Join Our Company — the engagement

Building a forward thinking hiring and onboarding system

Some hiring problems you can fix with a good field manual. Others are more embedded — visible, but resistant to fixing, because they involve stakeholders who aren't aligned, or because the real issue sits in how the organisation thinks about what it's hiring for, not just how it runs the process. When that's the case, a book is a starting point, not a solution.

This is the work for exactly that situation. The Join Our Company engagement works with your hiring managers and people partners together to see where the process is actually breaking, rebuild what needs rebuilding, and develop the capability that holds it in place afterwards. It ends with a functioning system — not a better understanding of why the current one doesn't work.

Not a workshop. Not a training session. A diagnostic and advisory engagement, run alongside the people who'll own the result.

Where this comes from

The approach comes from several years running hiring and onboarding for a technology team scaling 100% year on year — a team that went from decent at hiring to known for it. Benchmarks from that period, still reasonable now: churn around 3%, well below the UK norm for technology businesses; around ten days from first contact to decision; and most hires arriving through word of mouth and reputation rather than paid recruitment channels, with unsuccessful candidates recommending the company to friends.

That experience, and later executive positions in HR, became a field manual — and the field manual became this engagement. The same thinking, applied directly inside your process rather than handed over to read.

What we actually do

Over the course of a week, we work through where your hiring and onboarding really break — not where they look broken. We rebuild the touchpoints that matter, from the first recruiter call to the first fortnight, designed from the candidate's perspective rather than the organisation's convenience. And we develop the capability in your hiring managers and people partners, so the system holds after the engagement ends.

The work is collaborative by design. The people who run the process are in the room throughout — because a system handed down doesn't hold, and a system built together does.

Who this is for

Organisations whose hiring is sub-optimal in ways that are invisible, or visible but resistant — multiple stakeholders who aren't aligned, or root issues in what's being hired for, not just how it's run. People leaders and hiring managers who want a functioning system at the end, not a report. And teams about to scale who want the process right before bad habits set in.

Prefer to start with the book?

If your hiring problem is more contained, the self-serve version may be all you need. Join Our Company — the field manual is the free book this engagement grew from: the full framework, the language, and the specific practices, yours to apply directly. Start there, and come back if the problem turns out to be bigger than the book.

Start a conversation

The work always starts with a conversation. We'll spend twenty minutes understanding where your hiring actually stands, then propose something honest about whether we can help — and what it would look like if we can.