London runs on tech recruiters the way it runs on coffee.
Top IT recruitment agencies in London
Before the individual names, the firms: these agencies dominate London tech hiring, and three of them are led by recruiters profiled below:
| Agency | Known for |
|---|---|
 RecWorksLondon | Community-first software-engineering recruitment. Founder Barry Cranford appears below. |
 La FosseLondon | Employee-owned tech recruitment and executive search firm with 200+ staff. Founder Simon La Fosse appears below. |
 Burns SheehanLondon | Tech recruitment for scale-ups across engineering, DevOps and product. |
 HarnhamLondon | Data, AI and analytics recruitment specialist with its own salary guides. Chairman Simon Clark appears below. |
 Understanding RecruitmentSt Albans | Award-winning software, AI and public-sector tech recruitment just outside London. |
 Hays TechnologyLondon | Technology arm of one of the UK’s biggest recruiters, for contract and permanent roles at scale. |
 EchoGlobalLondon · Tallinn · Lviv | Our own agency: London-based tech recruiters placing Eastern European engineers with UK companies. |
London is Europe’s most competitive tech-hiring market: most of these firms run separate permanent and contract desks, and niches like data, fintech and DevOps have dedicated specialists of their own.
London’s tech recruiters to know
IT recruiters below are the names that come up again and again across the city’s hiring scene, whether you need a contract DevOps engineer, a fintech CTO, or a whole engineering team built from scratch.
Some run agencies hundreds of people deep. Others are solo operators or community builders who happen to know everyone. Here’s who they are and what they’re known for.
- Paul Farrer
- Simon La Fosse
- Phil Blaydes
- David Morel
- Daniel Ambrose
- Nick Gordon
- Andrew Larholt
- Phill Bateman
- Nadia Edwards-Dashti
- Barry Cranford
- Salim Hamid
- Rodney Crouch
- Rhys Evans
- Ann-Christin Roope
- Pete Alexander
- Stevie Buckley
- Sherry (Sheharyar) Salman
- Charlie Rawstron
- Amy Golding
- Hung Lee
- Simon Clarke
- Lewis Maleh
⚡️London rates too high? EchoGlobal places Eastern European engineers. Tell us what you need.
Paul Farrer
Paul founded Aspire (then PFJ) back in 1992 and has run it through 30+ years of digital and media recruitment, growing it from a one-person operation into a staffing firm that now serves clients worldwide.
His lane is high-growth digital and media roles, and his pitch is continuity: three decades of the same long-term client relationships through every market shift.
- Linkedin: Paul Farrer
- X (Twitter): @pfarrer_aspire
Simon La Fosse
Simon founded La Fosse Associates in 2007 and built it, on an employee-ownership model and a “treat people well” ethos, into one of the UK’s biggest tech recruitment firms: 200+ staff across several countries, £100m+ turnover, and roughly 30% annual growth.
The trophy cabinet includes Growth Company of the Year and Best Recruitment Company to Work For.
He himself focuses on executive IT search, having placed CIOs, CTOs, and digital leaders everywhere from startups to the FTSE 100, and speaks widely on how to run recruitment well.
- Linkedin: Simon La Fosse
- X (Twitter): @simonlafosse
Phil Blaydes
Phil led recruitment inside tech companies like Forward3D and Mind Candy before co-founding Talentful in 2015 on a simple idea: an in-house recruitment team you rent only when you need one. It caught on.
Talentful scaled globally, helping high-growth companies hire engineering, product, and design talent without paying traditional agency fees, and the embedded-recruiting model it popularized is now everywhere.
- Linkedin: Phil Blaydes
David Morel
David founded Tiger Recruitment in 2001 and still leads it as CEO, having grown it over two decades into a global agency with offices in London, New York, and Zurich.
Alongside its business-support work, Tiger runs a dedicated technology division known for rigorous screening across both permanent and contract roles. Clients tend to stick around for what one colleague summed up as his “quirky sense of humour, decades of experience and strategic insight.”
- Linkedin: David Morel
- X (Twitter): @davidcmorel
Daniel Ambrose
Daniel brought a decade of engineering-recruitment experience from Platform Recruitment when he co-founded the boutique Hexwired in 2020, where he’s Managing Director. The firm lives in the deep end: embedded software, FPGA and DSP engineers, Python devs, ML and data specialists.
