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NOT ANOTHER RECRUITMENT FIRM.

Substance was built on a simple observation — most recruiters talk well and deliver poorly, especially on GTM, Growth, Commercial Finance and Strategy roles, where a wrong hire is expensive fast. Over 15 years of watching that pattern, from both sides of the hiring table, was enough.

 

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Behind Substance.

Substance was founded by Deema Yanni Ma'at,

who has spent over 15 years inside the rooms where hiring decisions are made — and the ones where they fall apart.


She billed as a top-performing agency recruiter across Morgan McKinley, Hays, and Reed, winning Top Billing Recruiter across APAC and EMEA for over a decade. She later led APAC and MEA talent acquisition at scale inside Booking.com and BASF MBCC, formerly at LinkedIn — managing regional teams, building hiring infrastructure, and living with the consequences of every mandate she owned.


She holds an MBA from Trinity College Dublin and CIPD Level 7 in HR.

That is the person handling your search. Not a junior. Not a bot. Not an account manager passing your brief down a chain.

The name wasn't chosen. It was recognised.

The name Substance came from a conversation — not a boardroom, not a branding agency. Deema and her partner were talking about the quality gap in recruitment across different markets. He was searching for the right word to describe what was missing in so many recruiters. She said it before she even thought about it: Substance.

 

He stopped. "Yes. That's exactly it."

 

Not technical skill. Not charm. Not volume of activity. But Depth. The kind that comes from actually knowing what a good hire looks like, what a failing search feels like, and what it costs a business to get it wrong.

 

That is what was missing. That is what this firm is built to deliver.

Substance - New Era in Recruitment

WE DON'T OPTIMISE FOR ACTIVITY.

Most recruitment models optimise for visible progress — more CVs, more interviews, more updates. We optimise for decisions: we don’t send candidates to keep things moving, screen through juniors, pad shortlists for the appearance of choice, or push interviews before the brief is stable. These aren’t efficiency choices. They are risk controls. You give up volume and constant updates. You gain clearer comparisons and no backtracking after an offer.

We have sat where you sit.

Every recruiter at Substance has delivered inside agency environments, owned hiring outcomes in-house, and worked under real headcount pressure, budget constraints, and delivery expectations.

 

We know what internal trade-offs look like, what hiring politics cost, and what it costs a business to get a hire wrong — not theoretically, from having lived it.

 

It includes recruiting for companies working against a weak employer brand — low Glassdoor scores, high attrition, a reputation candidates already know about before the call.

 

We've placed resilient hires into exactly those conditions by building the search to work harder where the brand doesn't. That's why we push back when we need to, why we're direct when the market isn't what you think it is, and why we'll tell you early when a search is set up to fail.

WHAT SUBSTANCE ACTUALLY STANDS FOR.

We don’t just talk the talk – we walk the walk.

Judgement over activity.

WHERE WE OPERATE

Primary markets: APAC and MEA, including Japan, South Korea, and China — markets where most international hiring approaches fail.

Functions: GTM, Growth, Commercial Finance, and Strategy — roles where a weak hire hits revenue or a transformation timeline directly.

Levels: senior individual contributor through executive. We take roles based on how costly it would be to get wrong, not by seniority alone.

Sectors: Technology, FinTech & Payments, Media, Consumer, Retail, Consulting, Manufacturing, Oil & Energy, and Pharmaceutical.

 

Boundaries: not high-volume hourly hiring, generic resume forwarding, or roles without clear ownership. If a role falls outside that, we’ll say so early.

Most recruiters will tell you what you want to hear.
We will tell you what you need to know.

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