Everything you need to know about working with s1.
For contingency searches, we charge a percentage of first-year OTE upon a successful placement. Retained searches involve a split fee structure with an upfront engagement fee. We'll walk you through specifics on a call.
We deliver a curated shortlist of 3–5 hand-vetted candidates within 5 business days of kicking off a search. No bulk resume dumps: just people we'd genuinely hire ourselves.
That's our specialty. We understand what great GTM talent looks like at the zero-to-one stage: scrappy, self-sufficient, and built for ambiguity. We've been there ourselves.
All placements come with a replacement guarantee. If a candidate leaves or doesn't work out within the guarantee window, we re-run the search at no additional cost.
Our primary focus is US-based and Canada-based GTM roles, but we work with international companies hiring into the US/Canadian market. Reach out, and we'll let you know if we can help.
At s1, we've carried quotas, built GTM teams, and managed sellers and managers at both early-stage and scale-up startups. Beyond the experience, we genuinely care about the people we work with and take our candidates' and clients' goals personally, because we want to be the team they come back to for the next hire. Your experience with us will be super personal and fun. That's our word : ]
AI tools can source resumes, but they can't tell you your comp plan is off-market, coach a hiring manager through a counteroffer, or know that someone who looks wrong on paper is actually the perfect founding AE. We use AI where it helps with sourcing and efficiency, but the value is in our judgment, relationships, and operator experience. That's the difference between a list of names and a hire that sticks.
We cover the full GTM spectrum: Founding AEs, Account Executives, Enterprise AEs, SDRs/BDRs, Revenue Operations, GTM Engineers, Customer Success, Growth & Marketing roles, as well as leadership positions like Sales Managers, VP/Head of Sales, and RevOps Leadership. See all roles we cover →
We offer four models: Founding GTM Search (contingency, ideal for first hires), Scale-Up Search (contingency, for building out teams), Executive Search (retained, for VP/CRO-level hires), and GTM Advisory (custom scope for strategy, org design, and comp benchmarking). Learn more about our services →
We're happy to chat through your situation.