SaaS Recruitment Agencies Top Challenges in 2019
With 2019 behind us, Intrinsic – one of Europe’s top SaaS Recruitment Agencies would like to highlight some of the main challenges both SaaS firms and Executive SaaS job seekers have experienced during the last 12 months.
This article is referring to senior commercial hiring (CRO, CMO, Marketing, VP Sales, Enterprise Sales and Customer Success). Ben Watkins of one of Europe’s leading SaaS recruitment agencies, “Intrinsic” feedbacks on the following:
1- Increasing Salary Levels
With exceptionally low unemployment, B2B SaaS firms are having to pay more to hire the staff they want in countries such as the USA, UK and Germany. We have seen basic salaries increase by around 10% during 2019. Further, we recently released a salary break down in our latest SaaS Salary Report.
SaaS Recruitment Agencies have noticed that hiring companies are often having to increase their compensation from their initial budgets in order to make the hire or offer additional incentives where possible such as guaranteed commissions or stock options.
2- Rejected Job Offers
With so many SaaS firms seeking to hire the same smaller number of B2B SaaS Executives, it has become common for individuals to end up with 2 or more job offers to choose from. Clearly someone is going to end up disappointed when their job offer is declined!
Many SaaS recruitment agencies have found that many B2B Enterprise Sales Executives will often be attracted by companies who have the hottest technology propositions. For instance, AI and Machine Learning have been very attractive during 2019.
How else can you make your job offer and company more attractive to reduce the chance of it being turned down? Pay competitive compensation, employ strong Leadership, have realistic targets, offer a flexible working environment, promote the company’s positive culture and provide a career path. These are just some examples.
3- Is Diversity really so diverse in the SaaS industry?
It is hard to find a SaaS Hiring company these days that doesn’t promote diversity on their careers page. For instance, many SaaS companies have changed their hiring strategies and really benefited from employing more female Executives in Leadership teams than ever before. However, one group we notice is often less represented if at all. This group is the over 60 year old age group. Once you hit 60 years+, it can be a tough world out there and seems harder than ever to land a job, despite individuals having so much valuable experience. Why is this? I would love to hear your views.
4 – Getting a face-to-face Interview is tough!
From a candidate perspective, we hear it has become harder than ever to have a face-to-face interview in the SaaS recruitment industry. We believe this is due to many SaaS companies replacing the first stage face-to-face interview with a video call. This has helped many overseas hiring managers able to save themselves having to jump on a plane. However, we have noticed the time of hiring cycles have not really got any faster despite being able to connect via video within a few seconds.
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If you are looking for a EU Headhunter or have any questions, please contact Ben Watkins.
Further reading:
New SaaS Salary Report