role specifications with the engineering leads first, which took two sessions and removed about a third of the stated requirements. Several were aspirational rather than real and were filtering out good candidates.

All technical screening was done by a consultant with an engineering background, on a call rather than against a checklist. We committed to sending no more than four candidates per role and held to it.

We also restructured the interview loop with them, cutting it from five stages over four weeks to three over eight days, which turned out to matter more than anything else we did.

We went beyond Dublin from the outset rather than exhausting the local market first, running parallel searches into the UK, Poland and Portugal with relocation support built into the offer from the beginning.

We recruited the validation lead first and involved them in every subsequent hire, which improved both selection and the acceptance rate materially.

Contractor onboarding, right to work and compliant payroll were handled entirely by our operations team, so the site’s quality function was not pulled into administration during a critical period.

We addressed the finding directly in the first conversation with every candidate rather than letting them discover it later. Framed as a remediation programme with board sponsorship and budget, it became a reason to join rather than a reason to decline.

We prioritised the two senior appointments and gave them genuine input into the shape of the team beneath them, which we used openly as part of the pitch.

Every candidate was assessed on written analysis as well as interview, because the role output is written and interviews do not test that.

We proposed a different premise: recruit for transferable capability and fund the sector-specific knowledge. That required a genuine conversation with the engineering director about what was actually essential versus what was habit.

For every transition candidate we submitted a written mapping of what carried across, what did not, and what the first six months would realistically require. That document did more to build confidence than any interview.

We also worked with the client on a structured onboarding programme so that the argument we were making was actually supported once people arrived.

We started by writing the job specifications with them from first principles, based on what the function needed to deliver rather than on titles copied from elsewhere. That alone changed the shape of three of the five roles.

We built a simple, practical assessment: a real anonymised data set and a forecasting problem. It took candidates ninety minutes and it separated people who plan from people who report almost immediately.

We ran the searches sequentially, starting with the S&OP manager, so that each subsequent hire could be assessed by someone who would work with them.