Case Study: Hiring for rapid growth
CLIENT: VENA SOLUTIONS
The Result
42 great sales interviews and 16 hires made for a top Toronto-based SaaS company
The Challenge
Vena is a fast growing SaaS company. Since its 2011 launch, Vena has doubled its revenues every year and is on track to continue its impressive growth in the years to come.
While rapid growth is always a positive outcome for any business, in 2016/17 it posed Vena significant hiring challenges. The most pressing being: how could Vena find and attract the quality sales talent it needed to meet its aggressive customer growth goals in a highly competitive talent market? Vena’s leadership team recognized the need to significantly increase its candidate marketing, networking and headhunting practices to keep a constant flow of quality sales people in its sales managers’ hiring pipelines.
The Solution
Vena engaged Sales Talent Agency to provide a proactive and constant candidate interview pipeline for its most pressing sales role: business development representatives. The strategy was to run parallel with its strong internal recruitment team to provide increased candidate flow, thus significantly improving the quality of each sales manager’s candidate pool, allowing them to make more and better sales hires.
The candidate profile required high energy, curious and emotionally intelligent people with at least 1 year of measured professional sales experience. Candidates would need to be located in (or moving to) Toronto, and had to be strong cultural fits for Vena’s hard-working and team-focused environment.
For a three and a half month intense engagement, Sales Talent Agency’s role was to actively pursue candidates that met that profile and develop their interest in Vena as a potential next employer. Screened and motivated candidates were to be booked directly into sales managers’ calendars on a scheduled weekly basis. The expectation was for 3-4 quality interviews per week from Sales Talent Agency’s efforts.
The Result
Since 2015, Sales Talent Agency has worked with Vena in multiple bursts of 2-4 week increments responding quickly to its hiring needs. Over the last two years 60 candidates were presented, 42 were interviewed, 16 were hired, and of the individuals hired, 3 have since been promoted.
The program was so successful that Vena has continued to use Sales Talent Agency in the same manner to date.
“STA’s Interview Pack solution along with their DNA/PRO™ methodology has been a great supplement to the efforts of our internal recruitment team and allowed us to continue to make outstanding sales hires that align with our Vena culture.”