So the likelihood of all members of a given set of X people being employed is almost zero.
What happens to the team dynamic when the employer wants to employ Jenny and Steve but not Bill, Mike and Vivek?
This might sound good but it aint going to work.
This is basically just acqui-hiring without the acquisition. And acqui-hires are common enough -- not as common as straight up hiring, but enough to be interesting.
If we make an offer, we’ll make it to all of you, at the same time; you’d all be free to accept or decline individually, but of course we’d hope you’d all accept — and if you do, we’d work with all of you to find a place at Stripe where you can all start off working together.
- Hire new CRO or President of sales.
- He "builds out a team" generally consisting of people he's already worked with in the past.
- Sales org grows.
- CRO moves to next company. wash rinse repeat ad infinitum.
Why would this process breakdown given a team of proven, successful engineers who have shown to be capable of building/scaling a product in the past?
Cause sales ain't software.
A better question would be "what do they have in common?"
To be a bit blunt here: I've only experienced once that talking to a recruiter helped for anything. (OK, twice if I'm generous, it wasn't a recruiter, it was a hiring manager at a consulting company and I ended up rejecting the job.)
I have however sold myself in a number of times the last few years.
So if anyone in recruiting needs a good idea, here is one:
* do get back to devs with updates, not only customer
* know what you are talking about, don't ask if I still know how to bike (or program) just because I haven't been doing it full time in 12 months
* do sell
* in Europe
Could you be experiencing a bias because of your deal/people flow?
There might be some network bias here since it sounds like your experience (first- and second-hand data) is from outside recruiter-referred candidates.