The Recruitment Function Most UK Businesses Are Running on the Wrong Resource
And how one Psychology graduate from the Philippines is raising hiring quality and building the pipeline infrastructure to sustain it.
Recruitment Is Not an HR Problem. It Is an Operational One.
The person doing the recruiting is rarely a recruiter. It is a hiring manager with three other priorities, or a director pulled in because the role has been open too long, or an operations lead trying to move things forward between calls. Nobody formally owns it. So, the function operates reactively, vacancy by vacancy, urgency by urgency, with no pipeline, no consistent process and no accumulated knowledge about what good looks like for the business.
An in-house Recruitment Specialist in the UK currently carries a total employment cost of £35,000 to £55,000 per year, before job board subscriptions, applicant tracking systems and management overhead are included. For businesses that do not recruit at sufficient volume to justify that investment year-round, the numbers do not work. The function remains under-resourced. Hiring stays reactive.
Luck Mae Sarmiento is running that function from the Philippines at £1,100 per month.
Why Psychology Changes the Quality of Every Hire
Most recruitment fails not at the process level but at the assessment level. CVs are screened against job descriptions rather than against what the role actually demands. Interviews surface presentation rather than capability. And hiring decisions are made on instinct because nobody in the room has been trained to do it differently.
Mae holds a BS Psychology degree from the University of Perpetual Help System DALTA, where she completed both Industrial and Clinical internships. Industrial psychology, the study of human behaviour in workplace settings covering motivation, performance, selection and organisational fit, is the academic foundation that most recruiters spend years trying to develop through experience alone. Mae arrived with it.
Her role at Tiger Global is structured around building the recruitment function, not just filling roles. She sources across Indeed, Bossjob and targeted social media outreach, manages candidate pipelines through SharePoint, conducts structured interviews and maintains the tracker discipline that keeps the process visible and accountable. Alongside that, she supervises recruitment interns, designing the workflows they follow, setting the quality standards they are assessed against, and handing the documented process to the wider team to maintain. When a new intern joins, they do not start from scratch. They follow Mae’s system.
“Mae is an exceptional addition to the team; she balances high-level execution with effective leadership. She excels in finding and endorsing the right talent, all while helping me lead and supervise our recruitment interns. Her dedication to hitting daily outreach goals while supporting the growth of others has added immense value to our department.”
Joey Brines, Recruitment Manager, Tiger Global Business Services Inc.
Mae is candid about what she enjoys. “I see recruitment as a bit of a matching game. It is challenging in a good way, because you are not just looking at a CV, you are trying to find a person who actually fits the team’s energy. It is fast paced, but it is a great feeling when you find that perfect click for a role.” Working with UK businesses has sharpened how she operates: “It has taught me the value of directness. I really appreciate how straightforward and efficient the communication is. There is no fluff, just high standards and clear expectations, which has helped me be more professional and to the point in my own work.”
Psychology Graduate, High-Volume Background
Mae is 25, born and raised in Las Piñas City, the youngest in a family where education and hard work were lived values rather than stated ones. She works from the Tiger Global office in the Philippines, seated alongside her manager and intern team, which creates the real-time accountability the recruitment function requires. Outside of work, she travels, tries new food and hunts out good coffee shops wherever she finds herself. She approaches both with the same instinct: it is worth taking the time to find the right one.
She is currently enrolled in professional development courses, building capability in parallel with delivery. Her assessment approach is grounded in Industrial Psychology methodology and her instinct, in work as in everything else, is to build process rather than improvise.
What Recruitment Looks Like When Someone Owns It
Picture the business six months from now with Mae running the function. Roles open and the pipeline already exists, because she built it before the vacancy appeared. Candidates are assessed against documented criteria, not gut feel, because she designed the framework. The intern team works to a consistent standard, because she trained them and wrote the process they follow. And the director who spent three weeks screening CVs last quarter is back doing their actual job.
That is what it looks like when recruitment is owned rather than borrowed. And it is available now, for £1,100 per month. No job board contract overhead. No agency fees. No employer National Insurance. A Psychology-trained specialist with three years of high-volume experience, building the function your business has needed for longer than you would like to admit.
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