The team

• Building a high performing, high achieving delivery team. Working out the shape it needs, recruiting into it, and developing the people already here.
• Effectively coaching the team, using expertise alongside data to nurture informed decisions and processes. Enabling the team to manage priorities and reach expectations.
• Setting standards and holding them, with honest conversations when they slip.
• Craft development. Their consultants should get measurably better at brief taking, mapping, candidate approach and conversion while they work here. That means real coaching, call and pitch review, and time protected for it.
• Building the culture of the team: standards, energy and accountability.
• Building marketplace knowledge, so every consultant becomes a sector specialist. Promote thought leadership and market insights captured in delivery to support wider sales and marketing teams.

Making remote work

• Designing the operating rhythm: what meetings happen, how often, and just as importantly what stops.
• Building visibility so progress on an assignment is obvious without anyone having to chase it.
• Working out what happens live and what happens asynchronously, across time zones.
• Making coaching work at distance, including reviewing calls you were not on.
• Getting new starters to their first placement without a desk neighbour to answer the first month of questions.

Stakeholders, inside and out

• Making sure briefs, expectations and capacity line up with the client leads before anything is committed to, and saying so honestly when they do not.
• Will work closely alongside the client engagement team.
• Holding the external relationships delivery depends on: candidate networks, systems suppliers, partner networks.
• Representing delivery in commercial planning and forecasting.

What they are looking for

• Permanent recruitment delivery experience in technology. You need to have done this work yourself, not managed it from a distance. This is the part that cannot flex, because permanent is where their immediate growth has to come from.
• A 360 background. You have carried a full desk at some stage: winning the work, taking the brief, delivering it and closing it. You will not be asked to do that here. What is wanted is the commercial understanding that only comes from having done it, so that when you design a process or challenge a brief you know what it is worth and what it costs.
• Contract exposure. You will own contract delivery as well as permanent, so you need to understand how it works: rates, margin, extensions, redeployment and the aftercare that keeps runners running. Deep contract experience is a bonus. Being able to hold your own with it is a requirement.
• You will also need
  • Real depth in delivery craft: brief taking, search and mapping strategy, sourcing technique, candidate engagement, offer and counter offer management. This will be explored properly at interview.
  • A track record of building or substantially improving a delivery team, and evidence of what changed as a result.
  • Coaching experience. You have made other recruiters better and can explain how.
  • Process and workflow design, with the reasoning behind it rather than just the steps.
  • Proven remote first leadership. Not that you have worked from home, but that you have built something that made a distributed team perform: the rhythm, the visibility, the coaching, the onboarding. You will be asked what you built.
  • Line management experience, including managing people you do not sit next to and across time zones.
  • A track record of getting things done through people who do not report to you, internally and externally.
  • Experience of a business where direction changes quickly, and the judgement to know when to hold your line and when the plan genuinely needs to change. You will be asked for an example of each.
  • Niche or specialist market experience within Technology 5 years+, where the population is finite and placements come from mapping and network rather than advertising response.
  • Competence with a recruitment CRM and dashboards, and the discipline to keep data clean enough to report from.
  • Commercial curiosity. You understand how a recruitment business makes money, not just how a desk does.
  • Experience in a small or medium sized, owner managed business, where leading and doing are the same job.
  • Practical use of artificial intelligence in your work, and the judgement to know where it does not belong.
• It would help if you had
  • Technical understanding in niche markets will be considered, alongside a willingness to learn new technologies.
  • European market experience, and some feel for how German hiring works.
  • German language. The working language is English, so this is a genuine nice to have.
  • Retained or search experience, including upfront fees, at senior executive to management level.
  • Any profit and loss or budget exposure.

How they work, and who this suits

The business is founder led, and that means the ground moves sometimes. They are looking for someone who can hold their line and deliver against clear objectives, and who can also tell when the plan genuinely needs to change rather than defending a process because it is theirs.

More than that, they want someone who spots what needs fixing without being asked, and then makes the case for it properly: what it is worth and why it matters, alongside what it costs, who has to do what, and what breaks in the meantime.

The person they have in mind

• Calm, because this is where the problems land and the team takes its temperature from you.
• Consistent, because in a remote team that is what replaces being seen: the same standard applied the same way, the one to one that happens when it was booked, feedback that sounds the same on a bad week as a good one.
• Focused enough to hold a few priorities and finish them, in a business where ideas arrive faster than anyone can action them.
• Patient with consultants learning their craft, with searches that take months, and occasionally with the business itself.
• And comfortable with a team that is growing and changing, because theirs is not finished. You will be recruiting into it, reshaping it and bringing new people in. If you need a settled team to do your best work, this will be frustrating.

My client is an equal opportunities employer. If you need any adjustment to the process, tell me and I will arrange it.