About
A small agency that would rather be trusted than large.
Northbound Talent places senior engineers with US and EU companies. We are deliberately narrow: remote engineering, senior level, and nothing we would need to be vague about.
Why we exist
The problem we kept running into
Remote hiring broke in two directions at once. Companies opened up to global candidates and immediately drowned — hundreds of applications per role, most of them unscreened, a growing share of them not who they claimed to be. Engineers went the other way: strong candidates sending careful applications into silence.
Both problems have the same root. Nobody in the middle is doing the actual work of assessment, so clients over-interview to compensate and engineers absorb the cost. We built the business around doing that assessment properly and showing our working, rather than around moving as many profiles as possible.
So we kept the business narrow and wrote the promises down. An agency that screens candidates itself, shows a client exactly what it checked, and publishes its fees is worth paying for in a way that a résumé forwarder never was.
Our numbers
The business in four numbers
Terms rather than traction. Every one of these is in the contract, which is the only kind of number worth publishing before there is an audited track record to point at.
3
Engineers on a typical shortlist
22%
Margin on contract work, shown on the invoice
90 days
Replacement guarantee on direct hires
1 day
To a reply for hiring teams, either way
How we work
Four things we hold to
Written down so you can tell us when we have drifted from them.
Say the number
Engineers see the client's budget and our margin before they agree to interview. Clients see what the engineer takes home. Hidden margins are the single biggest reason agencies are distrusted, and the fix is not complicated.
Fewer, better introductions
We are paid on placements, which creates an obvious pull toward volume. We resist it by capping shortlists at three and turning down searches we do not think we can fill. A shortlist you can act on is worth more than a longlist you cannot.
Answer either way
Every application gets a reply, including rejections, including the ones where the answer is an awkward one. Ghosting is cheap for us and expensive for the person waiting.
Nothing we would not put in writing
If a promise only exists on a first call, it is not a promise. Fee terms, reply times and the replacement guarantee are all published and all in the contract, which is a useful filter for whether we mean them.
Team
Who you will actually talk to
Small enough that the person who screens you is the person who briefs the client.
Intake
One person owns the search
The person who takes the client's brief is the person who reads your application. Nothing is passed to a sourcing desk that has never spoken to either side, which is where a brief usually gets flattened into a list of keywords.
Screening
A working engineer runs the technical screen
Screens are run by someone who has built the kind of system being hired for, not by a recruiter working from a rubric. Where we cannot screen a stack properly we say so and scope the search around it, rather than guessing and passing the guess on.
After the shortlist
No handover to an account manager
Whoever made the introduction is still on it at offer stage, through the start date and the first months of the engagement. There is no point in the process where you meet someone new who has to be brought up to speed on your own search.
Names and photographs go here once there are real ones to publish. Until then this is the honest version — what each stage involves and who owns it — rather than stock headshots of people who do not work here.
Details
The boring but necessary part
- General enquiries
- contact@northboundtalents.com