Five years of frictionless hiring in a specialist market
🌍 Industry: Climate & sustainability consulting
🔗 Client: carbonlimits.no
📋 Model: Flex
Carbon Limits is an Oslo-based international consultancy with nearly 20 years of experience reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Working across more than 30 countries, their team of specialists covers methane management, carbon markets, climate policy, CCUS, and low-carbon hydrogen — some of the most specialised disciplines in the climate sector. Alongside their consultancy work, they develop MIST, a methane inventory software product used by organisations managing emissions data.
They are not a typical Cohort client. Carbon Limits is well-established, internationally respected, and operationally mature. But when Cohort first started working with them, Managing Director Stephanie Saunier was carrying the hiring process herself — managing high volumes of applications for roles requiring highly specific expertise. For a consultancy where every hour not spent with clients affects revenue, it was a cost the business couldn't keep absorbing.
Specialist hiring is difficult at the best of times. The candidate pool for climate policy experts, methane engineers, and carbon market specialists is genuinely small. Identifying the right people requires deep market knowledge; filtering a high volume of applications requires time and judgment. Carbon Limits had no shortage of either — but applying both to a hiring process was pulling leadership away from the work that generates value.
Cohort built Carbon Limits' hiring infrastructure from the ground up — the systems, processes, job briefs, and playbooks needed to run a professional operation — and has been running it ever since.
When a role needs filling, Cohort steps in and turns the key. We write the briefs, manage the process, handle all incoming applications, and conduct first-stage interviews — entirely as Carbon Limits. Candidates experience the organisation directly, represented by people who know it well enough to do it justice. By the time a shortlist reaches the leadership team, the early work is done. Carbon Limits make the decisions that matter; we take care of everything else.
Over five years that trust has extended across the full range of the organisation: VIE interns and entry-level analysts, specialist consultants, a Product Manager for MIST, Principal Consultants for CCUS, and most recently a COO. Each time, the process runs the same way — quietly, professionally, and without distracting the people who need to stay focused on clients.
"In a small and growing company, recruitment is both central and a headache. The work with Cohort has allowed us to improve our recruitment efforts on many fronts: from the process to how we describe our offer. The Cohort team manages the perfect balance between sharing their expertise while adapting to our constraints and our ways of working. We are grateful for a great collaboration."
Stephanie Saunier, Managing Director, Carbon Limits AS