Tech recruitment in Cardiff
seen through hardware.

A different view of the Cardiff market

Most tech recruitment Cardiff businesses advertise is software, and the market for it is well served. Our work sits in a narrower corner. We recruit for companies whose products are physical, with boards, sensors, chips and the software that runs close to them. These companies compete for a small set of engineers, and those engineers do not usually browse job boards.

Joel Drapkin founded Tacit Search in Cardiff after some twenty years in semiconductors, and our understanding of the hardware side of the city's technology scene comes from that background.

A typical search

A growing company in the Cardiff area built a connected industrial sensor and had reached the point where its embedded software was holding up the product. The founders needed an engineer who could write Linux kernel drivers, bring up new boards and work with the hardware team on power behaviour. The local agencies they approached offered web developers and application programmers, which was reasonable for the market they served but no help to this role.

Joel asked about the board, the processor family and the sort of fault that had been consuming the team's time. That description told us the candidate should have a background in embedded Linux on a small system-on-chip, ideally with some exposure to hardware debugging. Few such engineers advertise themselves. Several worked at manufacturing sites in the region, at test equipment businesses or at design teams over the bridge in Bristol.

One of them lived in Cardiff, had been commuting out of the city for years and was ready to come home. He talked to the founders about the board support package and asked who owned the bootloader. The answer was nobody, which is why the role existed. He took it on in his first week, and the product team had a stable image to test against soon afterwards.

Connecting hardware to the wider city

Cardiff has a strong technology community, and the hardware companies within it benefit from being visible to it. We help our clients describe their roles in terms that engineers from outside the sector will understand, so that the right people consider a move. We also advise on which neighbouring employers are likely to hold the skills a client needs, including the manufacturing sites along the M4 corridor.