Role: Senior Engineering Manager · Company: CarTrawler · Partner: Ryanair
The brief
The engineering function serving CarTrawler’s Ryanair partnership had to grow from a small founding team to more than 24 engineers, fast, while the same people kept delivering product work. There was no hiring bar, no interview process and no candidate experience to speak of. All three had to be built while the roles were being filled.
The trap
Speed and quality pull against each other at volume. At 24+ hires it is easy to lower the bar a little with each compromise and not notice until the team is different from the one you meant to build. The harder version of the problem was consistency: some of the people who would be interviewing had never hired anyone before.
What I built
- A structured interview with a small number of signal areas that every interviewer looked for, so two panels would reach the same conclusion about the same candidate.
- Interviewer training before anyone joined a panel, and a calibration step after each interview cycle to catch drift early.
- Candidate experience as my job, not an afterthought. Fast responses, clear feedback, respectful rejections. In a tight market, reputation compounds, and the people you turn down talk to the people you want.
Outcome
All 24+ roles were filled. Interviewer confidence went up across the team. Several candidates said the interview experience was a reason they accepted. The process documentation was picked up and reused for subsequent hiring cycles at CarTrawler.