A bench you have worked with before

The migration has a date and the date has been promised upward. The skill you need for the next four months is one your permanent team does not have yet. You brief an agency on Monday and by Thursday you have six CVs, each with the right words in it. You interview three, pick one, and in the first week the gap opens: the Kubernetes was a certification, the low-latency work was a nightly batch, and nobody who sent the CV had asked.

Specialist contract hiring fails in a particular way, and the fix is not more CVs.

Why specialist contract hiring fails

The CV was matched, not read. A search for “AWS, Terraform, Kubernetes, Python” returns a long list, and a long list looks like progress. Those words sit on the CV of the engineer who designed the landing zone and the engineer who attended the course, and the search cannot tell them apart.

Nobody spoke to the engineer about the work. The call before submission, where there was one, covered availability, rate and notice, not what they built last time, what broke, or what they would do with your platform.

So the first week finds the gap, and because a specialist is hired to do what your team cannot do yet, nobody can cover while they catch up. The way through is to stop the CV being the first contact anyone has with the person.

What a bench actually is

Not a database. A bench is specialist engineers and leads we have worked with before. We have seen their work land: we know the platform they built, and we have heard from the engineering lead who ran them how they behaved under pressure. And they take a call from us because of the relationship, which matters when the best person for your seat is mid-contract elsewhere and would never answer an advertisement.

A bench is not a promise to cover everything. Where ours is thin we say so and run a short, targeted search rather than send you the nearest thing we have.

How we screen a specialist

A conversation about the work, held by someone who understands it, before anyone sends you a name.

The system they built: what it had to do, what constrained it, what they would do differently now. The incident they carried: what broke, what they did in the first hour, what they changed so it did not recur. The trade-off they made: consistency against latency, and what it cost.

Then the first 72 hours question. Here is the platform, the team and the date; you start Monday; what do you do in the first three days, and why? Engineers who have done it get specific immediately.

References come from the people they worked for, not the people who worked for them, and we take them before you meet the person.

The specialist areas, and what is scarce in each

Cloud and platform. Certifications are plentiful. Scarce are engineers who have run a production platform at scale in a regulated environment: landing zones, access models, Kubernetes under load.

Integration leads. Many can write an adapter. Few can own the integration layer across a program: the event backbone, the API standards, the sequencing between a legacy core and what is replacing it.

Cyber. Supply is heavy on governance and policy. Demand is for engineers who build security into platforms and pipelines and own identity and access.

Agile delivery and engineering leads. Scarce are leads who have run squads that shipped into production and carried it afterwards, rather than leads who have run the ceremonies.

Trading and market data technology. The pool in Sydney is small and known: order and execution management, feed handlers, low-latency pricing and risk, eFX, post-trade. A CV from a generalist agency is rarely the real thing. We recruit into trading and markets technology, and the founder has worked both sides of the street in financial services, sell-side and buy-side, so we know a feed handler from a dashboard that reads from one.

Contract or permanent, and converting the good ones

Contract suits the build: the migration, the new venue connection, the platform stand-up. Permanent suits what runs afterwards. The engineer who built it is usually the best person to run it, so decide the conversion terms before the contract starts, not at month five. Good contractors convert when the work stays interesting and the permanent package recognises what they are giving up.

We will not publish a rate card, because rates are set by scarcity and phase. A scarce skill in a build phase with a hard date commands a premium; the same skill in stabilisation does not. We tell you on the first call what the number needs to be, and whether the budget will reach the person you have described.

How the process works with us

A short brief: twenty minutes on the phone covering the system, the phase, the team, the date and the budget.

Then two or three people within days, not a stack of CVs, each with our assessment of what they have built and carried and why they fit this seat. You interview; we handle rate, contract and start, and check in with you and with them at the end of week one and month one.

That is what contract and interim hiring looks like when the people are known before the CV arrives, and why the heads of engineering and platform we work with stop asking for six CVs and start asking for the right two.

Questions clients ask