Case study · GTM hire

A GTM hire in 1.5 weeks — and a recommendation that cost Sprout money.

Tangent Growth had already burned weeks with another agency that didn't work out. Sprout closed the role in a week and a half — and at the finish line, recommended the cheaper finalist because we believed he was the better fit.

The company

Tangent Growth is a revenue-intelligence consultancy founded by Vahe Baghdasaryan — a marketer who started running paid social from a college dorm and has since been featured in Forbes for his work on subscription growth. The firm helps subscription businesses turn paid acquisition into predictable revenue, with specific depth in profit-per-impression, LTV modeling, and the paid-to-organic loop that powers consumer apps.

Tangent's clients lean heavily on the founder's brand. As the firm grew, that became a constraint — Vahe needed someone in the seat who could carry a slice of the GTM function so he could stop being the only point of leverage on every account.

The hire that needed to happen

The role was a junior-to-mid GTM seat: someone hungry, technically fluent enough to navigate a paid-acquisition stack, and credible on a call with a subscription founder. Junior-mid is one of the most painful bands to hire for — too senior for an entry-level channel, too junior to draw real inbound, and almost impossible to filter on resume signal alone.

And it had to happen fast. Vahe didn't have a quarter to run a search. He needed someone in seat ASAP so client work didn't bottleneck on him.

What he tried first

Vahe had been running the search for a few weeks before reaching out to Sprout — most of that time spent inside an engagement with another agency. The experience was bad enough that, in his own words, he "didn't have the best experience." He doesn't name them in his quote and we won't either, but the pattern is one we hear often: high-volume sourcing, candidates who hadn't been screened in any meaningful way, slow turnaround relative to the urgency he'd communicated, and pricing that felt steep for what he was actually getting.

By the time he came to Sprout, his bar had moved. He didn't want another tool that promised a flood of profiles. He wanted someone who would actually own the search and bring back people he could hire.

What Sprout did

We took the brief — the comp band, the experience profile, the non-negotiables, the trade-offs Vahe was willing to make for speed — and ran the search across our active GTM candidate pool plus targeted external sourcing. Within days, we sent over a tight shortlist of pre-vetted candidates, each with notes from a real screening call.

Vahe ran his own loops on top of our shortlist. The role closed in 1.5 weeks — fastest of any provider he'd used.

The moment that mattered

The thing Vahe wrote about specifically wasn't the speed — it was the recommendation we made at the finish line.

When he was choosing between finalists, our recruiter recommended the candidate with the lower comp expectation. We thought he was the right person for the role — and we said so, even though it meant a smaller fee for Sprout. Our placement fee is calculated against first-year comp (the standard agency rate is 25%), so recommending a cheaper hire is, in the most literal sense, leaving money on the table.

We do it on purpose. Our incentive on every search is to make placements that stick. Every hire that doesn't work out costs us the next search at that company and any referrals from it. The cheapest candidate isn't usually the best — but when they are, we'll say it out loud.

The outcome

Tangent Growth hired the cheaper finalist. The role closed in 1.5 weeks and at a lower all-in cost than the other options on the table — both for Vahe and, mechanically, for Sprout. The hire is in seat, doing the work.

Vahe came in skeptical of the recruiting category. He left telling other founders we were the most affordable and the fastest he'd tried. That's the version of the story we want to be telling on every search.

"I needed to fill a junior-med level GTM position ASAP. I tried other recruiting software firms / tools (not going to name them, but you likely know who they are) and did not have the best experience. Sprout was the most affordable, and fastest — these guys filled the role in 1.5 weeks. When finalizing the hire, they ended up recommending a candidate that was cheaper (meaning they would earn less revenue) but they felt the less expensive individual was actually the best person for the job."