Deal focus: Quintet pumps Talent’s recruitment muscle

As technology penetrates every aspect of the modern economy, high-quality IT support is becoming a growing burden for smaller enterprises. While there is plenty of talent to be recruited, many employers lack the resources to hire full-time staff or the technology understanding to put them to best use.

Contracting services offer a solution to this problem, allowing employers to access IT workers as needed. By its nature, the arrangement also provides a level of flexibility for both sides.

“Companies are seeking more and more people to provide IT services on a contracting basis,” says Douglas Farrell, founder and managing partner of Quintet Partners. “We’re also seeing that IT professionals increasingly would rather be contracting than full-time employees, and they are very happy to work for multiple employers at a time.”

Farrell saw IT contract recruitment as an ideal target for Quintet, the investment firm that he founded in 2016 after stepping down as head of M&A and real estate investment for Australasia at Citigroup. For the second investment from its $50 million private equity fund, raised entirely from Australian family offices, the firm was seeking a company with strong growth prospects where its capital could be put to good use.

Quintet has found its match with Talent, a 23-year-old Australia-based IT contracting firm with 16 offices worldwide. The GP, which recently took a minority stake in the company for an undisclosed sum, saw its focus on a single sector and its client base as key advantages in the crowded contract recruiting space.

“Talent is a pure-play IT contracting recruitment business: it doesn’t focus on any sectors outside of IT, and so it’s exposed to that trend,” says Farrell. “We also liked the fact that it has longstanding relationships with major corporations and governments in Australia and New Zealand. Those took a long time to form, and they can also sustain it for a long time.”

Talent hopes to leverage this base of experience to become a staffing powerhouse in the $3 trillion global IT industry. The company already serves over 1,000 customers on four continents, and generated A$550 million ($392 million) in revenue last year. 

To these native strengths Quintet hopes to add its own capabilities. The firm’s investments are relatively modest – it targets commitments of $5-15 million per deal – but Farrell believes the network of potential clients that it can provide will be an asset. He also expects Quintet’s LP base to be a major help. Its investors include Thérèse Rein, founder of global recruitment business Ingeus, who has joined Talent as an advisor.

“We have tended to align ourselves with the more sophisticated family offices that we feel have a good understanding of our target sectors,” Farrell says. “Thérèse Rein has grown a business in this space from a start-up into a multinational company, so she has a lot of expertise that can help us as we’re thinking about buying and operating businesses.”   

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• Topics
• Australasia
• Buyouts
• Support services
• Australia
• Quintet Partners
• Appointments