Turning One Specialist Search Into a Wider Partnership
How Akkar secured a niche engineering leader and became a trusted hiring partner across three areas of Alcon's business.
Turning One Specialist Search Into a Wider Partnership
How Akkar secured a niche engineering leader and became a trusted hiring partner across three areas of Alcon's business.
Alcon Components is a UK-based specialist in the design, development and manufacture of high-performance brakes and clutches. For 40 years, Alcon has supplied professional motorsport programmes across Formula 1, NASCAR, IndyCar, World Rally and Touring Cars, and is the official brake supplier to the all-electric Formula E series.
Around half of Alcon's activity now sits beyond the racetrack. The business develops bespoke solutions for prestige road-car OEMs including Audi, Bentley, Jaguar Land Rover and Noble, and for builders of defence, armoured and low-carbon vehicles. Volumes range from a single unit to 20,000 per year.
A Specialist Market That Demands Sector Knowledge
In January 2026, Alcon needed to hire a Chief Engineer, Controlled Brakes. This is one of the most demanding areas of modern braking system development, sitting at the intersection of high-performance mechanical design, electronic control, and functional safety.
The credible talent pool for a role of this specificity is narrow, largely passive, and personally known to a small circle of hiring managers across the sector. Broad outreach was unlikely to solve a brief this specific. A volume-led approach would have created more filtering, not more relevant options.
Alcon had previously used more generalist recruitment agencies and had run into the familiar pattern for specialist manufacturers. Partners who could run a process, without the industry knowledge to identify, assess and engage the right people. The output was volume without fit. Internal time went into filtering candidates who were never truly aligned to the brief.
The wider business context sharpened the requirement further. Alcon operates across motorsport, prestige OEM, defence and low-carbon transport at the same time, each with its own technical standards and talent flows. A credible partner needed to understand the team the successful candidate would join, the programme mix around it, and the pace of a business that builds anything from one-offs to 20,000-unit runs.
The quality of the first three candidates would decide the search.
Briefing Beyond the JD, Starting With the Situation
Our engagement started with a structured briefing. The job description was the input, not the specification. Katy and Owen invested time up front understanding the technical requirements of the role, the composition and working style of the receiving team, the wider business context around the hire, and the cultural signals that would separate a good candidate from the right one.
Every conversation we had with the market ran from an accurate read of what Alcon needed, rather than an interpretation of a written brief.
Quality Over Volume in Candidate Assessment
We built the search around candidate quality, not pipeline volume. We assessed and qualified each shortlisted individual in depth before introducing them to Alcon, and we spent several hours with each candidate understanding experience, motivations, technical fit and long-term suitability.
Two outcomes followed:
- Alcon's hiring team spent their time on candidates who were genuinely relevant, not on filtering.
- Candidates arrived at interview with an accurate understanding of the role and the business, which sharpened the conversations on both sides.
The qualification burden sat with us, where it belonged.
A Structured Communication Cadence
We maintained an active communication rhythm with the candidate and with Alcon throughout the process. Weekly and bi-weekly feedback calls kept both sides aligned on progress, surfaced challenges early, and allowed adjustments without loss of momentum.
No drift.
The value of this rhythm is under-appreciated in specialist hiring. It removes the uncertainty of not knowing where a search stands. It protects the process from the small breakdowns in communication that cause specialist searches to stall.
Technical Fluency at the Point of Contact
A recurring theme in Alcon's feedback is our ability to speak credibly with hiring managers about technical requirements, and to engage candidates with genuine understanding of the markets they operate in.
In advanced engineering, technical fluency directly affects the quality of the search. It decides whether a passive candidate takes the call. It decides whether a hiring manager trusts the shortlist without wading through it themselves. And it decides whether we can meaningfully triage between candidates whose CVs read similarly but whose capabilities diverge.
We submitted the first CV inside 48 hours. We closed the process at week 13, with a full interview and selection sequence run at proper depth for a specialist leadership hire.
Operational & Commercial Impact
The Chief Engineer, Controlled Brakes has settled into the role and integrated well into the team. Alcon has spoken positively about both the appointment and the process that produced it.
The Chief Engineer search opened the door to a broader relationship. We have since delivered two further placements for Alcon:
- Senior Planning Consultant, strengthening operational and planning capability
- Sales Manager, extending commercial capacity into the customer-facing organisation
Three hires across three distinct functions: engineering, planning and commercial. In specialist recruitment, cross-functional repeat engagement is the clearest evidence of trust. A client extends the remit into new parts of the business only when the partner has materially reduced the time, risk and internal load of hiring elsewhere.
For a manufacturer operating across motorsport, prestige OEM, defence and low-carbon programmes at the same time, a recruitment partner who understands the sector removes a persistent tax on leadership time. It also improves the quality of every hiring decision that runs through the process.
"Akkar consistently demonstrates a level of industry knowledge, professionalism and attention to detail that sets them apart from traditional recruitment firms. To date, we’ve made three successful placements together. The team is able to speak credibly with hiring managers about highly technical requirements and genuinely understands the markets they recruit into."
Alcon Components is a UK-based specialist in the design, development and manufacture of high-performance brakes and clutches. For 40 years, Alcon has supplied professional motorsport programmes across Formula 1, NASCAR, IndyCar, World Rally and Touring Cars, and is the official brake supplier to the all-electric Formula E series.
