Our story

Since 2016

Referment started the way most boutique firms start. A few experienced recruiters, a phone, and a list of clients who needed people. We did the work for nearly a decade before we wrote a single line of code. In that time we’ve placed candidates into 15 of the top 20 hedge funds in the world (think Schonfeld, Balyasny, Winton, Jain Global, the most demanding clients in finance), alongside engineering teams in London, law practices in the City, and construction firms running sites across the UK.

So we know what good recruitment looks like, because we’ve done it. We also know what bad recruitment looks like, because we’ve watched the industry slide into it. Recruiters juggling forty roles at once. Commission incentives that push people to close on candidates nobody’s really sure about. CVs that nobody actually reads. The whole model is running on inertia, and the people inside it (recruiters included) deserve better.

We started thinking about what a version of this we’d actually want to use ourselves would look like. The answer turned out to be simple. Everything over email, so nobody’s calling you for a chat you didn’t ask for. A flat fee instead of commission, so the incentives line up with good hires instead of fast ones. Modern systems doing the heavy lifting in the background, so the time and money saved comes back to you. We built that. It’s the product now.

The founders

Alex has spent close to two decades in recruitment, across agency work, internal talent teams, and the kind of fast-growth businesses where the hiring bar keeps moving every quarter. He’s sat on every side of the table (the recruiter chasing the role, the in-house lead trying to keep a team together, the operator watching good candidates fall out of broken processes) and that’s the perspective the product is built from. A lot of what Referment does well is just Alex’s instinct for what the traditional model gets wrong, written down and turned into software.

Michael has spent the same stretch of time quietly engineering industries that hadn’t yet been engineered properly. In 2010 he launched InvestYourWay, the first robo advisor in the UK. At the time the phrase “consumer fintech” didn’t really exist as a category, and getting ordinary people to trust software with their savings was, to put it politely, an uphill conversation. He built it anyway. The thesis (that automation could do for personal investing what it had already done for institutional trading) turned out to be right by about a decade.

After that he founded Analytico, one of the largest crypto market makers in the world. Different industry, same underlying problem. How do you build a system that handles enormous volumes of data, makes thousands of decisions a second, and has to be right? It’s the kind of work that teaches you something specific: when systems quietly do the heavy lifting in the background, the humans on top can spend their time on the parts that actually need a human.

Recruitment is the next one. The same patterns apply (thousands of candidates, tight signal-to-noise, decisions that have to be right) and the industry has not, as far as we can tell, been engineered properly yet. So we’re engineering it. Alex on the recruitment side, Michael on the systems side, real recruiters on the relationships, modern software doing the reading and the writing and the chasing. None of the things that used to make the job miserable. That’s the bet, and so far it’s working.

What that means today

Practically, here’s what we are. A full recruitment service, the same kind you’d get from any senior recruiter, except the whole thing runs over email and the heavy lifting happens in the background. You brief us (a job spec, a paragraph, a back-and-forth, whatever works). We source, screen, and shortlist. A shortlist arrives in your inbox with the quick read on each candidate. You reply with who you like. We put you in direct contact for the interview.

Real recruiters oversee the relationship. The systems do the reading, the writing, the chasing, the parts that used to eat the working week. The cost savings come back to you in price. Flat fee, no commission, ever. Thirty-day free trial and you don’t need a card to start. If we can’t help inside that window, you just walk away.

That’s the story, more or less. If you want to see how it works in more detail, the rest of the site has the specifics.