When a startup needs an FPGA engineer, Daniel works the role himself and actually understands the spec, which is why Hexwired has built a name for hands-on hardware and software hiring.
- Linkedin: Daniel Ambrose
Nick Gordon
Nick founded Deerfoot IT in 2000 and still runs it, with 25+ years of hands-on work on complex IT hires behind him.
Deerfoot is a London specialist in digital, software, and cybersecurity roles, with a real emphasis on inclusive hiring, and it’s collected awards like Tech Recruiter of the Year while building teams for the likes of IBM, Cisco, and government bodies.
Nick’s pitch to founders is ethical, long-term service rather than a quick fee.
- Linkedin: Nick Gordon
Andrew Larholt
Andy started Montash from his bedroom in 2004 at 25 and is now its Group CEO, with offices across Europe and the Americas.
The firm works deep-tech fields, cloud, DevOps, data, SAP, and has spun out additional brands (Trillion, Remobi) while keeping an agile, startup-ish mindset despite its size.
His one-line summary of the business, from an anniversary post, is that “building a business is all about the people,” and he pushes Montash consultants to act as advisors to CTOs rather than order-takers.
- Linkedin: Andrew Larholt
- X (Twitter): @andylarholt
- IG: andylarholt
Phill Bateman
Phill founded trg. (Target Recruitment Group) in 2007, also at 25, and still runs it 16 years on.
His model blends recruiting with community: trg. consultants act as community leads, and Phill runs the firm’s own tech meetups (The Roundabouts) and hackathons to reach passive talent in niches like C++, data, and UX. Clients get the candidates and the network around them.
- Linkedin: Phill Bateman
- X (Twitter): @bateface1
Nadia Edwards-Dashti
FMLS:24.
Nadia co-founded Harrington Starr, one of London’s leading fintech recruitment firms, and has spent 19+ years placing technology and sales people across financial services, by her count helping thousands find jobs.
As Chief Customer Officer she also runs the firm’s podcasts and its Women of FinTech and “Talent Equity List” diversity campaigns, wrote a 2022 book on gender equity in fintech, and was named Recruitment Leader of the Year that same year.
- Linkedin: Nadia Edwards-Dashti
Barry Cranford
Barry founded and runs RecWorks, which specializes in software-development hiring, Java above all. He’s better known in some circles for what he built around the recruiting: the London Java Community (LJC) and other meetup groups that connect engineers with work.
He handles more than Java, but it’s the Java community organizing, and the mentoring that comes with it, that the city’s developers point to.
- Linkedin: Barry Cranford
- X (Twitter): bcrecworks
Salim Hamid
Salim’s reputation rests on one stretch of work: as Deliveroo’s in-house recruiter during its hyper-growth, he took the engineering team from 12 to 70 in nine months (and on toward 280 with help).
He now runs his own consultancy almost entirely on word-of-mouth, filling Ruby, Python, and React roles for fast-growing startups. He jokes about “hating recruitment,” but the no-nonsense style and the results keep the referrals coming.
- Linkedin: Salim Hamid
- X (Twitter): @team_salim
Rodney Crouch
Rodney is Managing Director of Grey Matter Recruitment, a London firm that places commercial and go-to-market talent into tech and digital companies.
Over a decade-plus he’s made it a top choice for sales, marketing, and client-services roles, with a personal specialty in senior commercial hires, the VP of Sales and Commercial Director seats at high-growth SaaS and AdTech businesses, while his team covers the more junior end.
- Linkedin: Rodney Crouch
Rhys Evans
Rhys founded and directs AdRoc Group, the firm London’s tech community will name first for Ruby developers, though he covers DevOps and front-end too.
AdRoc supplies expert contractors and permanent engineers to startups and, notably, to the UK Government Digital Service and other public-sector digital-transformation programs, which says something about his ability to deliver scarce skills under scrutiny.
- Linkedin: Rhys Evans
Ann-Christin Roope
Ann-Christin is Managing Partner of Ethan Partners, an executive-search firm for high-growth tech, where she runs global C-level and VP searches from London.
