17. March 2026
Why I Started BuildIn Talent
Founder Story
For most of my career I have worked inside growing businesses helping them hire people. These were often companies that were expanding quickly — winning new work, building new teams and trying to scale at pace. Hiring was always an important part of that growth, but it was also one of the areas that consistently caused the most frustration.
Over time I began to notice the same pattern appearing in company after company. A role would open unexpectedly, a team would need to grow quickly, or a key employee would leave. Suddenly hiring became urgent. Managers were busy running the business and didn’t have the time or systems in place to run a structured recruitment process. The easiest solution was usually to call a recruitment agency.
In many cases that worked in the short term. Agencies would send candidates, interviews would be arranged and eventually the role would be filled. But a few months later another role would appear, and the process would start all over again. Another agency search. Another recruitment fee. Another reactive hire.
Over time those fees began to add up. For a £50,000 role, recruitment fees can easily reach £7,500 to £12,500. For businesses hiring multiple people each year, that can quickly turn into tens of thousands of pounds spent simply bringing people into the organisation.
What became clear to me was that the real issue wasn’t recruitment agencies themselves. Many agencies do good work and play an important role in the hiring market. The deeper problem was that most businesses simply hadn’t built the internal capability to hire effectively themselves. There were no structured hiring processes, no employer branding strategy, no consistent approach to attracting candidates and no long-term talent pipeline.
Because those foundations didn’t exist, every new hire effectively started from zero. Recruitment became reactive rather than strategic, and agencies became the default solution whenever a vacancy appeared.
Interestingly, the businesses that seemed to hire most successfully approached recruitment very differently. They didn’t necessarily avoid recruitment agencies entirely, but they had invested in building strong internal hiring systems. They had clear employer branding, consistent job marketing, structured interview processes and talent pipelines they could draw from when roles opened.
In other words, they treated recruitment as infrastructure rather than a one-off service.
Once those foundations were in place, hiring became far easier and far more predictable. Roles were filled faster, candidate quality improved and reliance on expensive recruitment fees reduced significantly.
After seeing this pattern repeatedly, the idea behind BuildIn Talent became clear. Many businesses don’t actually need more recruiters they need better hiring infrastructure. They need the systems, processes and strategies that allow them to attract and hire talent directly.
BuildIn Talent was created to help organisations build exactly that capability. Instead of paying recruitment agencies every time a role opens, businesses can develop internal hiring frameworks that allow them to consistently attract, hire and retain great people themselves.
Hiring the right people is one of the most important things any business will ever do. When companies build strong internal hiring systems, recruitment stops being a constant challenge and becomes a strategic advantage.
If you want to learn how your business can reduce recruitment costs and build a scalable hiring system, visit: