Case Studies

How Axe Talent solves hard hiring problems · By the Axe Talent team

Three searches, each hard for a reason you can name. A cleared pool already exhausted by the client's own recruiters. A government budget that could not cover the clearances it required. A global candidate count you could fit in one room. Natalia Rostova and her team ran all three. Axe Talent has placed over 300 candidates across 18 countries since 2021, in defense, tech, and academia.

Two Chief Systems Engineers with Top Secret clearance

BAE Systems, New Hampshire, US. BAE's internal recruiters had contacted every cleared systems engineer near the site. The team searched the whole country for cleared engineers in expensive states, where a New Hampshire salary buys a different life, then rebuilt the offer around relocation, a sign-on bonus and PhD tuition. Both seats filled. One hire made Director within a year.

Cleared engineers for an EU national security project

Government defense project, Europe. Late-delivery penalties turned every resignation into an invoice, on a budget fixed before the search began. The team went through the roster seat by seat, put local cleared engineers only where the work touched restricted material, and funded them with remote hires elsewhere. Milestones landed ahead of schedule. The local Ministry of Defense confirmed its satisfaction.

Compiler Engineering Lead for a global Web3 startup

Nomic Labs (HardHat). The brief called for someone who had invented a programming language and could run a department, and those people are employed and finished with job boards. The team searched by evidence, found the candidate at Meta, and held the offer against TechCrunch-featured competition. The lead is running Nomic's engineering team.

The thread

All three were won the same way: name the real constraint out loud, work from evidence a candidate leaves in public, and rebuild the offer around what the person actually wants. That discipline now runs our university searches, where the evidence is a publication record: venue quality, the citation curve, grants held as principal investigator, every metric with its source named. Axe Talent is the first AI-native agency recruiting researchers for universities and industry with its own AI tools.

Start a search

Write to Natalia Rostova, Axe Talent Founder & Executive Headhunter with the role and team context, or book 20 minutes on Natalia's Calendar.