ABOUT XPERTDIRECT
A direct hiring platform built by a fifteen-year operator.
XpertDirect is the direct hiring platform for European technical scale-ups, powered by proprietary AI. Founded by John Ryan. Bootstrap-disciplined. Revenue-funded. Operating in Berlin, Amsterdam and London.
What we do.
We connect European technical scale-ups with senior specialists through a direct, AI-powered platform. Our proprietary engine reads public work surfaces, open-source contributions, and verified skill signals to surface candidates who are genuinely open to a conversation — not recycled from a database bought five years ago.
Our wedge is simple: a 5 per cent success fee, a 48-hour SLA on the shortlist, and a founder who joins the call for every in-segment brief. No retainer. No subscription. No account manager who disappears after week two.
We operate in Berlin, Amsterdam and London at launch — the three cities where the density of technical scale-ups and the willingness to try a new model are highest. We will expand when the unit economics in each city are proven, not before.
What we do not do.
- Pre-Series-A startups — we need buyers with budget certainty and a hiring mandate.
- Enterprise organisations — our model is built for scale-up speed, not procurement committees.
- Regulated industries — healthcare, defence and government carry compliance overhead we do not serve at launch.
- Geographies outside our Wave-1 cities — we do not run searches for roles based outside Berlin, Amsterdam, London or Remote at launch.
Founder story.
John Ryan spent fifteen years inside the recruiter category he would eventually replace. He ran retained searches for Series-B and-C technical scale-ups across London, Berlin and Amsterdam. He saw the same pattern repeat: a 25 to 40 per cent fee, a three-month timeline, and a shortlist that arrived only after the internal team had already filled the role through their own network.
The problem was structural, not personal. The recruiter category existed because the labour market for senior technical talent was illegible. There were no public profiles, no verifiable skill signals, no way to know who was open to a conversation without picking up a phone. So a category emerged that did the picking-up-the-phone, charged a massive markup for the privilege, and called it access.
That workaround is now obsolete. The signal problem has been solved by a new generation of tools and by the public surface area of work itself. The category that was built to compensate for opacity is now selling opacity — and charging as if the information asymmetry still existed.
XpertDirect is the alternative. Built bootstrap-disciplined. Revenue-funded. Small, focused, and structurally cheaper than the incumbent — forever. If you are a technical scale-up in Berlin, Amsterdam or London, the brief form is three fields and sixty seconds. The shortlist arrives in 24 to 48 hours.
Get in touch.
For a brief
Submit a brief →For press
press@xpertdirect.io