Global Talent Partner for VCs and their portfolio

Global Talent Partner as a Service

International search for companies building their first teams in the US and Europe — and for the funds backing them.

We find the people who do not answer job ads, in markets where you are not yet known. And we do it alongside whoever already rauns hiring for you, not instead of them.

Who this is for

If you are a company scaling into the US or Europe and your first hires there matter more than your next ten. You may have an in-house recruiter or a Head of Talent already. We are not a replacement for them — we are the part that works in markets they do not cover.

If you are a fund whose portfolio companies are expanding abroad. Your talent partner keeps the relationship, the standards and the oversight. We take the searches that sit outside their reach, under terms you set once and your companies draw on as they need them.

By the time we get the call, most people have already tried

More than half of our searches begin after the client has already run the search themselves:

• posted the role on their own site, on LinkedIn and across the job boards
• asked employees and investors for referrals
• messaged candidates directly

That tells you what is left. Everyone who responds to a job ad has already responded. What remains has to be found, approached properly and persuaded — in a country where the company has no name, no network and no reputation yet. That is the work we do.

Where our network actually is

Sector depth is not a claim you can make in the abstract, so here is ours.

• Sectors — B2B enterprise software · deep tech · AI · cybersecurity · quantum (a newer practice) · medtech, covering medical devices and medical AI
• Roles — go-to-market and customer-facing first: pre-sales, sales, post-sales, customer success. Then engineering: software, solution, field and service.
• Not us — finance, legal, administration. Other firms are better at those.

Our researchers and recruiters live in the markets they hire in — Munich, Paris, Madrid, New York, Chicago, Denver, Austin, San Francisco, Boston — and work in the language a candidate will interview in. The firm has worked across these markets since 1999; the team has done nothing but tech startups since 2006.

Finding people is not the hard part. Reaching them is.

A well-known enterprise platform company came to us with a senior solution architect role in Europe, open for six months. They had advertised it, searched for it themselves, and engaged six recruitment agencies. Nothing had produced a candidate of the caliber they wanted.

We assumed the ground was covered. We went to the best passive candidates anyway. None of them had been approached.

Contact details are easy. An approach a senior person finds professional enough to reply to is not — and in competitive markets that second failure is far more common than the first.

Two came back to us. After a long interview, we sent one resume. The client's first words: how on earth did you get to this person — we have been trying to reach him for six months. He took the job.

The first hire in a new market is critical

A medical AI company was making its first commercial hire in Europe, covering Germany, Austria and Switzerland. They hired a salesperson, on the advice they were given. He was a perfectly good salesperson, and the wrong hire. It cost them a year and a great deal of money.

Your first person on the ground in a clinical field is not selling yet. They are earning the right to be taken seriously — which takes someone who has spent ten years or more inside that specific clinical area, knows the key opinion leaders personally, and has the standing to ask one of them to trial an unproven product and then say so in a paper, from a podium, to their peers. Nothing happens in medtech until that has happened.

The person they hired would have made an excellent second hire, working a pipeline the first hire had opened. As the first, he had nothing to work with.

Nobody around that company caught it. It is a sector-knowledge problem disguised as a recruitment problem. We shortlisted four people who could make those calls, because we knew them before the search began.

A method that works in one market can damage you in another

An enterprise software company was scaling fast in the US and the UK, using British and American agencies to flood the market with approaches. In those two markets, in their niche, it worked.

Germany was next — same strategy, same agencies. Two months later: no hires, no successful interview processes, no suitable shortlists. The agencies reported that German candidates were not interested.

They called us. We spoke to the people we would have approached first. The candidates were interested in the company. What they were not interested in was how they had been contacted — incompatible with how business is done in Germany, and enough to leave them with a poor impression of the company itself.

Whoever you send into a market is representing you, to exactly the people you most want to hire, before you ever speak to them. A firm running every market from a single office at home cannot know when its own approach is costing it candidates, because candidates do not explain. They just do not reply.

You will get fewer candidates from us. That is deliberate.

Our screening is designed to end with two or three people, not twenty. We tell every new client so at the start, because it surprises them.

There is a second reason, less well known outside the industry. One standard performance measure for agency recruiters is the number of resumes sent to clients each week. Measure a recruiter on volume and you will get volume. The most common complaint startups have about search firms — too many irrelevant resumes — is not the model failing. It is the model working as designed.

Screening thoroughly is our job, not yours.

Sometimes the answer is not a search

A cybersecurity company asked us in to discuss scaling their US sales team. That was not the real conversation.

Six weeks earlier they had made their first US sales hire, and the CEO had realized it was the wrong person. We spent the first part of that engagement helping him handle the exit properly, because that is what twenty years of watching this go wrong is for.

Then we ran the replacement on a much tighter brief: someone who had done it at startup stage, from the handful of direct competitors who had solved the same problem. That is the hire that stuck.

How we work

Working with a company directly

Your first hires in a new market — one to three people. No retainer, no monthly fee, nothing upfront. We ask for exclusivity instead, time-limited if you prefer, and the placement fee drops below our standard rate. We work the search the way a retained firm would, without the retainer.

Building a team. For fifteen or more hires, or continuous hiring across twelve to eighteen months, we agree on a monthly fee with a significantly reduced percentage. The rate steps down as hires are actually made.

If you already have someone running talent. Good. We work to them, not around them. They keep the brief, the standards and the candidate experience; we bring the research team and the market.

Working with a fund

One framework, drawn on as needed. We agree on terms with you once. Your portfolio companies engage under them as they hire, and pay for what they use. Nothing is charged for a quiet quarter, and no company is obliged to use us.

Your talent partner stays in charge. Most funds that take portfolio hiring seriously already have one. What they usually do not have is a research team living in nine cities across two continents. We become that team; they keep everything else.

Better rates than any single company would get alone. Your recommendation replaces the months we would otherwise spend finding and convincing each company one at a time. We would rather pass that saving to your portfolio than spend it on business development.

On exclusivity — the harder of our two asks

Three agencies on one search feels like three times the coverage. In reality they compete for the same active candidates, send three versions of the same shortlist, and none can justify the weeks of research it takes to reach people who are not looking. You get more resumes to read and the same empty seat.

What we are not

• Not a volume recruiter. Twenty-five SDRs in SF, or fifty clinical research associates across the US, is specialist high-volume work. Someone else does it better.
• Not an RPO. Nobody is placed in your office.
• Not stage-dependent. Series A and Series F hire for different things; the engagement works the same way.

Talk to us

Hiring into a market you do not know yet? Tell us the role and the country. We will tell you honestly what the talent pool looks like, and whether we are the right firm for it, before anyone signs anything.

Running talent at a fund? Tell us where your portfolio is struggling. We will show you what we have already done for companies in your sectors.

Edith Varhelyi — ev@coberonchronos.com

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