How Freedom built a diverse engineering team in weeks, not quarters.

Freedom Financial Network is one of the largest debt resolution platforms in the US, helping hundreds of thousands of Americans navigate their way to financial independence. Their digital products — consumer-facing web apps, member portals, and internal tooling — sit at the center of a business that moves fast and operates at real scale.

As the company invested in modernizing its consumer platform, leadership made a deliberate decision: rebuild key parts of the stack in React and TypeScript, and hire the engineers and designers who could own that transition. The goal wasn't just technical — it was cultural. Freedom was committed to building a team that reflected the diversity of the customers it served.

Hiring a single senior engineer takes time. Hiring a coordinated cross-functional team — React engineers, TypeScript specialists, and product designers — simultaneously, with a meaningful diversity bar, is a different problem entirely.

Freedom's internal recruiting team was strong, but the pipeline wasn't producing what they needed. Candidates with the right React/TypeScript depth were often not from underrepresented backgrounds, and candidates who checked the diversity box frequently lacked the specific technical profile the product modernization required. Finding both in the same pipeline proved harder than anticipated.

The platform timeline wasn't flexible. Engineering leadership needed a trusted partner with an existing network — one that didn't require months of relationship-building before producing results.

RepoScout approached Freedom's engagement as a team build, not a sequence of individual searches. From the intake brief, we mapped the full scope — frontend engineers with React and TypeScript depth, a TypeScript generalist comfortable across the stack, and product designers with fintech or financial services exposure — and ran parallel sourcing tracks across all roles simultaneously.

Diversity wasn't treated as a filter applied at the end. It was built into how we sourced: expanding beyond the usual networks, actively surfacing engineers from underrepresented backgrounds who had the technical signal to clear the bar, and presenting slates where diversity was the expectation, not the exception.

Each candidate was vetted not just on resume signal but on their fit with Freedom's specific stack, their comfort with a production-scale React/TypeScript codebase, and their ability to ramp quickly into an existing product org.

Freedom received their first slate of vetted profiles within 10 days of kicking off the engagement. Across the full engagement, RepoScout placed six engineers and designers — a team built in weeks rather than the quarters a sequential search would have required.

Every slate delivered was diverse. Freedom didn't have to trade speed for representation, or representation for technical quality. The engineers hired had the React and TypeScript depth to contribute meaningfully from week one, and the designers brought the fintech product sensibility the platform modernization demanded.

The engagement redefined what the internal team expected from an external recruiting partner — not a resume pipe, but a team builder with a point of view.