Build lasting capability with a search shaped around the role, the work and your organisation. MENTARA supports role definition, candidate assessment and coordination through offer and onboarding.
Workforce Solutions
Permanent IT recruitment for specialist and senior roles
Build lasting capability with a search shaped around the role, the work and your organisation. MENTARA supports role definition, candidate assessment and coordination through offer and onboarding.
More in Workforce Solutions
How we can help
Planning
Agree the engagement before work begins
Define the role or service scope, location, responsibilities and commercial terms before committing. The proposed arrangement should reflect how the work will be directed and supported in practice.
How MENTARA works
What we do differently.
Approach
How a search runs.
01 Rewrite the brief
Turn a technology list into a description of the work, the decisions and the context. Frequently the most valuable part of the engagement, and it sometimes concludes the role should be structured differently.
02 Agree the process before sourcing
Stages, panel, timelines and feedback commitments settled first — because a process that cannot move at pace will lose the strongest candidates regardless of sourcing quality.
03 Source and assess
Direct approach and network rather than volume advertising, with real conversations about the role rather than keyword matching.
04 Support to offer and start
Honest expectation-setting on both sides through offer, notice and onboarding — the period when accepted offers are most often lost.
Questions
What buyers ask.
Do you work contingency or retained?
Both, and we will tell you which suits the role. Contingency is reasonable for roles with a deep candidate market. For senior, scarce or hard-to-specify roles, a retained or partially retained arrangement produces materially better work, because the assessment time is actually funded.
If we think a role is a poor fit for contingency, we will say so rather than take it on and under-invest in it.
You are new — how do you have a candidate network?
Through direct sourcing and professional networks rather than a large proprietary database, and we will not claim scale we do not have. For senior and specialist roles this is often the more effective route regardless.
For high-volume hiring across many roles at once, an established agency has a real advantage and we will tell you that.
What if the hire leaves quickly?
Guarantee terms and the qualifying period are agreed before the search begins. What we will also do is tell you honestly what we think went wrong, including when the answer implicates the role definition or the onboarding rather than the candidate.
Will you tell us if we should not hire?
Yes. Sometimes the honest answer is that the role as specified will not attract who you want at the budget available, that two roles have been merged into one nobody can fill, or that the work should be contracted rather than hired. All of those cost us the placement fee and all of them are the right advice.
06
Where MENTARA fits best.
Scope
We fit senior, specialist and hard-to-specify roles where getting it wrong is expensive and where the brief itself needs challenging before the search starts.
Volume hiring campaigns, graduate intakes and recruitment process outsourcing need infrastructure at a scale we are not built for.
Where this connects
Related decisions on this site.
One partner. One plan. Measurable outcomes.