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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.

Where we are

The business in four numbers

9 days

Median time to first shortlist

3.4

Interviews per placement, on average

94%

Contract engagements extended past month three

12

Countries our engineers work from

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.

Team member name

Founder

Background, previous companies, and why this business exists. Two or three sentences.

Team member name

Technical screening lead

Who runs the technical screens, what they built before this, and what they look for.

Team member name

Client partner

Who runs intake calls and manages client relationships day to day.

Placeholder profiles, using initials rather than stock photography — we would rather show nothing than show people who do not work here.

Details

The boring but necessary part

Registered entity
Northbound Talent Ltd