Highlighted company: Dunelm

Conor Morgan has started 1,280 conversations with engineers on cord. He is Dunelm's Tech Recruitment Partner, and he has been doing it since 2022.

Right now he has six roles live, five of them posted in the last two weeks, and the median first reply across them is 18 hours. One engineer heard back in one hour and 17 minutes.

Who Dunelm are

Dunelm started in 1979 as a market stall in Leicester selling ready made curtains, run by Bill and Jean Adderley. The first shop opened in 1984, and the company joined the London Stock Exchange in 2006.

Today Dunelm is the UK's leading homewares retailer, with 204 stores across the UK and Ireland and around 12,000 colleagues. Clodagh Moriarty became chief executive in October 2025, joining from Sainsbury's where she was Chief Retail and Technology Officer.

Digital now accounts for 42% of everything Dunelm sells. The Dunelm app launched this year and passed 740,000 downloads by the summer, and in August they launched Ask Dunelm, an AI shopping assistant built with Google Cloud.

How they perform on cord

The numbers below are from cord, on 6 October 2026.

• 1,288 conversations started with engineers by the Dunelm team.

• Six live roles, across engineering, data and architecture.

• A median first reply of 18 hours, with the fastest at one hour and 17 minutes.

• A 100% response rate on every role that has been messaged.

• On cord since 2022.

Eighteen hours is the number to remember. Engineers rarely lose interest at interview. They lose it waiting to hear back, and Dunelm doesn't make anyone wait.

Why engineers stay once they get there

They built their own platform. Dunelm replaced off the shelf ecommerce with a platform built in house on serverless AWS, and split the website into micro frontends so teams can ship independently. Deployments went from 10 to 20 a week to between 75 and 85. The stack is TypeScript, React, Node, AWS Lambda, Terraform, Snowflake and Python.

There's a real route in for people starting out. The software engineering graduate scheme is a two year rotation across front end, back end and infrastructure, with applications opening this autumn.

They tell you how the interview works. Technology roles run as a two or three stage process, online or a mix of virtual and in person, covering your experience, the team, competency questions and sometimes a technical exercise. Reasonable adjustments are offered up front.

Hybrid across two offices. Technology, digital and data teams work hybrid between Leicester and London.

The small things they've bothered to do. A paid day off on your birthday. A paid day off when you move house. A paid volunteering day every year. Free round the clock access to a virtual GP, therapy and counselling. Four colleague networks covering gender equity, Pride, disability and neurodiversity, and ethnicity and race, plus a Women in Tech group.

The team doing the hiring

Two people run Dunelm's account, and one of them has started almost every conversation on it.

• Conor Morgan, Tech Recruitment Partner. 1,280 conversations started on cord since 2022, and the person you'll hear from about a technology role.

• Sumit Masania, Recruitment Partner. 8 conversations since joining the account in 2024.

The technology team they hire into sits under John Gahagan, Chief Technology and Information Officer.

Highlighted Companies is a series of hand picked companies on cord. Data sourced from cord, October 2026.