A US go-to-market search, run with the discipline of an engineering one

Most of what a technical recruitment partner is asked for is engineers. This was the commercial organisation: account management, enterprise sales, partnerships. Different market, different signals, different way of reading a CV. The risk in that situation is that a technical recruiter treats a sales search as easier, because the vocabulary is more familiar, and screens on charisma rather than on evidence.

What we did

We ran it exactly like a technical search. A written hiring kickoff document per role, taken from the client directly, covering why the hire exists, what the person will own, who they will manage and what defines success. For the Director role that meant an explicit statement that expansion mattered more than retention, that the product is sticky and therefore needs a commercial rather than a caretaking leader, and that the team is six people split across three segments. That document is the reason the search had criteria rather than impressions.

An account manager at an enterprise SaaS company and an account manager in payments do not do the same job. Spreedly needed someone who had sold a technical product to technical buyers, in payments or payments-adjacent, at enterprise deal size. Searching by job title returns thousands of people, almost none of whom fit.

What we did

We mapped the companies first, then the people. Using AI sourcing tools alongside LinkedIn Recruiter, we built a picture of the businesses that genuinely resemble Spreedly, by size, by the kind of contracts they sign with customers and by how they structure partnerships, rather than by industry label. Then we searched inside those companies. It is a slower way to start a search and it is the reason the shortlist was made of people who could hold the conversation.

Commercial hiring goes wrong when nobody writes down what "good" is. Four roles, two people sourcing, and a client team reviewing means four different mental models unless the criteria are explicit.

What we did

We wrote six criteria and scored every single candidate against all of them: payments or fintech background, five or more years in account management, expansion and upsell experience, having sold to technical buyers, enterprise deal experience, and genuine tenure of two or more years per role. 193 candidates went into the tracker with a verdict against each. 97 cleared all six, which is one in every two people we approached. On a search where the job title tells you nothing, a hit rate that high is the whole return on writing the criteria down first, and it means a shortlist can be argued with on the evidence rather than defended on instinct.

Spreedly's talent lead did not want a supplier emailing profiles from outside. He wanted visibility into the search as it happened, and he wanted to be able to act inside it himself.

What we did

We opened a shared Slack channel with both teams in it and ran the search in the open, sending candidates through as we interviewed them. The tracker went further: alongside our own outreach we logged his, so the sheet recorded who had contacted each person, through which channel, on what date, and what came back. Connection request, email and InMail were tracked separately per candidate, per sender. Nobody got contacted twice by two different people, and neither side had to ask the other where anything stood.