A new facility means a cluster of specialized hires on a deadline — operations, engineering, trades — with no time to build a recruiting function first.
North America / Europe / Asia
Growing fasterthan youcan hire.
Specialist recruitment.
Built for growth.
Founder-led logistics and industrial companies don’t have a recruiting department. When expansion demands five specialized hires at once, that becomes the bottleneck. We become the department you don’t have.
Book a 30-minute call
Tell us what you’re building.
We’ll tell you what it takes to staff it.
Explore our experience
The people behind what’s next.
Logistics & global tradeHeavy industryMission-critical technology
average time to first shortlist
specialized placements across three continents
of placements still in role at 12 months
Growth doesn’t fail on strategy. It stalls on seats that stay empty.
When a new site, contract, funding round, or leadership change creates several specialized hires at once, recruitment becomes operational infrastructure.
The moment hiring
becomes the constraint
Where we come inCapital and commitments arrive before the team does. The hiring has to happen in weeks, not quarters.
A new ops or plant leader reshapes the team, and the hires that follow all land at once.
Every search starts from zero. No pipeline, no market data, no recruiting stack — just your own network, a job ad, and hope. It takes attention from the people who should be running the business, and it doesn’t hold.
How we work
Two problems.
Two operating models.
Single SearchOne critical role,
One critical role,
run end to end.
A dedicated consultant owns the search from kickoff to signed offer. Five stages, a written search plan, and a weekly steering call so you always know where it stands.
Throughout your search
Book a 30-minute callWeekly steering calls to review progress and surface problems early.
The search, step by step01 / 05
In-depth qualification
We learn your organization and what makes it worth joining, then build a candidate profile that separates the essentials from the nice-to-haves. We agree target companies, compensation, and your interview process.
A written search plan
You receive a written search plan after the kickoff. Nothing starts until both sides agree it’s right. It keeps the search honest and holds us both accountable to the same definition of success.
Sourcing & shortlist
We work our own network alongside Pitchbook, ZoomInfo Talent, and referrals to reach people who aren’t applying anywhere. Every candidate is interviewed by your consultant. You receive a shortlist of three to five.
Selection
Psychometric assessment supports the decision. We coordinate your internal interview stages, debrief you on every candidate, and run references and background checks before you commit.
Offer management
We work between you and the candidate through the verbal and written offer — the stage where searches most often fall apart, and the one worth having a third party in the middle of.
Not sure which one fits your situation?
Book a 30-minute callRecruitment process outsourcingA hiring function,
A hiring function,
without building one.
When the hiring won’t fit inside one search, we take over the process itself — our recruiters, our tools, our reporting, working as your talent team for as long as the growth lasts. You keep every hiring decision. We carry everything that leads up to it.
DiscoveryImplementationRecruitmentReporting
Three shapes it takes
Project
A defined hiring push with an end date: a new site, a won contract, a plant coming online. We build the pipeline, run the process, and hand it back when the roles are filled.
On demand
If your bottleneck is sourcing, screening, or coordinating interviews, we take that piece and leave the rest with your team.
Ongoing
We run recruitment as a standing function — sourcing, screening, scheduling, offers, reporting — so hiring stops being something you rebuild from scratch.
It starts with discovery.
Before anyone is contacted, we map how hiring runs in your business today: where roles stall, what each hire costs, and where you lose candidates. That becomes an implementation plan you sign off on. We then report on time to hire, cost per hire, and pipeline health.
Every candidate, every time.
Each candidate is assessed against your requirements, interviewed on capability and fit, and given technical or behavioural assessment where the role calls for it. References and background checks come before an offer.
When RPO is the wrong answer
If you need one critical hire, Single Search is the better fit — and we will say so on the call. RPO fills permanent roles; it is not temporary staffing.
Our sectors
What we staff.
A narrow set of industries on purpose.
Depth is what lets us reach people who aren’t visible.
Roles we place
- Customs Compliance Manager
- Trade Compliance Specialist
- Classification Specialist
- Customs Broker
- Logistics Manager
- Operations Manager
Specialized searches across logistics and global trade.
Talk through your hiring needsProof in practice
Recent work.
One critical hire or a hundred and fifty.
Recent engagements across three continents.
Single Search / Logistics & global trade / North AmericaA 30-day target,
A 30-day target,
filled in three weeks.
A customs brokerage needed a Compliance Manager immediately, in a highly competitive credentialed market. With no internal benchmark data, we built the candidate profile and market map from scratch.
3weeks
Filled against a 30-day target.
RPO / Maritime & shipbuilding / Asia150 roles filled
150 roles filled
to stand up a shipyard.
A shipping company building its shipbuilding operation from the ground up, with 150 vacancies to fill and no internal recruiting capacity at that scale.
150roles filled
65 days average time to hire.
RPO / Energy & utilities / Europe35 roles that had
35 roles that had
sat open for 100 days.
A national gas operator hiring across technical and non-technical functions. The positions had been open an average of 100 days before the engagement started.
35roles filled
90% hiring manager satisfaction.
A partner. Not a handoff.
Maria
Marengo.
15+ years
Building recruitment functions
across four continents.
Meet the person
behind the search.
Connect with Maria Maria Marengo has spent more than 15 years building recruitment functions across four continents — in mining, oil and gas, renewable energy, technology, healthcare, and customs brokerage.
Her background runs through human resources, talent acquisition, and change management, which is why her work usually starts with structure rather than a shortlist: how hiring should run, who owns which decision, and what a good hire actually looks like in your market.
Your search is led personally, start to finish. Behind that sits a team with more than 5,000 specialized placements across three continents.
Recruitment projects led
Client names withheld by agreement.
CanadaMining equipment
Built and coached the hiring operation
Central EuropeIndustrial gases
Discovery, implementation and coaching
United StatesRenewable energy
Supported the project foundation
East AfricaOil & gas
Foundation and operational coaching
AustraliaOil & gas
Project structure and assessment center
United StatesMedical devices
Project structure and assessment center
EuropeAirline
Transformation and operational coaching
A few answers before we talkQuestions
Questions
clients ask.
We need several people, not one. Can you handle that?
Yes — it’s most of what we do. We run searches in sequence rather than taking on everything at once, so each role gets real attention. On the call we’ll map out a realistic order and timeline for the roles you need.
How do your fees work?
It depends on the roles, the seniority, and how the work is structured. We’ll walk you through the numbers on the call — nothing to sign before you understand the cost.
We don’t have an HR team. Is that a problem?
It’s the norm for the companies we work with. Most of our clients are founder-led with no internal recruiter, which is exactly why hiring has become the bottleneck.
How can a shortlist arrive in 72 hours?
Because the mapping work is already done. We recruit in a narrow set of sectors, which means the people qualified for your role are usually already known to us — we’re making a call, not starting a search from zero.
What is RPO, in plain terms?
Recruitment process outsourcing means handing the hiring process itself to an outside team rather than buying one placement at a time. We supply the recruiters, the tooling, and the reporting, and run sourcing, screening, and coordination as if we were your internal talent team. You keep every hiring decision.
How is RPO different from a recruitment agency?
An agency works role by role. RPO takes ownership of the process across many roles, with one consistent standard, one set of numbers, and a team that improves your hiring. For a single critical hire, our Single Search is the better buy.
Let’s build what’s next
Tell us what
you’re staffing.
Thirty minutes. You describe what you’re building and the roles it needs; we tell you honestly what it would take and whether we’re the right firm for it.
Book a 30-minute callm.marengo@pragmatictalentpartners.com