For engineers
You have been sent roles that turned out to be nothing like the advert, by people who could not answer a single technical question about them. You will get something different here: the real stack, the real team, the real salary, from someone who has done the work.
It is not forwarded to anyone, ever, until you have heard which company it is and said yes. No speculative sends, and no using your CV to open a door with a client.
What the team actually works on, what the codebase is like, whether the hardware exists yet. If we do not know, we find out rather than guess.
The real range, before you spend an evening on an application. If it is below what you are on now, we will tell you that at the start.
You will hear back after every stage, with the reason. A no with a reason is worth more than silence, and silence is what most agencies give you.
Who you are meeting, what they tend to ask, and what the team is worried about. You should walk in knowing more than the job advert told you.
If now is not the right time, we will note what you are looking for and stop contacting you. No monthly check-ins about roles that do not fit.
Most engineering CVs fail for the same few reasons, and all of them are fixable in an evening. This is what we would change before sending yours anywhere.
01Say what was yours. "Worked on a motor controller" tells a hiring engineer nothing; "wrote the FOC loop and the CAN stack" tells them everything.02Name the parts. The MCU, the bus, the toolchain, the RTOS. Technical readers scan for them and recruiters cannot invent them.03Say whether it shipped. Prototype, pilot or production is the single most useful fact about any project.04Cut the skills matrix. A table of every acronym rated out of five is the first thing an engineer stops believing.05Keep the constraint in. Memory budget, power budget, certification, deadline. Constraints are what make the work hard and interesting.06Two pages. Three if you have twenty years of it. Nobody reads the fourth.We place contractors as well as permanent staff, usually for a specific deliverable: a board bring-up, a certification push, a firmware port or cover for a deadline.
Rate, length, notice, and whether the engagement is inside or outside IR35, all settled and in writing before day one.
Timesheets and invoicing handled on a fixed cycle. If a client is slow, that is our problem to chase, not yours.
If the brief changes under you, or the scope quietly doubles, tell us and we will have the conversation with the client.
Reply within one working day
Send the stack, the team it sits in and what would make you say no at interview. If we are not the right firm for it, we will say so on the first call rather than take the brief anyway.