SERVICES
Recruitment function design
This is a 2-tier offering. 1. Design and advisory on optimal Talent Acquisition operating model for your growth stage and business needs: in-house, embedded RPO, agency-led, or hybrid. 2. Attend and support with internal TA interviews and/or supplier discovery calls to help you select the right support for scaling your teams.
TA performance management design
Design metrics, KPIs, OKRs, SOPs and ways of working that enable you to track and manage recruitment performance.
TA tech stack advisory
Advice on the right tools to set up and scale your hiring function: - ATS & AI Recruitment tools - sourcing and job board platforms - scheduling and assessment solutions. This service can be extended to include attendance and support during discovery calls with vendors, cost evaluation, and post-trial efficiency reviews.
Market research & Competitive Intelligence
Structured research into how competitors are structuring their teams in your target functions. Research into compensation benchmarks, talent supply in target locations, and market trends. Direct insight for specific hiring and org decisions.
Fractional, embedded & short-term hiring
Senior hands-on hiring support for strategic and senior recruitment: fractional, embedded, or short-term full-time support for companies that need the capability without the permanent senior TA headcount.
Hiring blockers audit
Structured diagnostic when hiring has stalled, or attrition is rising. This service covers audit of role scoping, interview effectiveness, compensation, candidate sentiment, and talent supply - delivered with proposed remediation steps.
Interview process & Competencies design
Function-specific interview architecture: structure, competencies, scorecards, and evaluation frameworks - designed for one team at a time. Built based on in-depth discussions with your hiring teams to understand target commercial objectives and milestones, organisational culture, and critical candidate capabilities.
Recruitment performance audits
Analysis of whether you're tracking the right metrics - time-to-fill, funnel conversion, candidate drop-off, interview-to-offer ratios, and how to resolve underperformance issues.
ABOUT ME
I am Kristina, founder of Talent Ascent. I help scaling SaaS companies build the hiring strategy, team architecture, and recruitment capability they need to grow - without the cost or lead time of a full-time Head of TA.
Over the last decade, I've led hiring inside Deel, Disney+, and Amazon, partnering daily with Director-to-C-suite leaders globally. Earlier, I was a management consultant at Talent Intelligence, delivering senior-level consultancy work for Mars, Unilever, Philip Morris, and Royal Canin. I have also led executive recruitment work at BAT through one of the most challenging employer-brand pivots in consumer goods, which taught me how to sell a vision when the logo alone doesn't do the work.
MY APPROACH
A lot of my work is diagnostic. Hiring leaders come to me when hiring has stalled, attrition is rising, or a function isn't scaling the way it should. I work with leaders to find out why and discover mitigation levers. It's what I'm best at, and it's rooted in ten years of operator experience and an academic background in Organisational Psychology.
I created Talent Ascent for the work I'm genuinely best at and find most rewarding: strategic talent problems and building new functions from the ground up.
If you're building new functions, wondering how to leverage AI to accelerate recruitment, navigating a tricky "Head of" hire, or trying to figure out why your hiring isn't keeping pace with your growth - let's talk.
CASE STUDIES
Diagnosing a Female Leadership Attrition Crisis
A global FMCG business had been losing senior female sales leadership talent at an unsustainable rate, while also struggling to attract new talent.
Over the course of 8 weeks, a qualitative research study, including interviews with 20+ female sales leaders within the sector, surfaced a number of cultural and structural drivers behind the pattern.
A remediation report was delivered to the client CEO and HR leadership team, translating a costly attrition problem into a comprehensive mitigation strategy, outlining a range of corrective levers across culture change, benefits modification, and the introduction of mentorship programmes.
Building a Demand Gen function from Zero
Following an organisational restructure stemming from rapid growth within a SaaS hyperscaler, the pressing requirement to build a brand new Demand Generation capability emerged.
To enable executive leadership to structure this new function, a comprehensive competitive intelligence project of 10 key peers and competitors was completed within two weeks.
The delivered report included proposed team org design models, corresponding job description drafts, critical skills ranking, as well as proposed target markets with the highest supply of relevant SMEs. The business case was approved, and the new team was fully staffed within 2 months through a mix of internal transfers and external hiring. .
Resolving an acute attrition pattern
The commercial department of an international SaaS organisation was facing critical risks of missing key revenue targets due to a prolonged spike in new-hire attrition rates, with resignations within 4 weeks (on average) of their start date. on average. weeks of onboarding. This led to a prolonged team capacity shortage and significant opportunity cost in unrealised productivity,
A 4-week intervention was conducted, including analysis of exit interviews, an overhaul of the interview process, and a strategic market mapping identifying an alternative (and cheaper) target profile.
The intervention successfully reduced interviewer hours and time-to-fill by over 30%, average offer cost declined, and retention improved. The new process was permanently adopted.