10 Placements in 12 Months at MiQ. Here’s How.

MiQ is one of the world’s largest independent programmatic media companies. They operate in 18 markets, manage billions of dollars in ad spend, and are quietly one of the most impressive adtech businesses most people outside the industry have never heard of.

In Australia, they were growing fast. The ANZ operation needed to scale across sales, trading, operations, and client services — and they needed people who could hit the ground running in a business that moves at the speed of real-time bidding.

Before they called us, they’d tried the obvious route. A large recruitment agency. Big brand. Big promises.

That’s not an exaggeration. That’s MiQ’s Managing Director Fiona Roberts describing what happened when they switched from volume recruitment to actually working with specialists who understand programmatic media.

The problem with 30 resumes

Thirty CVs sounds like a lot. It sounds like effort. But when 28 of them are wrong, it’s not effort — it’s noise. It’s a hiring manager spending two weeks reviewing profiles from people who’ve never touched a DSP, don’t understand programmatic trading, and think “adtech” is just another word for digital marketing.

That’s what happens when your recruiter doesn’t understand the market they’re hiring for. They keyword-match. They spray and pray. And the hiring manager pays the price in wasted hours and delayed hires.

What we did differently

We started with a deep-dive brief with Fiona. Not a 20-minute job intake call — a proper conversation about what MiQ actually is, how the ANZ team operates, what the culture feels like from the inside, and what kind of people thrive there.

Fast-paced, commercial, no politics. That was the shorthand. MiQ is a place where you’re expected to figure things out, move quickly, and not hide behind process. That’s a specific culture. It rules people in and it rules people out.

Then we mapped the programmatic and adtech talent market in Sydney. Not from a database — from relationships. We already knew who the best programmatic traders were, which sales directors were quietly open to a move, and which account managers were ready for their next step. Because that’s our world. We live in it every day.

We didn’t send 30 resumes. We sent shortlists of 4 to 6 candidates per role. Candidates we’d already spoken to in depth, already qualified on culture, and already confirmed were genuinely interested in MiQ specifically — not just “open to opportunities.”

The result: 10 hires in 12 months

Across sales, trading, and operations, we placed ten people into MiQ’s ANZ team:

Account Director. Senior Programmatic Trader. Ad Ops Manager. Campaign Manager (x2). Sales Director. Business Development Manager. Senior Account Manager. Operations Lead. Client Services Manager.

Ten hires. Twelve months. Average time to first shortlist: 48 hours.

That’s not because we’re faster at searching LinkedIn. It’s because we already knew the candidates before the brief landed. We’d already had the coffee. Already understood their motivations. Already knew who’d fit MiQ’s culture and who wouldn’t — regardless of how good their resume looked.

What Fiona said

In Fiona Roberts’ own words:

Why this keeps working

There’s no secret here. It’s three things.

Specialist knowledge. We recruit across adtech, programmatic, and digital media every single day. We don’t need to Google what a DSP is. We don’t need to ask what “trading desk” means. We know the market, the players, the salary benchmarks, and the talent.

A warm network. The best programmatic professionals in Sydney aren’t on job boards. They’re in our network. We’ve placed them before, referred them before, or had conversations with them that started years ago. When a role opens, we don’t start from zero.

Speed that doesn’t sacrifice quality. 48-hour average to first shortlist. Not because we rush — because we’re prepared. When you know the market, speed is a byproduct of expertise, not a compromise on quality.