Martin-Baker: 12 Months in, and Things Are Only Getting Better

One year ago, Martin-Baker set us one of the toughest recruitment challenges: finding genuinely scarce, highly technical, safety-critical engineering talent, where the wrong hire isn’t just costly, it’s dangerous. Twelve months on, we’re celebrating something even better than hitting the target, we’re celebrating the ongoing partnership we have formed.

Martin-Baker’s hiring needs sit at the sharp end of recruitment: safety-critical, highly technical engineering roles in the defence and aerospace sector, where candidates are genuinely scarce, and competition for them is fierce.

This isn’t high- volume recruitment. It’s precision recruitment. Martin-Baker’s specialist engineering recruitment is supported by AI focused on semantic skills matching and intelligent search, built to identify candidates whose experience closely matches complex technical requirements, and to reach passive candidates who’d never respond to a standard job advert. Technology finds the right people. Our team makes sure they’re the right fit.

A Year to Celebrate

A year in, and there’s genuinely something to celebrate. The scale alone tells a story:

2,860 applications reviewed

385 candidates proactively sourced, found and approached, not just applied

473 telephone interviews completed

355 candidates shortlisted

184 hiring manager interviews conducted

The Real Win: We Didn’t Just Scale. We Got Sharper

Here’s the part that matters. Every stage of this specialist engineering recruitment process got more accurate over the year, not just busier:

Screening-to-shortlist rate improved from 21% to 26%

Shortlist-to-hiring-manager-interview rate improved from 62% to 71%

Interview-to-offer rate improved from 28% to 40%

That’s not volume for its own sake. That’s a process learning and tightening with every month that passed, and it shows in the results: around 9 in 10 offers made were accepted.