The operator behind the platform.

John Ryan has spent thirty-two years building teams, businesses and ventures in European technology recruitment — the last fifteen focused on the senior technical hiring problem XpertDirect was built to solve.

He began his career in London with Delphi Group PLC, where he moved from recruitment consultant through senior management to board-level positions. In 2000 he was appointed Managing Director of NTR Consulting. In 2002 he relocated to Spain and founded CIS Electronics Engineering, an engineering services business that became a long-standing fixture of the Iberian technical hiring market.

Since then he has continued to build at the intersection of recruitment, engineering services and applied technology — most recently through TechTeamz, Flowlenz, and now XpertDirect.

He is known across the sector for a practical operator's approach: direct conversations, durable relationships, and a refusal to romanticise the recruitment business. XpertDirect is the product of that view — a platform shaped by three decades of watching what works between buyers and specialists, and what does not.

XpertDirect was founded on a single observation: the middle layer between European technical scale-ups and the specialists they hire is the slowest, most expensive, and least informed part of the process.

The platform is built to remove it.

Buyers and specialists transact directly inside the platform. The matching engine runs in real time. Introductions move into interviews without intermediaries.

There is no agency layer. No shortlist desk. No account-management buffer.

What remains is the conversation that matters — between the buyer and the specialist — supported by software that earns its place by removing friction, not by replacing judgement.