A few weeks ago, a CEO posted on LinkedIn asking for recommendations for a sales executive recruiter.
The post blew up - over 600 comments, dozens of referrals, and tons of confident endorsements.
It was generous, well-meaning… and almost entirely anecdotal.
It reminded me of shopping for clothes online - especially when I’m looking at items with hundreds of reviews.
You know the ones:
“Perfect fit.”
“Five stars.”
“My son wears it all the time.”
Nice, but not helpful - unless I know who’s writing the review. How tall are they? What’s their build? Are they wearing it to work? On a hike? To bed?
“Perfect fit” only means something when you know who it was a perfect fit for.
The same applies to recruiter recommendations.
They were enthusiastic, but anecdotal. And without knowing the full story behind each one, you’re left guessing:
- Was this a VP of Sales search for a 40-person SaaS startup?
- Or a CRO for a 1,000-person B2C brand?
- Were they selling to SMBs? Enterprise?
- Was it early-stage? Post-IPO?
Context matters. And most referrals don’t include it.
That’s why we don’t rely on reviews.
At Clockwork ESE, we look at outcomes.
We’ve analyzed over 100,000 anonymized retained executive searches to answer a more useful question:
Who consistently delivers results in searches like yours?
Let me show you.
We started by asking the same question that CEO did:
Who are the great executive sales recruiters?
Then we ran the data:
- Searched 100,000+ anonymized projects
- Filtered down to sales leadership roles
- Limited to firms who completed at least 5 sales searches in the last year
That gave us a sample of 1,372 projects across 126 firms.
The average time to placement was 108 days.
The average placement rate was 68%.
10 firms stood out.
They were consistently faster and more successful than the average.
They appear in the top-left quadrant of the chart.
We call them Outperformers - firms that actually beat the market.
This is how we start.
But when we work with a company, we go further - to build a “bespoke fit.”
We filter for your specific context:
- Industry
- Company size
- Stage of growth
- Sales model
- Location
- Funding
We use that to identify firms that have already succeeded in searches like yours.
Even if that sample size gets smaller, the method stays the same: We look for outperformers based on data, not anecdotes.
Instead of asking:
“Who do you know?”
We help you ask:
“Who performs in searches like mine?”
Planning a key executive hire this year and need a search firm? Let us show you how this works.
Real data. Real results. Not just referrals.