SDR recruitment for SaaS and AI companies

Typically at the point where founder-led outbound has proven a message works but nobody has time to run it consistently, or where Account Executives are spending half their week prospecting instead of closing.

The second common trigger is entering a new market where there is no inbound and no brand recognition, and pipeline has to be manufactured from a cold list.

At Seed and early Series A there is no playbook to inherit. The first SDRs need to be comfortable writing their own sequences, building their own lists and being wrong in public. Polished candidates from large, highly-structured SDR organisations frequently struggle here.

From Series B onward the requirement inverts: there is a playbook, ramp is measured, and the strongest predictor becomes willingness to execute a defined process at volume while enablement handles the rest.

Every candidate is interviewed against the competency set we use across searches — intelligence, curiosity, urgency, drive and track record — with an explicit written rationale for each shortlisted person.

For AI and infrastructure products we add a comprehension test: the candidate has to explain the product back in their own words. It removes a surprising proportion of otherwise strong SDR candidates and it is the single best predictor of whether they will get past a technical first line.

Coverage runs roughly 40% United States and 60% EMEA. In practice most SDR searches are local to the buying market — a US company building an outbound motion into Germany hires in-market and language-native rather than remotely from another territory, and we run those searches that way.