An operator runs your search, not a recruiter.

22–26% of the hire's first-year base salary, depending on search complexity — exclusivity brings it down to 23%. We hold the invoice until two weeks after the hire's start date, then send it on standard net-30 terms — nothing unusual for your AP team to process. By the time payment is due, the 30-day refund guarantee has already been closed for two weeks. No retainer, no upfront fee, no monthly minimum, and no charge for the sourcing, screening and interviewing in between. If a search runs and nobody is hired, nothing is owed. The percentage is agreed in writing before any work begins.

Three things, all standard and all in the agreement. Off-limits: nobody hired through this practice gets recruited out of your company by us for 12 months — the whole company, not just the person placed. Candidate ownership: if we introduce someone and you hire them within 12 months, the fee applies, even if the hire happens through a different channel by then. Data: resumes, comp details and notes shared during a search stay confidential to that search — they do not get reused for other openings, and if someone is not hired, their materials are not kept on file unless they have separately agreed to stay in consideration for future roles.

Two things. If a hire doesn't work out within 30 days of their start date, the full fee is refunded. Within 90 days, the search runs again at no charge until the seat is filled. Both cover performance and fit — not a role you eliminate, a job you materially change after they start, or a comp plan that doesn't hold as promised. Those are calls you're entitled to make, but they aren't ours to guarantee against. Outside of that, no proration, no credit-only clause, and no debate about the circumstances — the terms sit in the agreement rather than on a policy page somewhere. They will not give you back the quarter the seat was empty, and nothing can, but the fee never becomes money spent on a hire that did not hold.

Four to six, and the ceiling is deliberate. Because every search is run by a former GTM executive, a firm this size cannot carry searches that go nowhere. That is what keeps the standard honest, and it is also why the answer is occasionally that there is no room until a current search closes. When that happens you will be told plainly rather than added to a queue.

That's the more common case, not the exception. Multiple roles from one client run as separate searches within the same four-to-six capacity ceiling, sequenced rather than run all at once — you'll know the order and the timeline upfront, not find out later that attention was being split four ways.

You will hear that on the first call. Most recruiters take a job description as given because assessing it is outside what they have done. A hiring sequence that sets the role up to fail, a quota that assumes a pipeline which does not exist yet, or an enterprise seller hired a stage too early — those are the reasons enterprise searches stall, and they are worth naming early rather than a month into one.

A first shortlist inside two to three weeks. That's realistic because sourcing doesn't start cold — a working list of roughly 4,500 AI-native US companies is kept current, tracking who's building an enterprise motion and who just raised the round to fund one. After the shortlist, the timeline belongs to your interview process, and how fast your team turns feedback around matters more than anything else.

This is common, and we fully expect it. Someone already being represented is a head start, not a requirement, and plenty of searches get sourced from scratch against the brief. The terms do not change either way: the fee is owed only when a hire starts.

No, on both counts. This is enterprise GTM in the US market only — Mid-market and SMB searches get referred to someone better suited to them, and the referral costs nothing. We believe it is better to be genuinely good at one segment than thin across three.

You get the same enterprise GTM expertise on every call, every time. Nothing gets passed to someone who wasn't in the intake conversation. We've carried a quota, written comp plans, and sat in board-level reviews explaining hires that didn't work out, so there's a clear view of costly mistakes to avoid. If we're not the right fit for a particular search, we'll tell you that instead of taking the work.