Building world-class teams for the UK’s largest AI research institute.

Brief

In 2024, EIT partnered with us to scale its AI and ML research capability, shortly after announcing its £130m strategic alliance with the University of Oxford.

Competing with the likes of Google Deepmind and Meta for top AI and ML talent, they needed a recruitment partner to be able to engage truly world-class data, software, and systems engineering talent. They were looking to bring aboard the country’s top experts who could thrive in a research-led, interdisciplinary environment and help translate science into real-world solutions to the world’s problems.

Challenges

EIT had aggressive growth targets and, despite already achieving a 300% headcount increase year-on-year at the time of engagement, still needed to build out multiple new teams to sustain its expansion and meet ambitious project goals.

Given the calibre of talent required, they needed confidence that a recruitment partner could engage credibly with senior technical talent while representing the Institute’s mission and values with the right level of expertise and professionalism. Previous agencies had fallen short here.

EIT was also competing with global tech leaders, including Google, Meta, Isomorphic Labs, Anthropic, OpenAI, and IBM, who were all vying for the same niche talent pool. To remain competitive, they needed detailed market intel and guidance on structuring offers that were both compelling and sustainable.

Approach

• We appointed a dedicated recruitment liaison officer to serve as a singular point of contact between ourselves and EIT. With access to all calendars, they managed scheduling, coordination and feedback loops across multiple hiring teams at EIT creating a frictionless process.
• The liaison role proved essential in maintaining alignment between EIT stakeholders and our own team, particularly as we were running simultaneous searches across several functions with input from multiple decision makers.
• We deployed a four-person specialist team, each focused on hiring into separate AI research, data engineering and software systems disciplines.
• We positioned EIT’s mission and credibility to attract top talent, highlighting the world-class leadership, newly announced partnerships and funding, and the globally-recognised mission to create engagement from the target candidate pools.
• We maintained constant process optimisation, continually refining scope and interview flow to sustain project pace.
• We provided deep market intelligence for high-value roles, collecting first-hand intel from competing companies on salary and equity options in order to shape packages.
• The project remains active and we continue to support their ongoing team expansion across AI, data, software engineering and product.