Case Study: Hiring Six Elite SDRs with the STA NEXT™ Program
CLIENT: GATEKEEPER
The Result
In a competitive hiring market, Gatekeeper was able to hire six motivated junior candidates to build out its Toronto sales division through the STA NEXT™ program. Here’s how.
The Challenge
Gatekeeper is a SaaS company with a vendor and contract management platform that helps customers gain visibility and control over their vendor relationships and contract documents. Through its platform, businesses across the world reduce their risk, safeguard compliance and maximize value from their signed agreements and vendors. It has consistently achieved profitable YoY growth since opening for business in 2015, and it has worked with big-name brands across a variety of industries, including Ford, The Telegraph, Mailchimp and Crocs.
While Gatekeeper had a team working primarily on inbound leads, it wanted to expand operations in Toronto and add talented sales reps focused on outbound lead generation to create a strong, balanced pipeline. However, the market at the time was highly competitive for hiring junior talent. Mindful of this, and the fact that the average tenure of junior talent in Canada was just under five months, it was looking for a solution to help attract talented, motivated SDRs to grow and build their careers at Gatekeeper.
Gatekeeper was in need of a partner that offered a consistent pipeline of elite junior candidates – that could be accessed immediately when a hiring need arose – in order to hire from this quickly-moving talent pool.
The Solution
In 2021, Gatekeeper partnered with Sales Talent Agency (STA) to help find, attract and hire a team of talented junior salespeople to support its growing business. First, STA connected with the hiring team at Gatekeeper to better understand what they were looking for from a candidate perspective and the ideal impact they wanted the hires to make in the role.
For Gatekeeper, the ideal junior candidate was mature, organized, and had some B2B sales experience through education or internships. After discussing STA’s DNA/PRO™ methodology – specifically DNA for this project to identify candidate potential – it then realized the importance of attracting motivated and resourceful candidates with drive, integrity and focused curiosity who would excel in their roles and grow with the company.
STA’s NEXT™ program was the ideal solution for this challenge. Why? With this program, Gatekeeper’s hiring team:
- Was able to access a weekly pipeline of 10+ elite junior candidates, each pre-vetted and ready to interview within 24 hours notice, allowing the hiring team to stay on top of the talent pool even without an established talent network in the city.
- With the support of an STA account manager, was able to create a plan and compensation packages that were competitive and compelling, which helped ensure quality hires were attracted.
- Received support with all candidate communications, including bookings, interview feedback, and the facilitation of acceptances and rejections, which saved time.
The Result
After initially joining the program in October 2021, Gatekeeper was able to hire two STA NEXT™ candidates in SDR roles by the end of the year. Then, as demand for its services increased throughout 2022, Gatekeeper hired four additional SDRs to its sales team. Having access to a consistent, reliable, and large stream of quality candidates instantly, without any advance planning required, was the key for Gatekeeper to build out a successful sales division. Through the program, it was able to hire candidates as quickly as two within two weeks – even in the quickly-moving market.
“The support we have received from STA NEXT™ has been instrumental in successfully growing our SDR team in Canada. Their approach to recruitment is both refreshing and highly effective. We have been consistently impressed with the quality of candidates in their weekly talent pool.
Thanks in no small part to STA, we now have a very talented team of SDR A-players who play a key role in the growth of our business in the region.”