GTM & Tech Recruiting Case Studies:

Client Profile

80-person services company | Lean, execution-driven leadership team

What They Believed

The hire who dazzled on paper and then couldn't operate is a story every lean, hands-on business knows. The big-firm project executive who can't run a forty-person builder. The carrier underwriter who can't function in a scrappy agency. The polished executive who
needs a machine around them that this company doesn't have.

After a couple of leadership hires who looked excellent and then struggled, this company drew the obvious conclusion: aim higher. Bigger names, stronger resumes, more impressive backgrounds. If the last candidate didn't work, the next one simply needed to be more qualified.

What The Search Found

The failed hires weren't under-qualified — they were mis-fit. A PE-backed, execution-driven environment runs on a particular operating cadence, and leaders who'd thrived in slower, more heavily resourced settings couldn't find the gear. Pedigree hadn't been too low; it had been the wrong screen entirely. Hiring harder on the same profile would have bought the same failure at a higher salary.

What Changed

We ran a discovery-driven search built around how a c-level leader actually drives outcomes - judgment under pressure, execution style, fit to the company's real operating cadence - rather than experience and title. Success criteria were tied to the operating model, candidates were assessed on how they'd run inside it, and expectations were set plainly on both sides before anyone signed.

Where It Stands
The leader hired fits the operating model, ramped faster, and was contributing earlier than the predecessors who'd looked better on paper. The executive team and board carry more confidence in the seat, and the risk of another costly mis-hire at that level came down. Leadership hiring shifted from resume-driven to outcome-driven.

Client Profile

Mid-market | 120 employees | hiring cloud and data engineering roles

What They Believed

Every business hiring for hard-to-fill roles tells itself the same story when hiring slows: the talent is scarce, the market is brutal, and that’s just how it is. The firm chasing senior cloud and data engineers, the GC hunting experienced superintendents, the agency after seasoned underwriters - all reach for scarcity first, and the answer is always to source harder and wait it out.

What The Search Found

They were finding people. They were losing them. Almost none of the drag lived in sourcing — it lived in the deciding. Every interview loop produced a different kind of signal - the architect probing depth, the hiring manager probing delivery, nobody measuring the same thing twice - so strong candidates sat in limbo while the team tried to reconcile feedback that didn’t line up. Scarcity was the story the team told itself; inconsistent evaluation was the actual cause.

What Changed

We worked with the firm's leaders to set role-specific success criteria and standardize what the interview was actually measuring, so a loop produced a decision instead of four
opinions. The process was built to hold momentum and strip out the friction that was costing them candidates after the hard part — finding them — was already done.

Where It Stands
Quality of hire went up, cycles got shorter because the decisions got clearer, and the people running the hiring stopped pulling in different directions. Candidate drop-off fell in exactly the competitive spots where it had been worst. Hiring for hard roles became predictable and repeatable without slowing the business down.

Client Profile

60 employees | CRO - heavy sales-led organization | Scaling go-to-market motion

What They Believed

The biggest trap in hiring anyone who carries a number — a sales rep, an insurance producer, a business developer — is believing the number travels. The producer with the huge book. The rep at the top of the leaderboard. The BD lead who “owns the market.” The instinct is universal: hire the biggest past number and the growth comes with it. Scaling its revenue team, this company reached for exactly that — the candidates with the strongest quota history, on the logic that past performance is the best predictor.

What The Search Found
Those numbers measured fit to someone else's motion. A producer who built a huge book in one market, with one set of relationships and one way of selling, was at this company a genuine unknown — different product, different buyer, different motion, different everything the numbers were actually built on. The interviews made it worse by
dwelling on past results instead of how the person actually sells and builds. Big numbers elsewhere turned out to say very little about ramp here.

What Changed
We redesigned the hiring approach to test the thing that actually transfers: how a candidate sells, qualifies and builds inside this company's specific model. Criteria were
aligned to the real revenue motion, approach and execution were assessed directly rather than inferred from a track record, and we worked with leadership to keep strong candidates moving before the market took them.

Where It Stands
Revenue hires came in stronger, ramped faster, and began contributing earlier. Confidence in revenue hiring rose, and the turnover-and-rehire cycle that quietly taxes every scaling sales team eased. Revenue hiring became an accelerator, not a risk factor.