Specialist technical search
Pre-Sales and Sales Consultants, Solution Architects, Developers, Testers, Product Owners and the specialist roles around them. Each search is scoped against your actual stack and team, not against a job title.
About
The whole agency is one person. That is deliberate.
Most technology briefs don't fail for lack of candidates. They fail because nobody involved in the search understood the role well enough to recognise the right person when they saw them.
Aksana Rusakova
Director and Owner
Senior Technology Recruiter & Career Coach
Aksamit Recruitment Ltd
Senior Technology Recruiter & Career Coach
Aksamit Recruitment Ltd
Aksana Rusakova
I'm the Director and Owner of Aksamit Recruitment Limited, and I've spent twenty years in executive search and recruitment, eighteen of them specialising in IT and technology across the New Zealand and Australian markets.
In that time I've delivered executive searches and large technology recruitment programmes for organisations on both sides of the Tasman, placing specialist technical and sales people into some of the world's largest IT organisations as well as into well-known Kiwi businesses.
I built my career inside large corporates and major recruitment firms before starting Aksamit. Those years taught me what works in a big machine, and also what gets lost in one. Briefs get passed around. The person who understood the role isn't the person who calls the candidate. Filling the seat quietly becomes more important than filling it well.
Aksamit is my answer to that. I take the brief, I run the search, and I make the calls. You get the same person from first conversation to signed contract, and you get a straight opinion rather than a shortlist padded out to look busy.
What I most enjoy is the hard end of the market: the technical, sales and leadership roles that have been open a while and that everyone else has given back. Those are usually a matching problem rather than a supply problem, and matching is the part I'm good at.
Whether you're hiring or thinking about your own next move, I'm glad to talk it through. Get in touch and we'll work out whether I'm useful to you.
Our Services
IT recruitment for New Zealand and Australia
Aksamit focuses on the technical hires that most affect how a technology business performs, and on the sales and leadership roles that sit alongside them.
Executive search
Technology leadership appointments where the pool is small, largely passive, and mostly not reading job boards. This is search work rather than advertising, and it is where eighteen years of network does the heavy lifting.
Recruitment programmes
Scaling a team, standing up a new function, or hiring several roles against one deadline. I've run large technology recruitment programmes for organisations across NZ and Australia and can do it as one coordinated piece of work.
Market and salary insight
What technology people in New Zealand and Australia are actually being paid, what they're moving for, and how long a realistic search will take. Useful before you write the job description, not after.
How I Work
Fewer candidates, better matched
Understand the role properly
Before any search starts I want to know the team, the stack, the reason the role exists and what "good" looks like in twelve months. Vague briefs produce vague shortlists.
Search, don't advertise
The strongest technology people are rarely applying for anything. Reaching them means approaching them directly, through a network built over eighteen years in this market.
Be straight with both sides
Candidates get honest guidance on the role and the organisation. Clients get an honest read on the market, including when the answer is that the brief needs to change.
Aksana has an absolutely outstanding talent for understanding people and then matching them to teams and roles and is always excellent to work with.
CTO at an IT services firm, Auckland
Beyond the Search
Consulting services and coaching
Alongside search work I advise individuals and hiring teams directly. Every engagement begins with a free 15-minute consult, so you can work out whether it is worth going further before anything is charged.
Consulting and coaching for job seekers and candidates
- Strategic resume alignment & polish. What a hiring manager actually sees, and what to lead with.
- Technical interview strategy & coaching. The format you face, and the answers worth rehearsing.
- Offer negotiation & career advisory. What the offer is really worth, and what can still move.
- Executive career transition coaching. Senior moves, where the search is long and largely invisible.
- LinkedIn & professional brand audits. How you read to the people already searching for you.
Consulting and coaching for companies and hiring managers
- Talent acquisition advisory & process design. Where your process loses the people you want.
- Executive & specialist search projects. Retained search for leadership and hard-to-fill roles.
- Market intelligence & salary benchmarking. What the market pays, and how long a search takes.
- Hiring manager & panel interview training. Interviewing is a skill most panels were never taught.
- Employer value proposition (EVP) alignment. Why candidates say yes, in words they believe.
Let's work out if I can help
The first 15-minute consult is free, with no obligation attached to it. If I'm not the right person for what you need, I'll say so and point you somewhere better.