This isn't really a case study - it's our origin story!

Matt Blackledge - Cohort Founder

In 2012, I took a contract with Oil Spill Response Ltd — the global industry body for oil spill preparedness and response, based in Southampton.

In the wake of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the industry had tasked OSRL with responsibility for a subsea well capping stack - a piece of critical infrastructure designed to prevent another catastrophe of that scale. It was a significant undertaking, and they were building the organisation to match: new bases in Brazil, South Africa, and Norway, and a team in Southampton to manage the equipment and logistics.

They needed someone who could hire across multiple countries simultaneously, navigate local employment law, and build a function from scratch. That's what I'd spent my career doing.

Over twelve months, we helped OSRL recruit more than 50 people across four countries. The work went well beyond sourcing candidates. We benchmarked salaries in markets we hadn't worked in before, worked with local accountants to sort payroll and employment terms, ran assessment days to help OSRL make good decisions at pace, set up their recruitment systems from scratch, and reconfigured their HR systems to work across both existing and new territories.

What made this engagement different wasn't the scale of it. It was how it felt to do the work.

OSRL is a genuinely purpose-driven organisation, created by the industry to protect it, and the world, from the consequences of its own worst days. Working inside that, rather than alongside it as an external supplier, meant our expertise landed differently. There was trust, access, and a shared sense of what we were trying to build together.

That feeling of being genuinely embedded, genuinely useful, genuinely aligned is what stayed with us.

It's where the idea for Cohort came from.