The first thing nearly every recruiter mentions is load.
It’s rarely said as a complaint. More as a fact of life. A single in-house recruiter covering every GTM role for a business, plus a handful of product or ops roles on the side, is far more common than any of us would like.
What’s interesting is how the experienced recruiters handle it. They don’t try to run every search at the same intensity. They sit down with their hiring managers, sometimes every fortnight, and agree which three or four roles actually matter this month. The rest get a lighter touch until something changes.
That conversation isn’t always easy. But the recruiters who have it regularly sound noticeably less stretched than the ones who don’t.
Ask a GTM recruiter what slows their searches down and you’ll often hear some version of “the goalposts moved”.
A CRO signs off a spec for a mid-market AE. Three weeks later, after seeing a strong enterprise candidate, they want someone who can do both. Or a new VP of Marketing joins halfway through a search and has a completely different picture of the team.
The recruiters who cope best treat calibration as something that happens throughout the search, not just at the start. They share real profiles early, ask for reactions, and write down what was agreed. When the bar shifts, they can point back to that note and have a calm conversation about what’s changed and what it means for timelines.
It sounds simple. It saves weeks.
Plenty of recruiters who’ve moved across from engineering or generalist hiring say GTM took some getting used to.
Good salespeople are approached constantly. They’re often happy where they are, especially if they’re hitting quota. They’ll take a call out of curiosity and then go quiet for a fortnight. And they tend to interview well, which makes it harder to separate the great from the merely confident.
The recruiters doing this well lean on evidence. Deal sizes, sales cycles, territory, attainment over several quarters, not just the last one. They ask candidates to talk through a specific deal from first call to close. They pay attention to how someone sells the role back to them, because that’s a small preview of how they’ll sell to customers.
This one surprised us at first, though perhaps it shouldn’t have.
A lot of in-house recruiters are the only person in their business who does what they do. Their hiring managers are in sales or marketing. Their HR colleagues focus on people operations. There’s nobody down the corridor to ask “is this salary band realistic?” or “how are you assessing SDR potential?”
So they piece it together. A former colleague on WhatsApp. A Slack group that went quiet months ago. The odd agency contact who’s happy to share a view.
The recruiters we spoke to who seemed most confident almost always had some kind of peer network they could lean on. Not necessarily a big one. Just a few people facing the same problems who’d pick up the phone.
Most in-house teams track time to hire. Fewer track the things that actually explain it.
The recruiters who have the best conversations with their leadership teams tend to know a few numbers well. How long each stage takes. Where candidates drop out. How many first interviews it takes to make a hire for each role type. How long it takes new hires to ramp, and whether that ties back to anything in the process.
What they don’t do is drown their stakeholders in dashboards. They pick two or three numbers that tell the story and use them to make a case, usually for a faster process or a more realistic spec.
If there’s one thread running through all of these conversations, it’s this.
The recruiters who seem happiest, and most respected internally, have moved from “tell me what you need” to “here’s what I’m seeing”. They bring market context into intake meetings. They push back, kindly, when a brief doesn’t match reality. They help hiring managers understand what’s possible for the budget and the timeline.
None of them would claim it happened overnight. Most built it one hiring manager at a time, by being right about something early and being trusted a little more the next time.
Speaking with this many GTM recruiters has made one thing clear. The challenges are remarkably similar whether you’re at a 50-person startup or a 2,000-person scale-up. Too many reqs. Shifting bars. Hard-to-reach candidates. Not enough people to talk it through with.
The good news is that the answers are often shared too. Someone, somewhere, has already solved the problem you’re facing this week.
So who do you turn to when you’re stuck on a search? If the answer is “nobody, really”, you’re far from alone, and that’s exactly why we started The Launch Collective. We’d love to hear what you’re seeing.
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
