Sales development representative 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 sales development hiring when they close a funding round and have a hiring surge, start building an outbound motion, have had SDR hires that didn’t work out, or need more recruiting capacity for go-to-market roles without adding W-2 recruiting headcount.

We fill sales development representatives and business development representatives (SDRs and BDRs), inbound and outbound, as well as inside sales representatives, senior and enterprise SDRs, and sales development managers, directors, and heads of sales development.

Sales development is part of our GTM and sales recruiting practice. Our SDR recruiters are go-to-market recruiters, and the recruiter on your search has hired sales development teams at your stage before.

A sales development representative’s job runs on consistent, high activity. They also have to be strategic enough to understand your product and positioning, research accounts, and represent your company well on every call and email. The best SDRs learn fast, take direction without needing hand-holding, have a huge bias for action, communicate clearly in writing and on the phone, and work well on a team.

Technical aptitude matters more every year. Sales development teams now work alongside AI agents and tools, and the reps who use them well reach activity levels that weren’t possible before.

The sales environment someone comes from is easy to miss. Some SDRs come from an SMB environment with a very short sales cycle, selling into 15-person companies. Others sell into an enterprise environment with a very complex sales motion. It can be challenging to uncover that from a resume. Enterprise SDR roles need prior experience. For other seats, decide early whether you can train someone in-house, because it changes who we look for.

An important thing to consider is stage-appropriate experience, it’s the biggest reason GTM hires fail. An SDR who has only worked inside a large, resource-rich sales organization, with a set playbook for every step, often struggles at a startup or growth-stage company, where the process is still being built and the job description keeps changing.

For a lot of growth-stage companies, another trap is hiring reps who come from big-logo companies. An SDR from a category-leading brand has usually booked meetings where the brand opened the door. Getting a meeting for a product nobody has heard of yet is a different job, so we match the selling environment, not the logo.

Behavioral fit is the last piece. Startup and growth-stage sales development needs drivers, not passengers: people who are proactive, own outcomes personally, and adapt quickly to new technology, including AI. If you’re on the fence about behavioral fit, we recommend passing.

Scoping comes first: what you sell and who buys it, the segments and deal sizes your account executives work, whether the role is inbound, outbound, or both, how many account executives each SDR supports, and what the role is measured on.

We also check track records. We tell candidates in the first round that we require references from previous direct managers at the offer stage. How candidates react to that tells us a lot.

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 sales development 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.