A recruiter from a specialist HR firm got in touch with me directly. I hadn't applied anywhere near Intercom on my own.
I was open to a move but hadn't started a proper search, so the timing caught me off guard. I'd submitted around six applications in total over the previous few weeks, mostly just having a look, but this one came to me and felt more serious than the rest straight away. The brief was specific: Intercom was scaling its engineering organisation from 200 to 400 people within 18 months and needed an HR Business Partner who could run that function from end to end. The process ran across four interview rounds over 33 days, which felt thought through rather than dragged out. First was a screen with the recruiter, mostly about my background partnering with technical organisations and whether I wanted to work somewhere growing that fast. Then I spoke with the CPO, who wanted to understand how I thought about people strategy at scale: levelling frameworks, internal mobility, training managers. The third round was with the Engineering VP, the hiring manager, and it got more practical. How I'd structure my first 90 days, how I'd approach a reorg, how I'd handle a situation where engineering leadership and HR priorities ↓