We Ranked First for Talent Density Among Scaleups. It All Starts with Bringing Together the Right People

What Nova measured, and why it matters to us

Nova's Talent Density ranking scores the scaleups in each market by the people who actually work there. Every current employee receives a Nova Talent Score built from four pillars: experience, education, international exposure and languages, weighted according to career stage. A company's score is the average across its whole team, so what counts is the people, not the brand. Circeus came first among the scaleups Nova assessed in Italy.

We care about this metric more than almost any other because talent density is upstream of everything. Product quality, speed of execution, how well an acquisition is integrated, how much a small team can carry. All of it traces back to who is in the room. So, we have built our hiring process to maximise one thing: the average level of the people we bring in.

The funnel is wide by design

Over the last year, we received on average around 1,150 applications for every open role, more than 55,000 in total.

That is not a vanity number. It is the precondition for being selective. One hire for every 1,150 or so applicants is roughly the top 0.1%, and you cannot get there from a pool of fifty. A wide funnel is what earns us the right to say no a lot, and to wait for the right person rather than the available one.

Selection is data-driven from the first screen

Every application is assessed against roughly 20+ signals before it reaches the more in-depth part of the process. Some are the ones you would expect. Others are less obvious, and we cover a few below. We are not publishing the full framework, but the principle is simple: decide what predicts exceptional performance, measure it consistently across every candidate, and let the data do the first cut so that human time goes where it adds most.

It also keeps as a transparent process to avoid bias. We optimise for the top 0.1%

The question we ask is not "can this person do the job?" Plenty of people can. The question is whether they would raise the standard of the team they join, and make the people around them better. Every hire either lifts the bar or lowers it, and at a company that intends to be around for decades, the compounding effect of that choice is enormous.

This makes us slow to say yes. We would rather leave a role open than fill it with someone who is merely good.

What we look for is not always obvious

Experience matters, but it is a lagging indicator. It tells you what someone has done, not what they will do. So alongside experience, we look hard at the things that predict trajectory.

• Learning speed. How quickly has this person become good at things they did not know before?
• Competitive sport or other competitive activities, because they teach discipline, resilience and how to perform under pressure.
• Extreme ownership. Do they treat problems as theirs to solve, even when nobody assigned them?
• Trajectory. Are they moving faster than their peers, and is the pace picking up?
• Academic performance, and in particular evidence of sustained excellence rather than a single good result.
• An appetite for real responsibility early, an entrepreneurial mindset, and a track record of asking for it.
• Evidence of exceptional performance somewhere, in anything.

None of these guarantees anything on its own. Together they are a far better predictor than years on a CV.

Talent density compounds

This is the part that makes the effort worth it. Very strong people attract other very strong people, so the funnel improves over time on its own. Decisions get faster, because you can trust judgment rather than route everything through process. And teams can stay small even as the company grows, because each person carries more.

For a group that serves more than 250,000 businesses with small teams, that last point is not a nice-to-have. It is how the model works.

We are hiring

We are committed to creating an environment where employees feel valued, safe and empowered, because diverse perspectives lead to better outcomes in the long term.

We are actively hiring across our hubs in Milan, London and Sarajevo. If the description above sounds like you, we would like to hear from you.

See our open positions