Six Robotics: What does recruitment look like when the hiring bar is exceptionally high, and the talent pool exceptionally small?

Six Robotics is one of Norway’s fastest-growing defence tech companies, developing advanced autonomy technology for unmanned systems. They’ve grown from a handful of people to more than 100 in a short period of time, with ambitions to keep scaling significantly in the years ahead.

That kind of growth comes with some difficult hiring challenges.

Finding someone with the right technical background is only part of it. They also need to understand – and thrive in – the kind of complex, fast-moving environment that comes with scaling a company like Six Robotics. It’s not for everyone. But for the people who enjoy that combination of ambitious technology, high expectations and rapid growth, there probably aren’t many more exciting places to be in Norway right now.

For three months, Tobias from Cruit joined Six Robotics full-time as a Senior Consultant, working as an integrated part of the Talent team. That meant working directly with hiring managers, including the CTO and COO, using Six Robotics’ systems and processes, and representing Six Robotics directly in the candidate market.

The engagement covered hiring across both Operations and Engineering, with the first hire made just 26 days after the engagement started and Operations roles averaging a time-to-hire of less than 30 days.

But some of the most interesting work was in Engineering.

The searches included highly specialised profiles within Embedded Linux, Electrical Engineering and Edge & Embedded Security. These aren’t roles where a broad LinkedIn search gives you a shortlist.

For some positions, more than 100 profiles were proactively mapped and assessed for a single hire. Finding relevant people was one thing. Finding people who met Six Robotics’ technical bar, understood the environment they were joining, and could genuinely thrive in it was something else entirely.

Even for these highly specialised Engineering roles, hires were made in around 60 days.

That’s the kind of search where being embedded really matters.

The hardest roles aren’t solved by simply finding relevant profiles. Finding the right person takes persistence – and when the number of genuinely relevant candidates is limited, every conversation matters.

When you’re embedded, you don’t just know the job description. You understand the technology, the team, the challenges and what the company is trying to build. You work directly with the hiring managers, continuously calibrate the search, and learn what separates an interesting profile from the right one.

That understanding matters when you finally get the right person on the phone. For highly sought-after candidates, recruitment is as much about making the opportunity compelling as it is about assessing whether they are qualified. You need to understand the company well enough to explain why this role – and why Six Robotics – might be worth leaving a good job for.

And when a search gets difficult, it doesn’t get deprioritised or left to float. You stay close to it until you find the right person.

“Working with a company that has an exceptionally high hiring bar is both challenging and rewarding. You know that a strong CV is only the starting point. At Six Robotics, we needed rare technical skills, but also people with the mindset and motivation to thrive in a company experiencing hypergrowth.
The importance of being embedded was clear. It was crucial that my contribution didn’t come from a distance. I was in the room as priorities shifted, trade-offs were made and the definition of ‘great’ became sharper. That made every search more precise, every conversation more credible, and allowed us to move quickly without lowering the bar.”
— Tobias Perez Nielsen, Senior Consultant for Six Robotics and Head of Embedded at Cruit

The result was successful hiring across several business-critical areas, with an average cost-per-hire around 40% lower than a comparable traditional agency model – while building recruitment capability that stayed with Six Robotics beyond the individual hires.

But the assignment wasn't only about today's open roles.

Together with Six Robotics' Talent team, we also worked on the recruitment infrastructure around them – introducing Candidate NPS, creating more structured processes, and building reusable Engineering talent pools to make future searches more efficient.

"Recruiting for highly specialiced engineering roles requires much more than just sourcing of candidates. It requires a deep understanding of the technology, the company, and the people behind it. Tobias quickly became an extension of our internal team, and that close collaboration allowed us to move faster on highly specialiced roles without compromising on our hiring bar."
— Kristine Angeltvedt, Head of People & Communication at Six Robotics

For us, this is what Embedded Recruitment is about.

Adding experienced recruitment capacity when and where it's needed, while becoming close enough to the business to actually make a difference – both on the hires being made today and on how recruitment works tomorrow.

A big thank you to the Six Robotics team for having Cruit along for the ride. With the journey Six has ahead, we have a feeling this won’t be the last time we work together.