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  • A cheeky description of someone who has butchered something and made themselves look silly in the process.

    Formal Definition;

    “Kooked" someone made a fool of themselves, usually by falling and ruining a wave. An enduring term for someone who is a little strange, eccentric or crazy.

    “Goose” lighthearted insult for someone who has done something silly.

    While a "kook" is a person, saying someone is "totally kooked it" means they made a major, embarrassing mistake in the water.

    We’ve kooked hiring more than we care to admit. Now we help others avoid a wild goose chase, particularly when the risk of getting it wrong is high.

  • Kooked Goose is a specialised consultancy focused on helping New Zealand-based companies navigate the complexities of recruitment with precision and confidence. Led by an expert with extensive experience in the SaaS sector, the firm offers structured sprints to validate job roles and map the talent market before hiring.

    Our methodology is designed to prevent wasteful spending and administrative frustration by providing evidence-based recommendations and end-to-end recruitment support.

    Beyond simple hiring, we build scalable infrastructure, such as employer branding and technical workflows, to improve the long-term candidate experience. Ultimately, we aim to replace reactive, unclear hiring habits with a strategic framework that supports sustainable business growth.

  • A Discovery & Validation Sprint is a short, time-boxed assignment designed to help businesses validate a role against the real market before committing to a full hiring process. Its primary goal is to help companies avoid a "wild goose chase" and reduce wasted effort, which is especially valuable when hiring for obscure, new, or scaled roles. The sprint involves role alignment, creating a quality market map, and having validation conversations to provide an evidence-based recommendation on whether to pursue the mapped talent or adjust the role's scope. At the end of this sprint, a business can choose to take the provided shortlist of talent and run their own recruitment process at no additional charge.

    In contrast, Expert Recruitment Support provides comprehensive, end-to-end management of the hiring process for businesses that lack the internal capacity to do it themselves. This service actually includes the Discovery & Validation Sprint, but it takes the process further by adding bespoke recruitment campaign design and full coverage of both passive and active talent markets. While the Discovery Sprint focuses purely on research and validation to give you the confidence to hire, Expert Recruitment Support is an outcome-oriented service designed to solve cost, continuity, and capacity challenges by actively landing the pivotal hire for a fee upon success

  • Paving a hiring runway helps scaling businesses avoid the pain and wasted effort of reactive hiring by building the infrastructure needed to make recruitment efficient, repeatable, and scalable for the future.

    When a company is growing, the biggest constraint to capitalizing on that momentum is often the time and effort required to find the right talent. If the hiring process is "murky" or reactive, it stifles growth and burns valuable time and money precisely when a business needs to remain hyper-focused on its customers, capital, and critical business plans.

    By taking the time to pave a "hiring runway," businesses can enjoy several key benefits that allow them to "fly the plane and land it safely again and again":

    • Scalable Infrastructure and Technology: It lays the foundational processes and technology needed for growth. For example, implementing the right HR or recruitment tech stack (like an HRIS or ATS) allows a gaining-momentum business to shift gears safely.

    • Proactive Talent Pooling: Rather than starting from scratch for every role, businesses can create "Expression of Interest" (EOI) pipelines. These engineered vehicles attract, nurture, and qualify potential candidates so they can be seamlessly converted into active applicants exactly when a role opens.

    • Enhanced Candidate Experience (CX) & Workforce Planning: By mapping out comprehensive "Talent Journeys" that span from initial talent attraction through to one year post-hire, off-boarding, and alumni programs, businesses can align their workforce planning with a consistently delightful candidate experience.

    • Targeted Employer Branding: Developing a specific "Brand Persona" gives scaling businesses a competitive advantage. It allows them to use unique persona marketing to appeal directly to the segmented audiences they most want to attract.

    Ultimately, establishing this hiring runway transforms recruitment from a potentially chaotic, ordinary process into a strategic advantage that builds the company's brand, accelerates its growth, and shapes memorable careers

  • Growing Kiwi companies across various stages of development would benefit most from Kooked Goose's services. Specifically, their offerings are designed for:

    • Startups and SMEs: These businesses benefit from Kooked Goose helping them lay the foundational hiring infrastructure—such as implementing simple tech (like an HRIS or ATS) and scalable processes—so their growing teams can run efficiently as they level up.

    • Larger Enterprises: Mature companies can benefit from specific, customized solutions designed for more complex workstreams or large-scale projects.

    • Businesses hiring for obscure, new, or nuanced roles: Companies that are hiring for highly specific roles where the risk of making an expensive mistake is high. Kooked Goose helps these businesses validate the role against the market to avoid a "wild goose chase".

    • Companies lacking internal recruitment capacity: Businesses that want a smooth, end-to-end hiring process but simply do not have the internal time, capacity, or continuity to manage bespoke recruitment campaigns themselves.

    • Businesses with reactive or "murky" hiring processes: Companies whose growth and momentum are being stifled by inefficient hiring. Kooked Goose takes on the hiring burden so these businesses can stop burning time and money, allowing them to stay laser-focused on their customers, capital, and business-critical plans

  • Kooked Goose differentiates itself from traditional recruitment services through a combination of unique service structures, our transparent flexibility, and the specific "lived experience" of our leadership.

    Here are the core factors that set us apart:

    • Accessible Premium Search Techniques: Unlike typical agencies that might rely on "CV volume, advertising management or open ended sourcing," Kooked Goose focuses on discretely targeted, time-boxed sprints. We provide a level of evidence-based market validation that is usually reserved for high-level c-suite hiring at a significant cost and retained commitment, effectively removing those traditional barriers so growing businesses can make confident decisions.

    • Ultimate Flexibility and No "Lock-In": At the end of our Discovery & Validation Sprint, we offer genuine flexibility. A business can take the shortlisted talent provided and run their own recruitment campaign at no additional charge (Kooked Goose will even make the introductions), or the business can choose to retain them for full end-to-end recruitment support.

    • Deep "Lived Experience" in Scaling SaaS: The business is led by Warren, who brings 17 years of independent recruitment experience, including nine years specifically building the highly successful Kiwi SaaS company, ezyVet. Rather than just acting as external consultants, they rely on this deep, lived experience of what it actually takes to scale a tech business successfully.

    • Radical Authenticity and Self-Awareness: The company's unique name is a lighthearted nod to the fact that we have made hiring mistakes (or "kooked" it) ourselves in the past. We use these hard-learned, real-world lessons to help other businesses avoid a "wild goose chase," which is especially valuable when the risk of getting a nuanced or obscure hire wrong is high.

    • Breathing Life into an Ordinary Process: We don't just view hiring as putting a body in a seat; we are deeply passionate about crafting "delightful hiring experiences" that breathe life into a traditionally ordinary process. We recognize that how a company hires actively builds its brand, accelerates growth, and shapes memorable careers