She earned the credibility the hard way, as former Global Head of International Recruiting for Rocket Internet and Groupon, hiring leadership teams across 50+ markets.
Founders lean on her for the strategic question behind the hire: which executive can actually drive the next phase of expansion.
- Linkedin: Ann-Christin Roope
Pete Alexander
Pete is a Partner at Riviera Partners, co-leading its European Ventures practice, after more than a decade as a Director at The Up Group, one of London’s premier digital and tech executive-search firms.
His specialty is senior product and technology leadership: the CTO and Product Director seats for startups, scale-ups, and corporates mid-transformation. Clients single out how carefully he weighs both technical depth and cultural fit at the leadership level, where one wrong hire is expensive.
Stevie Buckley
Stevie is a People & Talent leader who’s spent a decade-plus inside London startups from Seed to Series D, scaling Permutive past 200 people as Global VP People & Talent and growing Lyst beyond 100 in 18 months.
For nearly ten years he ran Hacker News London, Europe’s largest regular tech meetup, and he’s turned up in Wired, Forbes, The Telegraph, and Business Insider, plus stages like Web Summit. He later founded Talent Stuff to take the leadership-hiring grind off startups’ plates.
- Linkedin: Stevie Buckley
- X (Twitter): @StevieBuckley
Sherry Salman
“London’s Go-To DevOps Recruiter for Scale-Ups and Start-Ups”.
An ex-DevOps engineer who moved into recruiting, Sherry works his old field from both sides, filling DevOps, SRE, and cloud-infrastructure roles, perm and contract, for tech companies.
The engineering background is the edge: he can actually vet candidates on CI/CD, Kubernetes, and AWS/GCP rather than keyword-match them, and he posts regularly on fixing how DevOps hiring is done.
- Linkedin: Sherry Salman
Charlie Rawstron
Charlie co-founded 3Search, a marketing, digital, and product recruitment agency that’s become one of the best-reviewed in its niche. Those roles increasingly sit inside tech companies, and 3Search’s client list runs from high-growth startups to household brands.
He’s built a lot of repeat business on a genuinely consultative style and an unusual-for-the-industry stance on transparency: clear communication and fair, upfront fees.
- Linkedin: Charlie Rawstron
Amy Golding
Amy became the youngest female CEO of a £100m+ turnover recruitment company when she took over Opus Talent Solutions in 2017 at 31. She’d already launched her own tech-recruiting firm in 2014 and grown it to 130 staff and £17m in revenue within three years.
After steering Opus through a private-equity sale, she started a tech-talent training company aimed squarely at the skills gap and diversity, on a stated mission to “diversify the tech talent pool in the UK.”
She now runs Steven Bartlett’s private investment office from London and remains a prominent voice in tech talent.
- Linkedin: Amy Golding
Hung Lee
Hung spent decades in agency and in-house recruiting before becoming the industry’s de facto curator through Recruiting Brainfood, the widely read newsletter he writes.
He’s effectively a talent-acquisition futurist now, reading where technology and market shifts are taking hiring, and the Brainfood events and community have made him one of the most-cited voices in the field.
Simon Clarke
Simon is Executive Chairman of Harnham, the data and analytics recruitment specialist founded in 2006 and based in Wimbledon.
Harnham built its name on data, AI, and analytics hiring at scale, backed by its own market research and salary guides, and Simon is the through-line in its growth from a niche agency into an international name in data recruitment.
- Linkedin: Simon Clarke
Lewis Maleh
Lewis founded Bentley Lewis in London in 2010 and built the boutique into a global executive search firm with teams in 11 cities and searches delivered in more than 40 countries, with technology and fintech among its core sectors.
He is also one of recruitment’s most visible commentators: he hosts The Recruitment Show, interviews hiring leaders on camera, and turns up in mainstream media whenever the labour market makes news.
The combination is rarer than it sounds. Most headhunters stay quiet about method. Lewis explains his in public, weekly.
- Linkedin: Lewis Maleh
Sum Up
While these individuals offer valuable industry expertise, deep networks, and a track record of working with startups and tech firms in London, their services often come at a premium price tag or with limited availability.
For fast-moving teams seeking a more responsive and cost-effective alternative, EchoGlobal Tech can be an option. Contact us today!
Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top professionals. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.
