Founder story
Why I stopped selling resumes and started staffing engineering scope
Gridline began with a specific frustration: watching capital projects absorb weeks of schedule because nobody in the hiring chain could evaluate engineering work before it reached a hiring manager.
Chapter 01
The moment the model broke
I spent years in recruitment desks where the unit of work was the submittal. Success meant sending resumes quickly. Nobody measured whether the engineer on the other end could stand in a switchroom at two in the morning, read a functional test script, and tell the difference between a control sequence that had failed and an instrument that had drifted.
The pattern repeated across sectors. A commissioning manager would describe a level-four functional testing requirement, and the search would return maintenance technicians whose resumes contained the word commissioning. A protection engineer requisition would return electrical generalists. Every one of those submissions cost a hiring manager forty minutes and cost the project a week.
The problem was never candidate supply. It was that the first filter in the process had no technical vocabulary. Recruitment had industrialised the wrong step.
Chapter 02
Why engineering, and only engineering
Engineering hiring is one of the few white-collar markets where the cost of a wrong hire is measured in energisation dates, outage windows and safety exposure rather than in onboarding overhead. That asymmetry deserves a specialist discipline, not a horizontal recruitment product with an engineering vertical bolted onto it.
It is also a market where competence is legible if you know where to look. Commissioning levels, relay coordination settings, loop check records, punchlist closeout, arc-flash boundaries, network topologies: an engineer's real depth shows up in how they describe the boring parts of the job. You can only hear that if you understand it.
So Gridline exists to do one thing properly. We recruit engineers and engineering leaders for infrastructure that has to work: power, data centers, industrial automation, construction delivery, manufacturing and mission-critical facilities.
Chapter 03
Why specialisation is a technical decision, not a marketing one
Specialisation is often presented as positioning. In practice it is an operating constraint that changes what a firm can honestly claim. A recruiter covering twenty disciplines cannot maintain a live picture of who has recently commissioned a 2N electrical topology, which relay platforms a candidate has actually configured, or what a rotational assignment does to availability.
Narrowing the surface area is what makes the pipeline real. It lets a recruiter build a discipline map rather than a keyword search, hold a credible view of pay behaviour, and tell a client an uncomfortable truth about a rate or a location before the search starts rather than four weeks into silence.
It also means declining work. We turn down searches outside our sectors and disciplines, because the moment we accept them, every benchmark we quote becomes less trustworthy.
Chapter 04
The philosophy I want the firm judged on
Treat the requisition as an engineering document. It has requirements, constraints, tolerances and failure modes, and it deserves the same interrogation as a design basis. Most bad searches are badly specified searches.
Be the person who says the hard thing early. If a scope needs two roles rather than one, or a pay band cannot buy the experience described, that conversation belongs in the first hour of intake.
Finish the job. A presented candidate is not an outcome. An engineer who is productive on site, cleared through site induction, and confirmed by the hiring manager is an outcome.
What became the firm's principles
The commitments that came out of that experience
Technical literacy is non-negotiable
Every recruiter is trained on the systems in their discipline before they run a search: what commissioning levels mean, what a coordination study contains, why a PLC platform is not interchangeable with a controls architecture. Literacy is assessed, not assumed.
Constraints are surfaced, not absorbed
Where a requirement conflicts with market reality, we name the conflict and offer options: adjust the band, split the scope, extend the window, or accept a longer search. We do not quietly run an impossible search to look agreeable.
Evidence over assertion
Claims about a candidate are backed by specifics: which systems, which phase, which standard, which document they authored or signed. If we cannot evidence it, we do not put it in a submission.
One accountable owner per search
A named recruiter owns intake, screening, presentation and post-placement follow-up. Handoffs between an account manager and a delivery team are where technical nuance dies.
Looking forward
Where this is going
The long-term ambition is not to be a larger agency. It is to become the reference point engineering leaders use when they need to understand a labour market before they commit to a schedule: what a discipline realistically costs, how long it takes to secure, and what the market will not give you at any price.
That means the firm has to publish its thinking, document its method, and be specific enough to be wrong in public. Everything in our knowledge center exists for that reason.
Founder and Managing Director, Gridline
Keep going
Where the philosophy shows up
Test the claim on a live requisition
The fastest way to judge a specialist firm is to give it the role that has already defeated a generalist process.