A sales director at Monster.com quit after commissions kept dropping while quotas climbed. She and a former colleague started a recruitment firm for top salespeople, then invoiced her old boss to hire her replacement as their first client.
when the industry started shifting online, I was recruited by Monster.com out of Toronto. They said, hey, you want to come to Toronto? We need a director of sales to focus on selling to the enterprise market. And I said, sure. So I hopped on a plane, I came to Toronto, and that's when my career really took off because Monster was the first publicly traded company that I'd ever worked for. Quotas were— I mean, it was a very high-demand, high-pressure sales role. Like, you didn't want to miss a quota. Nobody knew what would happen. If you missed quota. It just like wasn't an option. And we worked really hard. And after 3 years there, my boss pulled me in at our annual review. He said, you're doing an amazing job and we have to increase your quota next year. Quotas are going up. And just so you know, the commission structures that we are paying, the commissions are going down. I said, oh, that's interesting. So my quota's going up and my commission's going down. And I just remember having this clear vision of looking into the future going, okay, well I think I'm working really hard. I'm working from 6 AM to midnight, and I love it, but I'm working really hard, and I can't imagine working harder and making less. And it just wasn't a future that made sense to me. So I, I'd been speaking with an old colleague and friend from Monster. He had left to actually become a VP of sales at another company, and I called him up and I said, look, I think there's an idea. I think there's a gap in the market. I know all the recruitment agencies, and there isn't a recruitment agency that specializes in helping companies hire their best salespeople. I think there's a missing there's a little gap there that needs to be, um, filled. I said, are you interested in starting a recruitment agency? I think we can, um, do something great here. And so, we decided to do that and, um, we both quit our jobs. I went into my boss and I said, I'm sorry, this isn't gonna work for me, but I'm gonna start a recruitment agency that specializes in helping companies hire great salespeople. And since I'm leaving and I think I'm a great salesperson, would you be our first client? Would you be our first customer? And Hire us to replace me. And so I walked out the door with an order, actually. And that's how we started.
