Building teams by design. 

THE CONTEXT

A record year, and a hiring process that couldn’t keep up.

STA Consulting Engineers is a Queensland engineering consultancy of around 90 people. The workforce is a wide mix of people, skills and ways of working.

When STA came to Compono in mid-2025, the business was having a record year. Every month was beating the last. That growth meant steady hiring, and the hiring process wasn’t optimised for it. There was no applicant tracking system (ATS). Line managers posted their own ads on SEEK. A single technical role could draw hundreds of applications, and someone had to read every CV to find the eight or so with the right background.

Getting the CV right wasn’t the whole problem either. STA had recently seen a few unsuccessful probations. For many of its roles, qualifications don’t tell you much. An office assistant doesn’t need a degree, but they do need to be the right person for the team. Katherine Grant, STA’s Quality, Training and People Manager, wanted a way to assess that fit with something firmer than an interview and a gut feel.

Katherine also had a hunch about the business itself. Her read was that STA leaned heavily towards one personality type, and she wanted the data to confirm it and help spread the mix. She wanted to use culture and engagement data to make strategic decisions, too. Pulse surveys were easy to run. Understanding what each team actually wanted, and how that matched what the business could offer, was much harder.

All of this had to land in a business already tired of change. As Richard Dunks of New Horizon Solutions, STA’s consultant, put it at the start: everyone was tired of the next new thing, so the rollout would need care.

WHAT STA SET OUT TO DO

Five goals, and where each one landed.

These are the goals Katherine and Richard set at the start of the engagement, and what has happened against each since.

THE APPROACH

Compono Platform, rolled out one step at a time.

STA took on Compono Platform, including Compono Hire, an ATS that assesses candidates for culture and Work Personality fit alongside skills, and Compono Engage, Compono’s culture and engagement platform. Both went live in July 2025.

Given the change fatigue, STA didn’t switch everything on at once. Engage was rolled out department by department, starting with the admin and executive teams, who were about to hire. Hire was put to work on the roles that mattered most, beginning with an Engineering Manager, one of the most important technical positions in the business. By September 2025, every active role was running through Compono.

WHAT CHANGED

People insight now sits inside every hiring decision.

Recruitment became manageable

Compono let Katherine decide what mattered for each role when first creating the job ad. When applications came in, candidates were automatically ranked against Katherine's criteria, and AI generated CV summaries were included in each candidate profile. Katherine found the summaries accurate and clear, stating "They've been really helpful with initial screening of candidates".

Fit became part of senior and recruiter-led hires

STA still uses external recruiters for its most specialised technical roles. Rather than taking those candidates on the CV alone, Katherine asks them to apply through Compono so they can be assessed for organisational fit. For the Engineering Manager role, that surfaced a strong candidate with a good fit for the business. In Katherine’s words, having senior candidates apply through Compono “helped us work out what their priorities were compared to ours.”

Hiring managers came on board

Early on, hiring managers were wary of another new system, so Katherine managed the hiring process external to Compono to minimise the friction. That changed as managers saw the power of how Compono combined traditional application data with psychometric data, all within the candidate profile. By early 2026, several managers were reviewing applicants together inside Compono for a high-stakes role. In September 2026, STA moved its careers page to Compono links, so every candidate now comes through the same front door.

“Using the Compono Platform has been very valuable for our planning and recruitment. It helps our managers understand who is joining their teams, each person’s work personality, and how they will fit with existing team members. We’re also able to identify potential personality clashes early and understand how to work through them. Overall, it provides strong value in helping us plan recruitment and build well-balanced teams.”

Katherine Grant · Quality, Training and People Manager, STA Consulting Engineers

Managers understand their teams before someone new arrives

Work Personality gave STA a shared language for how people work. A workshop with the admin team helped people see what their colleagues need from each other in moments of stress, and the team’s feedback was strongly positive. STA’s managers now use Work Personality to break down their team, understand different leadership styles and work through conflict when it comes up.

The data also provided validation for Katherine's initial hunch. Looking at the spread of personality types, STA could see a high concentration of Coordinators. This prompted Katherine and Richard to determine how to best make use of this strength, but also to question what blind spots this bias of Coordinators may be creating. This thought process now influences who they need to hire next.

Engagement data shows where to look

STA had run pulse surveys before. In February 2026 it ran its first company-wide Compono Engage campaign, with managers encouraging their teams to take part and to complete their Work Personality at the same time. The results gave the senior leadership team something a pulse survey hadn’t: a heatmap showing which departments needed attention. It helped identify gaps in the way the specific departments worked, compared to how they wanted to work. These data driven insights were well received.

Katherine is now able to track engagement issues in specific departments far more precisely than before, using the department-level view she built from the Engage results. She found the platform “very intuitive” to work with.

THE TAKEAWAYS

Lessons for other technical firms.

1. Qualifications filter the field. Fit decides who succeeds. In a workforce with such varied roles, the CV only answers part of the question. Assessing Work Personality and organisational fit fills in the rest.

2. Bring recruiter candidates into the same lens. Using a recruiter doesn’t mean giving up visibility. Asking shortlisted candidates to apply through Compono puts every senior hire through the same fit assessment.

3. Start where the appetite is. In a business with change fatigue, rolling Engage out team by team, and starting with the teams about to hire, built trust before the company-wide campaign.