Marketing recruiters for high-growth tech companies

Our customers are venture capital-backed, high-growth tech companies, from startup to growth stage and enterprise; they range from 15 employees to over 50,000. Companies usually call us about marketing hiring when they close a funding round and have a hiring surge, lose a key marketing leader, have had marketing hires that didn’t work out, or need more recruiting capacity for go-to-market roles without adding W-2 recruiting headcount.

We fill product marketing managers, demand generation managers, growth and performance marketers, content marketers, and field, lifecycle, customer, and brand marketing managers, as well as marketing coordinators, directors, and heads of marketing, up to vice president of marketing and chief marketing officer. We fill communications, digital marketing, and marketing operations roles too.

Marketing is part of our GTM and sales recruiting practice. We work as sales and marketing recruiters for high-growth tech companies, and the recruiter on your search has hired marketers at your stage before.

A marketing title tells you very little about the job. One demand generation manager runs paid acquisition and owns a lead number every month. Another runs events, webinars, and account-based programs for an enterprise sales team, and is measured on meetings booked and pipeline influenced. They have the same title, and putting one into the other’s seat is an expensive mistake.

The biggest difference is usually the balance between building the brand and driving pipeline now. Most growth-stage companies need both: awareness that makes the sales team’s outreach land, and high-intent channels that create qualified pipeline and revenue this quarter. A marketer who has only done one side will usually pull the role toward it.

Who you sell to shapes the role as well. Marketing to small businesses runs on volume, speed, and self-serve conversion. Marketing to enterprise accounts runs on long sales cycles, many stakeholders, and close work with sales on a list of target accounts. A marketer who has only done one usually takes longer to ramp in the other.

The stage of your company also has a significant impact. At a startup, the first marketer writes the content, runs the campaigns, and builds the reporting, often in the same week, and the job description changes as the company learns what works. At a growth-stage company, marketers build a function while the process around them is still missing. Someone who has only worked inside a large marketing team, with an agency, a big budget, and a specialist for every channel, is a high-risk hire in either seat.

For a lot of growth-stage companies, another trap is hiring marketers who come from big-logo companies. A marketer from a category-leading brand has usually had brand recognition doing part of the work, and demand that came in on its own. Creating demand for a product nobody has heard of yet is a different job.

Behavioral fit matters as much as background. Startup and growth-stage marketing needs drivers, not passengers: people with a strong bias for action, who are comfortable with tight deadlines, own outcomes personally, communicate clearly, and learn fast. Technical aptitude matters more every year, because the marketing tech stack changes monthly and AI is changing how the work gets done. We screen for all of it in the recruiter interview instead of assuming it from the companies on a resume.

The stakes are high. A marketing hire who can’t build pipeline doesn’t look like a problem right away; it shows up in the sales numbers a quarter or two later, after the time is gone. And if your competitors get their go-to-market hiring right while you don’t, that gap is hard to close.

Every marketing search starts with scoping the role with you: what you sell and who buys it, the sales motion marketing supports, which channels this person owns, how the role splits between brand and pipeline, what it’s measured on, and how much of the pipeline number it carries today. We also ask whether the role has to build a program from scratch or take over one that already works, because those are different searches.

We then match candidates to that scope. The channels someone has owned, the segment and sales motion they’ve supported, the budgets they’ve worked with, and the stage of company they’ve succeeded in all have to fit the role. We tell candidates in the first round that we require references from previous direct managers at the offer stage.

At kickoff, we review the roles with your hiring team and align on the interview process. Within 48 hours after the kickoff meeting, we meet with the hiring managers again to have a calibration meeting. We bring 10 candidate profiles to the table to ensure that we’re aligned and only interviewing relevant talent.

1. 48hours

   Calibration meeting

2. 3-7days

   Initial recruiter screens

3. 7-10days

   Hiring manager interviews

4. 2-3weeks

   Full qualified candidate pipeline per role

5. 30days

   Initial hires

6. 90days

   On track against the hiring plan

Initial recruiter screens happen in 3-7 days, and hiring manager interviews in 7-10 days. You have a full qualified candidate pipeline per role in 2-3 weeks. Initial hires typically land in roughly 30 days, and you’re on track against the hiring plan by 90. Time-to-fill runs 15-60 days depending on seniority and scope.

A common hiring mistake is picking the best of the first handful of people you speak to. We focus heavily on outbound sourcing to engage with a lot of talent. This ensures that you’re able to hire the best people on the market.

Along the way, our recruiters meet with your hiring managers weekly and communicate updates daily in your chat channels. You also get weekly metrics from the delivery lead who manages recruiter performance. Our recruiters also have access to our tech stack that accelerates identifying and reaching out to top talent: strategic AI sourcing and AI resume matching, multi-step, multi-channel outreach, and job postings. Everything runs in your systems, and you own your data and your candidate pool.

Most of the marketing hiring we do runs through Embedded Recruiting and RPO: a recruiter working only on your business, inside your systems. If your hiring is consistent, or there’s enough work for at least one full-time recruiter, it also cuts down on cost-per-hire. The engagement scales with your hiring plan, from adding capacity to your internal recruiting team to running recruiting as your talent function. You can see how these engagements run in our case studies.