Caruso: Delivering a Recruitment Sprint to Support Rapid Growth

Company: Caruso | Industry: Financial Technology (Fund Administration & Registry) | Employees: 65

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"We had a number of mission-critical roles to fill in a short timeframe. Humankind helped us step back, think more deliberately about the structure and capability we needed, and then took ownership of the challenge. They became a true extension of our team."

— Mark Hurley, CEO, Caruso

The Company

Caruso is transforming fund administration and registry services through modern technology, helping investment managers and financial institutions deliver a better investor experience through modern, scalable platforms.

Following a successful capital raise, Caruso entered a critical growth phase. With ASX-listed fund managers onboarding to the platform, international expansion plans underway, and ambitious delivery targets ahead, the business needed to rapidly increase capability across multiple functions.

The Challenge

Like many growth-stage companies, Caruso initially thought the challenge was hiring.

The reality was more complex.

With new capital to deploy and several strategic priorities to deliver, the leadership team needed to determine which roles were truly required, where capability gaps existed, and how the organisation should evolve to support future growth. At the same time, several mission-critical hires needed to be made within extremely tight timeframes to support enterprise customer onboarding and international expansion.

The alternative was building internal capability or engaging contractors. Both options would take time the business did not have.

Leaders and hiring managers were also becoming increasingly involved in recruitment activity, spending valuable time reviewing unsuitable candidates, coordinating agencies, and managing inconsistent hiring processes. The risk wasn't simply slow hiring. It was leadership attention being diverted away from customers, delivery, and growth.

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Our Approach

Humankind partnered with Caruso through our Talent as a Service model, embedding capability across both People & Culture and Talent Acquisition.

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01 - Aligning Talent to Strategy

Before hiring began, we worked with the leadership team to understand the company's strategic priorities and future growth plans.

Through organisational design workshops, we mapped capability requirements, challenged assumptions around role design, identified opportunities to promote internally, and clarified the structure required to support both enterprise delivery and international expansion. This ensured hiring decisions were driven by business priorities rather than urgency alone.

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02 - Embedded People & Talent Capability

Acting as an extension of the leadership team, we provided dedicated People & Culture support while also leading the recruitment programme.

We partnered with hiring managers, refined role design, advised on remuneration and market positioning, coordinated recruitment activity, and became the central point of accountability across the hiring programme. This reduced the burden on leaders while creating greater consistency across every hiring decision. ‍

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03 - Building a Scalable Hiring Engine

Alongside delivering recruitment outcomes, we helped build the foundations for future scale.

This included creating structured recruitment processes, interview frameworks, assessment guides, role-specific skills testing, candidate communications, hiring templates, and a clearer employer value proposition. Rather than reviewing hundreds of transactional CVs, hiring managers received curated shortlists and clear recommendations aligned to the needs of the role.

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The Outcome

Caruso established a stronger platform for growth.

• Supported the recruitment of 14 roles over 3 months
• Clearer organisational design and capability priorities aligned to business strategy
• Mission-critical roles filled without the delay of building an internal talent function
• Reduced hiring manager workload, allowing leaders to stay focused on growth and delivery
• More consistent hiring decisions through structured assessment and selection processes
• A repeatable recruitment engine, including templates, interview guides, assessments, and candidate communications
• Greater confidence to scale, with the people, processes, and capability required to support future growth.

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Why This Partnership Matters to Humankind

Many growth companies assume they have a recruitment problem. More often, they have a growth problem that happens to show up through hiring.

Caruso demonstrates the value of stepping back to design the right organisation, capability, and talent strategy before rushing to market. By combining organisational design, People & Culture capability, and recruitment execution, the business was able to scale faster while building foundations for the future.

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