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SXSW London: Building a High-Performing UK Launch Team in Under 9 Months

  • Writer: Urban Digital Recruitment
    Urban Digital Recruitment
  • 4 days ago
  • 2 min read

SXSW London engaged Urban Digital to support the launch of SXSW’s first UK festival. With an ambitious 2025 launch timeline, the organisation needed to build a complete UK team from scratch (15 urgent hires) across commercial, marketing, and operational functions, in under nine months.


With no existing UK talent infrastructure and limited leadership bandwidth, SXSW London required a trusted recruitment partner capable of delivering senior, cross-functional talent at speed, while maintaining the quality and diversity expected of a globally recognised brand.


The Challenge:

Launching a major international festival into a new market presented several complex hiring challenges:

  • Building SXSW’s first UK team from the ground up with no existing local talent pipeline

  • Extremely tight hiring timelines to support a 2025 festival launch (less than 9 months)

  • Requirement for niche, cross-functional roles across commercial, marketing, product, and operations

  • Limited leadership capacity to review large volumes of candidates and manage recruitment processes

  • High expectations for top-tier, diverse hires, despite limited UK brand presence at the time


Our Approach:

Given the scale and urgency of the brief, Urban Digital implemented a retained recruitment solution designed for high-volume, time-critical hiring:

  • For volume, urgent hiring, we agreed a retained recruitment solution

  • Discovery sessions to define requirements and success profiles

  • Market mapping and targeted outreach to passive candidates

  • Pre-screening, competency assessments, and shortlist delivery

  • Full interview coordination and stakeholder alignment

  • Offer management, references, counter-offers & ongoing advisory


Our Results:

The partnership delivered a successful UK launch team within a highly constrained timeline:

  • 15 critical roles filled across commercial, marketing, and product teams — all within the required pre-launch window

  • £97k saved compared to traditional agency recruitment models

  • High-performing team built from scratch, delivering a successful debut SXSW London festival

  • Established a long-term talent foundation to support future UK events and ongoing growth

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