The honest answer: Fewer than you probably are.
For GTM roles in SaaS, somewhere between eight and twelve open Reqs per Recruiter is workable. Beyond that, something gives. Usually it is candidate experience first, then quality of shortlist, then your own sanity.
The reason GTM Reqs are heavier than they look is the volume of conversations each one takes. A Senior AE search might need forty or fifty outreach conversations to produce five genuinely strong Candidates, because the best salespeople are being approached constantly and are rarely in a hurry to move.
If you are carrying twenty Reqs, the conversation to have with your Leadership team is not “how do I work faster”. It is “which of these do we actually need to fill this quarter”. Forcing that prioritisation is part of the job, even when it is uncomfortable.
Start with evidence, not adjectives.
When a CRO says they want someone “hungry, strategic and a proven closer”, you have been given nothing you can screen against. So push for specifics. What deal size? Which sales motion – PLG assist, mid-market, enterprise? New logo or expansion? What does their current top performer’s background actually look like?
A trick that works well: Pull five or six real profiles before you agree the spec, and review them together. Reactions to real people surface the true hiring bar far faster than a job description workshop ever will. You will often find the “must haves” soften quickly when the leader sees what the market genuinely holds.
Then write down what you agreed. A one-page scorecard with four or five criteria, each with a definition of what good looks like, will save you weeks of drift later in the process.
It depends on the role, but less often than Hiring Managers think.
For closing roles in a complex sales motion, prior SaaS experience shortens ramp meaningfully. Someone who has sold multi-stakeholder deals with a sales engineer alongside them will find the rhythm familiar. For SDR, Customer Success and many Marketing roles, coachability and drive routinely beat industry background.
The more useful question is: What specifically does SaaS experience stand in for? Usually it is a proxy for understanding recurring revenue, managing a pipeline properly, and selling value rather than features. If a Candidate from another industry can show those things, the proxy stops mattering.
Where experience is genuinely non-negotiable, say so early and hold the line. Where it is a preference dressed up as a requirement, challenge it. Widening the pool is often the single biggest lever you have on time to hire.
You cannot fully fix a slow process from the talent side, but you can stop it killing your offers.
The Candidates you most want to hire are usually in more than one process. Silence is what loses them, not the timeline itself. A quick message that says “no update yet, still moving, here is what happens next” costs you two minutes and holds a Candidate for another week.
Beyond that, set expectations at the first call. Tell Candidates how many stages there are, roughly how long it takes, and who they will meet. People will tolerate a four-stage process they understood from day one far better than a two-stage process that mysteriously grew.
And keep gathering the internal data. If you can show your VP that your last three dropouts all left in the gap between second stage and final, you have a much stronger case for change than “candidates think we are slow”.
Track a small set well rather than a dashboard nobody reads.
Time to hire matters, but time in stage matters more, because it tells you where the process is breaking. Offer acceptance rate is one of the clearest health signals you have – if it dips below 80 percent, something is wrong with calibration, comp positioning or candidate experience. Pass-through rates by stage will show you whether your screening and the Hiring Manager’s bar are aligned.
And quietly track quality of hire, even if only through six-month retention and ramp to quota for sales roles. It is the metric leadership cares about most, and the one that proves recruiting is a revenue function rather than a service desk.
None of these answers is the final word.
Req loads shift with the market, hiring bars move as companies mature, and what worked for a Series B team hiring ten AEs will not suit a scale-up rebuilding its CS function.
That is exactly why comparing notes with peers matters.
If you are wrestling with a version of any of these questions, the chances are another in-house GTM recruiter solved it last quarter. Keep asking.
Strive are your go-to partner for GTM teams and we’re transforming the way sales and tech leaders connect with world-class talent.
Want to learn more? Check out their website www.scalewithstrive.com
