How we helped Starling scale their engineering team by 225%

Before partnering with Talentful, Starling Bank was entirely reliant on agencies and direct applications for new hires. Candidates were managed through the hiring process by a variety of people from differing teams, creating large inefficiencies in between stages. While the hiring process wasn’t completely broken, Starling’s agency spend was high, and focus was being pulled away from growing the Engineering team and other high priority areas of the business.

In September, the focus of Engineering hiring shifted to Starling’s Southampton office. This created the added challenge of a more limited pool of candidates and reinforced the need to approach talent in a more tailored and personalised way.

Over a 12 month partnership with Starling Bank, Talentful delivered against an initial target of increasing the Engineering team from 60 to 100. When this target was amended to 120, Talentful once again surpassed it, ultimately leaving Starling with 135 engineers in total (225% team growth across the project).

On top of this, the Talentful team was able to deliver training to the in-house team, provide valuable documentation for future success and host three tech events to raise Starling’s profile. Over the course of the project, Starling Bank saved £184,766 vs. traditional agency models and enjoyed an effective rate of 10.39%.