Reducing time-to-hire by 38% and tripling qualified engineering applications

The company was at an inflection point: a successful Series B, a product with clear market fit, and a growth plan that required hiring 120 additional people in 12 months — 60 of them engineers. Their existing recruitment process relied primarily on LinkedIn job posts, employee referrals, and two external headhunters. Average time-to-hire for engineering roles was 94 days. Cost-per-quality-applicant — measured by the talent team as applicants who reached the technical screening stage — was $890.

The volume problem was real: for every 100 applications, approximately 12 reached technical screening. The rest were unqualified — wrong seniority, wrong tech stack, or wrong motivational fit. The talent team was spending 60% of their time screening unqualified candidates. Meanwhile, the roles were staying open longer than growth targets allowed, creating compounding organisational risk.

The root cause was an employer brand problem. The company's LinkedIn Life Page was non-existent. Their Company Page said almost nothing about engineering culture, the technical challenges they were solving, or why an experienced software engineer would choose them over a FAANG offer or a more established local tech company. Their job postings read like every other tech company's job postings.

TalentIQ™ analysis benchmarked their current employer brand signals against the 20 fastest-growing tech companies in Singapore that had successfully scaled engineering teams. The analysis identified three primary gaps: no authentic technical culture content, no visible engineering leadership voices, and job postings that emphasised requirements rather than opportunity.

We built a LinkedIn Life Page from scratch — featuring engineering team spotlights, genuine behind-the-scenes content from product and tech decisions, and a video series where engineers talked about the specific technical problems they were solving. This content was produced with the engineering team's active participation: real voices, real opinions, real technical depth.

Job posting copy was rewritten around outcomes and opportunities rather than requirements. Each engineering role's LinkedIn post was accompanied by a targeted Sponsored Job campaign using TalentIQ™ audience parameters — senior engineers at companies with relevant stack experience, with seniority filters to exclude junior-level applicants. Recruiter InMail sequences were designed for passive candidates: personalised, technically credible, and referencing specific aspects of the role's technical challenges.

Within 60 days, application quality had transformed. The proportion of engineering applications reaching technical screening increased from 12% to 42% — a 65% reduction in unqualified applicants. This meant the talent team was spending their screening time on candidates who had a realistic chance of progressing, rather than rejecting 88% of applications at the first stage.

Time-to-hire for engineering roles decreased from 94 days to 58 days — a 38% improvement — primarily because the quality filter at the top of the funnel was now better calibrated. Cost-per-quality-applicant dropped from $890 to $310. The Life Page content drove a 3× increase in page followers, and engineering candidates began mentioning specific Life Page content in their cover messages — a clear signal that the employer brand was reaching and resonating with the right audience.

The company hit its 12-month hiring plan on schedule. Engineering headcount reached the growth target without extending timelines or increasing the headhunter retainer fees that had previously been a significant budget line.