CASE STUDY
Scaling a RegTech Platform from 60 to 140 People Without Losing Hiring Quality or Cultural Fit
Following a $95 million Series C, a Chicago-based RegTech platform had twelve months to double headcount across sales, technology, and client success while maintaining the hiring standards that had defined the culture of the business to that point.
*All client engagements are conducted under strict NDA. Client details are anonymised.
The Situation
A Chicago-headquartered RegTech business providing automated compliance and surveillance solutions to mid-size US banks and broker-dealers had closed its Series C and was under immediate pressure to scale. The growth plan approved by the board required the business to move from 60 to 140 employees within twelve months, with the majority of hiring concentrated in enterprise sales, software engineering, and client success. The Head of People had built the team from zero to 60 largely through her own network and direct sourcing. She was exceptional at assessing cultural fit and hiring for the early-stage environment. What she did not have was the capacity or the specialist market knowledge to run a hiring programme of this scale and speed without significant support. The board had discussed building out an internal talent acquisition team but concluded that the ramp-up time and fixed cost of doing so did not make sense given the concentrated nature of the growth phase. Valmont was engaged on a scaled embedded model with a rolling monthly structure.
The Challenge
The complexity of the hiring programme was less about the seniority of the roles and more about volume, quality, and speed operating simultaneously. The enterprise sales team needed to grow from eight to twenty-four, hiring account executives and sales engineers who understood the compliance and regulatory technology landscape well enough to hold credible conversations with Chief Compliance Officers and General Counsels at US banks. The engineering team needed to scale from fifteen to forty, with a specific requirement for engineers who had built within regulated data environments and understood the security and audit requirements of financial services clients. The client success function needed to grow from six to twenty, with a preference for professionals who had come from compliance or risk backgrounds within financial services and could speak the language of the firm's client base fluently. Getting the brief wrong in any of these functions would have damaged the client relationships the business had spent five years building.
The Approach
Valmont embedded two practitioners into the business. A senior talent lead took ownership of the sales and client success hiring, given the requirement for financial services domain knowledge in assessing candidate quality. A specialist technology recruiter focused exclusively on the engineering function, with specific experience hiring within regulated technology environments.
Both practitioners operated fully inside the business, attending team meetings, participating in hiring calibration sessions with functional leaders, and feeding live market intelligence back to the Head of People and CEO on a weekly basis. Compensation structures were benchmarked against the RegTech and FinTech market in real time as offers were being made, preventing the firm from losing candidates at late stage due to misaligned expectations.
A structured interview process was designed collaboratively with each functional leader during the first two weeks of the engagement, ensuring consistency of assessment across a hiring programme that would ultimately involve over two hundred and fifty candidate interviews. The Head of People remained the cultural arbiter throughout, with Valmont handling sourcing, screening, interview coordination, and offer management.
The Outcome
All seventy-four hires across sales, engineering, and client success were completed within twenty-two weeks of the engagement beginning, taking the business from 60 to 138 employees ahead of the board's twelve-month target. Attrition across the cohort hired during the engagement was 8 percent in the first year, against an industry benchmark of 18 to 22 percent for comparable scale-up hiring programmes, which the Head of People attributed directly to the rigour of the assessment process and the quality of candidate briefing throughout. The enterprise sales team that Valmont helped build contributed to a 140 percent increase in new logo acquisition in the twelve months following the scale-up, which became a central data point in the firm's Series D pitch materials.
In Numbers
74
Roles across 3 functions
22
Week to fill all roles
8%
First-year attrition
140%
Increase in new acquisitions post scale-up
2
Embedded Valmont practitioners
A few words
We operate where judgment matters
We excel where others struggle, bringing deep networks, technical understanding, and execution rigor to every search.