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/ How we work
Four ways to scale hiring. Each one outcome-focused and accountability-based.
Contingency, retained, multi-hire or contract-to-hire. Pick the commitment that matches the search.
- Pay when the hire starts.
- 90-day unconditional guarantee.
- One critical or confidential seat.
- Payments tied to approved milestones.
- Multiple searches inside one hiring initiative.
- Lower effective cost per hire.
- Six months of real work before the permanent decision.
Assign us your most critical role. We’ll build the pipeline at our risk, not yours.
You interview. We do the hunting.
A startup inside a Fortune 40. We were there at employee #3.
Lowe’s Innovation Labs was set up as a satellite, apart from the $110B parent, to build what the enterprise could not: spatial computing, generative AI, digital twins and in-store robotics. It ran like a startup, and it started with no team. Verticalmove was embedded before the lab had a name.
We built it from the engineering leadership down to individual contributors, sourcing from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Expedia and Carnegie Mellon. AR/VR and spatial computing, distributed data and AI/ML, 3D visualization and computer vision, platform engineering at retail scale.
The teams we built now support 2,370+ stores and 290,000 employees. The lab was the startup. The retailer was the customer.
Say it. We already have.
We already have recruiters.+
Good. We sit beside them on searches that need a different reach motion. Your team keeps the brand and candidate experience; we add market reach, pursuit and a compare-and-contrast pipeline. If we surface the same people, your team is validated.
We don’t use recruiting firms.+
Usually there is a reason: a bad past experience, poor quality, or too much noise. Fair. We are not asking you to change your philosophy, only whether a specialized search team can reach a part of the market your current process is missing.
We’ve had bad experiences with recruiters before.+
So have most of the companies we work with. The issue is usually volume without precision. We calibrate the search, map the market, pursue the right people directly, and qualify them before they reach you.
We don’t want to pay retained to test you.+
Fair. You should not pay retained simply to find out whether someone can recruit. Retained should buy deeper market coverage, dedicated capacity and accountability. If the role does not justify that, we should use a different model.
Our bar is unusually specific.+
Good. Specificity helps. Give us the five things that separate qualified from exceptional, plus the backgrounds and tradeoffs that matter, and we build the search around those rather than every bullet in a job description.
Your fee is higher than other firms.+
The comparison is not fee versus fee. It is fee versus the cost of a bad hire, a delayed hire, or months of missed execution. Cheap search is expensive when the seat stays open or the wrong person gets hired.
We don’t want a flood of resumes.+
Neither do we. Volume is not the product. Signal is. Our job is to do enough work upstream that the people reaching your interview process are worth your team’s time.
Our best candidates aren’t applying anywhere.+
Exactly. That is where external search earns its value. The strongest people are employed, performing and not looking. They have to be identified, contacted directly, and given a compelling reason to move.
We’re not ready to start yet.+
Then do not launch the search yet. We can still define the market, pressure-test compensation and clarify the profile. When the role opens, you start with intelligence instead of from zero.
How quickly does this actually move?+
Fast enough to create signal early, deliberate enough not to confuse speed with resume volume. We front-load strategy, mapping and research so execution time is spent talking to the right people.
Tell us where hiring is constraining execution.
Tell us the role. We’ll come back with how we’d attack it, where those people work today, and which engagement model fits.
Book 15 minutes
Pick a window and we will confirm by email.