Refery for hiring teams
Hire your first GTM lead or seller
Choose the commercial problem first. Then hire the person whose experience matches it.
For founders and heads of talent moving beyond founder-led selling or adding commercial ownership. Identify whether the bottleneck is finding buyers, closing deals, onboarding customers, or making the process repeatable.
An illustration of how a Refery search is presented. The names and grades are examples, not real candidates.
Our clients are backed by investors including:
Make the role clear
Decide what the job is before the search starts.
A founding account executive, growth marketer, revenue operations lead, and GTM engineer do different work. Avoid asking one broad “GTM lead” title to cover all four without deciding what success means.
Put these decisions in the brief
- Target buyer, deal size, sales cycle, and current proof of demand
- Which pipeline comes from the company and which the hire must create
- Founder involvement in discovery, demos, negotiation, and closing
- Base salary, variable pay, quota, ramp terms, and equity separately
- Must own
- Target buyer, deal size, sales cycle, and current proof of demand
- Stage
- VC-backed, Seed to Series B
- Still open
- Location, band, and the first milestone
What to look for in candidate evidence
Three things a shortlist should show.
Buyer understanding
A specific sale to a comparable buyer and the problem that created urgency.
Personal contribution
What the candidate sourced, ran, negotiated, and closed themselves.
Process building
How they made a successful approach repeatable and what they stopped doing.
Start a search with Refery
One brief. Two networks. A reasoned shortlist.
Refery is a startup recruiting network for VC-backed Seed to Series B companies hiring Engineering, AI, and GTM talent. It combines specialist independent recruiters with referrals from founders, operators, and investors.
Refery charges 15% to 25% of first-year base salary on a successful hire. No retainer, no exclusivity, and a 90-day guarantee under the client agreement. Scope and fee are agreed upfront. See current pricing.
Send your hiring brief →Share the brief
Send the role, location, compensation, and the outcome the hire needs to own.
Confirm fit and scope
Discuss the search, candidate evidence, interview process, and commercial terms with Refery.
Keep the decision grounded
Use a consistent scorecard, capture interview evidence, and give specific feedback as the search progresses.
Before you set the budget
Compare like with like.
Compare roles with the same responsibilities and working arrangement. Our salary guides show dated public posting examples, with base salary, equity, and variable pay kept separate.
A question hiring teams ask
Is OTE the same as a guaranteed salary?
No. On-target earnings combine base salary with target variable pay under the compensation plan. Confirm the quota, ramp, payout rules, and pipeline assumptions before using OTE in a hiring brief.
Explore other searches
Hire a founding engineer
Find an engineer who can turn an uncertain customer problem into a working product, then own what happens after launch.
See the search →Hire a forward deployed engineer
Hire for the point where your product meets the customer’s systems, data, and operating constraints.
See the search →Hire an AI engineer
Find an engineer who can make AI useful in a production workflow and explain how they know it works.
See the search →Choosing how to run the search
A referral network, a recruiter marketplace, a fractional recruiter and a fixed-fee service solve different problems. The options, grouped by model, and what each one publishes about its fees.