Building the Talent Strategy from Stealth
About
VRGL is a Dallas-based, venture-backed fintech company providing an institutional-grade, automated data and analytics platform for wealth management firms, asset managers, and family offices. The platform streamlines the aggregation, normalization, and analysis of complex investment data, enabling advisors and investors to make faster, more informed decisions.
Testimonial
“Partnering with Alex and ISC has been instrumental in building and scaling our company from the ground up. Across two organizations over seven years, Alex has consistently delivered a structured, candidate-friendly hiring process that drives results. He helped us grow from two cofounders to 25 employees while managing every aspect of recruiting and communication with professionalism and care. His pricing model is both transparent and startup-friendly, making ISC an invaluable long-term partner.”
Building the Talent Strategy from Stealth: How ISC Helped Launch VRGL
When ISC first partnered with VRGL, the company was in stealth mode, seed-funded, and without a formal talent infrastructure. The founders needed to define critical roles, build a compensation framework, and create a hiring plan that would not risk early missteps or slow momentum.
ISC first acted as a strategic advisor, developing the hiring blueprint and employer narrative, then transitioned into execution through its Workstream model.
The result was a lean, high-performing team built with cost efficiency and speed, achieving a $3,700 cost-per-hire and positioning VRGL to scale while keeping capital free to deploy elsewhere.
The Challenge
At the stealth stage, VRGL lacked a formal talent acquisition infrastructure with no applicant tracking system, workflows, or compensation framework. Before hiring its first employees, the founders needed market intelligence on talent pools, compensation, location strategy, and role sequencing to avoid misaligned hires that could slow momentum.
Traditional options like contingency search, RPO providers, or a premature internal recruiter were either too costly, too rigid, or lacked the strategic support VRGL needed. The company required a scalable, data-driven partner who could provide both strategy and execution.
Our Approach
ISC began its partnership with VRGL not by filling roles immediately but by acting as a strategic advisor during the company’s stealth stage. Over the course of the first month, ISC worked closely with the founders to establish the framework for a sustainable talent strategy. This involved:
- Compensation benchmarking to define competitive yet realistic salary bands
- Geographic comparisons to weigh cost, talent availability, and budget implications across different hiring markets
- Market mapping and competitor analysis to identify available talent pools and understand how comparable fintech firms were structuring their early teams
- Role prioritization to determine which hires would be most critical to establishing momentum
In parallel, ISC helped craft VRGL’s employer narrative, a story that highlighted the company’s vision, market opportunity, and leadership credibility. This narrative became essential in attracting candidates to a company that had not yet emerged from stealth.
By week four, ISC transitioned from advisory into execution through its Workstream model, which provided a scalable and cost-predictable framework for talent acquisition. This model allowed ISC to function as both a strategic talent advisor and an embedded talent acquisition function, flexing resources up or down as hiring needs evolved without sacrificing quality or speed.
Results
Over the course of its growth, ISC became the driving force behind VRGL’s talent acquisition, responsible for building the majority of its team across technical, product, and business functions. Many of these hires required highly specialized expertise and deep investment subject matter knowledge and experience, the kind of talent that is exceptionally difficult to secure in the competitive fintech market.
Leveraging ISC’s Workstream model, VRGL benefitted from a solution that combined scalability with cost predictability. By keeping cost-per-hire at approximately $3,700, well below industry benchmarks, and maintaining an average time-to-fill under five weeks, ISC enabled the company to secure top-tier talent while conserving valuable early-stage resources. This precision hiring approach allowed VRGL to remain lean and efficient while continuing to make critical progress.
Conclusion
VRGL’s story shows that building the right talent strategy early is just as important as the hires themselves. By embedding early, ISC provided the data, insights, and narrative needed to launch from stealth with confidence.
Using its Workstream model, ISC combined flexibility, scalability, and predictable cost to build a team that supported deliberate growth and prepared the company to scale.