Around half of Alcon's activity now sits beyond the racetrack. The business develops bespoke solutions for prestige road-car OEMs including Audi, Bentley, Jaguar Land Rover and Noble, and for builders of defence, armoured and low-carbon vehicles. Volumes range from a single unit to 20,000 per year.
A Specialist Market That Demands Sector Knowledge
In January 2026, Alcon needed to hire a Chief Engineer, Controlled Brakes. This is one of the most demanding areas of modern braking system development, sitting at the intersection of high-performance mechanical design, electronic control, and functional safety.
The credible talent pool for a role of this specificity is narrow, largely passive, and personally known to a small circle of hiring managers across the sector. Broad outreach was unlikely to solve a brief this specific. A volume-led approach would have created more filtering, not more relevant options.
Alcon had previously used more generalist recruitment agencies and had run into the familiar pattern for specialist manufacturers. Partners who could run a process, without the industry knowledge to identify, assess and engage the right people. The output was volume without fit. Internal time went into filtering candidates who were never truly aligned to the brief.
The wider business context sharpened the requirement further. Alcon operates across motorsport, prestige OEM, defence and low-carbon transport at the same time, each with its own technical standards and talent flows. A credible partner needed to understand the team the successful candidate would join, the programme mix around it, and the pace of a business that builds anything from one-offs to 20,000-unit runs.
The quality of the first three candidates would decide the search.
Briefing Beyond the JD, Starting With the Situation
Our engagement started with a structured briefing. The job description was the input, not the specification. Katy and Owen invested time up front understanding the technical requirements of the role, the composition and working style of the receiving team, the wider business context around the hire, and the cultural signals that would separate a good candidate from the right one.
Every conversation we had with the market ran from an accurate read of what Alcon needed, rather than an interpretation of a written brief.
Quality Over Volume in Candidate Assessment
We built the search around candidate quality, not pipeline volume. We assessed and qualified each shortlisted individual in depth before introducing them to Alcon, and we spent several hours with each candidate understanding experience, motivations, technical fit and long-term suitability.
Two outcomes followed:
- Alcon's hiring team spent their time on candidates who were genuinely relevant, not on filtering.
- Candidates arrived at interview with an accurate understanding of the role and the business, which sharpened the conversations on both sides.
The qualification burden sat with us, where it belonged.
A Structured Communication Cadence
We maintained an active communication rhythm with the candidate and with Alcon throughout the process. Weekly and bi-weekly feedback calls kept both sides aligned on progress, surfaced challenges early, and allowed adjustments without loss of momentum.
No drift.
The value of this rhythm is under-appreciated in specialist hiring. It removes the uncertainty of not knowing where a search stands. It protects the process from the small breakdowns in communication that cause specialist searches to stall.
Technical Fluency at the Point of Contact
A recurring theme in Alcon's feedback is our ability to speak credibly with hiring managers about technical requirements, and to engage candidates with genuine understanding of the markets they operate in.
In advanced engineering, technical fluency directly affects the quality of the search. It decides whether a passive candidate takes the call. It decides whether a hiring manager trusts the shortlist without wading through it themselves. And it decides whether we can meaningfully triage between candidates whose CVs read similarly but whose capabilities diverge.
48 hours
13 weeks
3
Engineering, planning & commercial
Operational & Commercial Impact
The Chief Engineer, Controlled Brakes has settled into the role and integrated well into the team. Alcon has spoken positively about both the appointment and the process that produced it.
The Chief Engineer search opened the door to a broader relationship. We have since delivered two further placements for Alcon:
- Senior Planning Consultant, strengthening operational and planning capability
- Sales Manager, extending commercial capacity into the customer-facing organisation
Three hires across three distinct functions: engineering, planning and commercial. In specialist recruitment, cross-functional repeat engagement is the clearest evidence of trust. A client extends the remit into new parts of the business only when the partner has materially reduced the time, risk and internal load of hiring elsewhere.
For a manufacturer operating across motorsport, prestige OEM, defence and low-carbon programmes at the same time, a recruitment partner who understands the sector removes a persistent tax on leadership time. It also improves the quality of every hiring decision that runs through the process.
In specialist engineering, generalist recruitment is a hidden cost.
The apparent efficiency of a broad-market agency disappears the moment a hiring manager has to filter unqualified candidates, re-brief the search, or re-open a process that closed on the wrong hire. Depth of industry knowledge shows up in the quality of the first three CVs, not the length of the longlist.
The briefing decides the outcome of a specialist search.
Time invested up front understanding the technical requirements, the team environment and the business context is what lets us speak credibly with hiring managers and passive candidates alike. Without that, every subsequent step runs on incomplete information.
Cross-functional repeat hiring is the truest measure of a recruitment partnership.
A single successful placement is a good outcome. Three placements across engineering, planning and commercial are a client extending trust deliberately. It happens only when the first hire has changed how the internal team thinks about hiring altogether.
"Akkar consistently demonstrates a level of industry knowledge, professionalism and attention to detail that sets them apart from traditional recruitment firms. To date, we’ve made three successful placements together. The team is able to speak credibly with hiring managers about highly technical requirements and genuinely understands the markets they recruit into."
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