Six hires in two months: a Bangkok team built from zero

The client was seed funded and early stage, with a mostly remote team spread across the region, and was establishing its first regional base in Bangkok. The brief was the whole team: six hires in a single retained project, spanning data engineering, software engineering, analysts and a Head of HR. There was no internal HR function, and we were the first recruitment partner the company had engaged.

The bar was extremely high. Both founders came from MBB, and the interview process reflected it: technical testing plus consulting-style case interviews, run at MBB standard. The roles also needed Thai nationals with near-fluent English, a genuinely scarce combination in this market.

And seed funding meant the client could not spend its way through the search the way heavily funded startups do, paying whatever it takes for proven names. The bar was not going to move, so the target had to: not people already at the top of the market, but people on their way there, with all of the ability and most of their rise still ahead of them.

Because the project was retained, a dedicated delivery team worked it rather than a single consultant fitting it around other roles. Six roles across four disciplines, one committed team, one process.

The targeting followed from the constraint. We looked for candidates with an international background through education or work, consulting experience from firms whose training matched the bar, and the appetite to move into an early stage business. All six hires were strong in different ways; what they shared was clearing an interview process that filtered out most of the market.