Meet Sarah Siwak and Airhouse
My name is Sarah Siwak. I'm the co-founder of a company called Airhouse. We help direct-to-consumer businesses—modern e-commerce companies—scale their operations.
Building a go-to-market team from scratch
Building out the first sales motion so we can locate more businesses to use our service—and do that at scale—is imperative to what we're doing at Airhouse. Finding someone who can wrap their head around the early-stage process we’ve built (and help us mature it) is super tricky to get right.
Right before we started working with Candidate Labs, the company was very small. We were about six people and we've since doubled. I think without Candidate Labs, it would have been really hard, because every person we were hiring was the very first person to perform that role at Airhouse. Candidate Labs helped us a lot with scoping out those roles, finding the right sort of backgrounds for people we might want to work with, finding the right skill sets, then quickly iterating on the type of candidate that we were looking for really early on. It's been quite a bit more hand-holding, which at our early stage has been really critical.
Hiring key roles within 4 weeks of kickoff
With Candidate Labs, we brought on two Accounts Leads, a Finance Manager, one Account Executive, and we're bringing on another Account Executive right now. The candidates have been really incredible, and all of the searches went very quickly. We went from putting out the job description to bringing on the candidate in four weeks. I wouldn't have expected things to work that quickly, let alone add such high quality people to our team—so that was fantastic.
“Candidate Labs has been a part of our actual team, working toward the same goal with us, caring just as much about finding the right candidate, closing the candidate, and bringing them on board. Start to finish, it's just been spectacular.”
Superior client communication and briefings
With the other firms that I've worked with for marketing recruiting, sales recruiting, and accounts recruiting, it's always been very transactional.The best thing about working with Candidate Labs is how embedded the team has felt in our broader recruiting process. Being able to just chat with someone on Slack the same as I would chat with any other members of our team—being able to reach out to them day or night, talk about what might be working or not working about the recruiting process, and go through all of the shifts and changes in the process together—has been invaluable.
Instead of just sending along a resume or a LinkedIn link, Candidate Labs gives me a really customized profile of each candidate saying what they're looking for in terms of compensation, what their goals are, and what they've been doing at their last company. That summary has been super valuable. And the dossier that Candidate Labs provides the candidates in turn has really improved the quality of the conversation that we can have out of the gate.
A close partner to founders in building their business
I would recommend that founders who are just starting to launch or scale their teams partner with Candidate Labs because the process of working with their team to understand the different GTM roles has been super valuable. I think go-to-market functions in particular can be really hard to place, especially for the first few people occupying that role, because of the particular type of personality and skillset you need. Candidate Labs nailed it.
“We went from putting out the job description to bringing on the candidate in four weeks. I wouldn't have expected things to work that quickly, let alone add such high quality people to our team—so that was fantastic.”
As a founder, having brought folks on board for sales and accounts, I'm most excited about being able to zoom out from the day-to-day of the business and really understand what we're doing, understand where we need to be moving or pivoting, and just being able to be a lot more strategic about how we're growing the company as a whole.
Candidate Labs has been a part of our actual team, working toward the same goal with us, caring just as much about finding the right candidate, closing the candidate, and bringing them on board. Start to finish, it's just been spectacular.