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The client side
You sell the outcome.
An executive can't ship the roadmap with the team they have. You learn the business, the role, and why it matters, then convince them you're the person who can fix it.
Sales careers at Verticalmove
The sales career nobody explained to you.
Most sales careers follow the same path: BDR, Account Executive, Enterprise Account Executive, then management. Each quarter brings a new quota, and every year you begin building again.
There is another kind of sales career. At Verticalmove, you build long-term relationships with companies and the people they hire. One client can produce dozens of searches over many years. A candidate you place today may become the executive who hires through you tomorrow.
Instead of starting over every quarter, you build a book of relationships that becomes more valuable over time.
This is a salaried, full-cycle sales role with uncapped commission. You win clients, recruit exceptional people, manage both sides of the process and close the deal. The relationships you create become the foundation of your business and your income.
$60KStarting
base salary. Guaranteed while you learn the craft
$10,000
production bonus. Paid for the work that builds a desk
Uncapped
commission on the fees you produce. No ceiling, no entitlement
$150,000+
by year three and compounding. The book keeps producing
Why nobody explained this to you
A recruiting desk is not an HR job. It's a full sales seat.
The word recruiter points at the wrong picture: posting jobs, screening resumes, scheduling interviews. That's coordination work, and it isn't what we do. This is an outbound-built career. You map a market, open a relationship with an executive who has a problem they can't solve internally, then go find the person who can solve it, usually someone who wasn't looking and won't answer a job ad. That is prospecting, qualification, objection handling, negotiation and closing, on both sides of the same deal.
The candidate side
You sell the move.
Why leave something safe for something you weren't looking for? That takes curiosity, judgment and trust. Keyword matching doesn't get anyone to resign.
The close
You own the whole deal.
Offer strategy, counteroffers, resignations, start dates. Nobody hands the deal off. That's why the relationship stays yours afterward.
What it pays, plainly
A base you can live on, and upside nobody caps.
Most people assume a job like this is commission-only and hope you survive the first year. Ours isn't. You get a floor while you're learning, a bonus for doing the work that builds a desk, and no ceiling on the rest. The reason year three looks different from year one has nothing to do with a raise. It's that the relationships you opened in year one are still producing.
Year 1
$100,000+
Base plus production bonus plus your first commissions, while you learn the market and open your first relationships. That is the shape of a solid first year, not a ceiling on one.
Year 2
Compounding
Nothing resets. You start the year with clients who already trust you, and you keep adding to them.
Year 3+
$150,000+
A book that produces repeat opportunities while you keep building it. This is where the model separates from a salary.
This is not a commission-only job. It's a salary with a book attached to it.
Nothing above is a cap. Commission is uncapped from your first placement, and people have cleared these numbers considerably. The only ceiling here is the one your own production sets.
What you'd actually be building
You won't be selling seats. You'll be building the companies.
The searches you'd run sit inside the hardest, most consequential technology being built right now: data science, artificial intelligence, machine learning, critical infrastructure, physical AI and autonomy. Not the software that schedules meetings about that work. The work itself. And you catch these companies early. A Series A with eleven engineers and a roadmap they cannot staff becomes, three years later, a name people recognize. You see the whole arc from the inside.
Nascency
Eleven people and a roadmap.
You're the first call when a founder realizes the plan needs people who don't work there yet. The hires you make now decide whether the next two years happen at all.
Scale
The org gets built around your hires.
Leaders you placed start hiring their own teams. You watch a function form out of decisions you were part of, and you're in the room for the next one.
Household name
Then everyone's heard of them.
You were there at eleven people. Very few people in software sales ever get to say that, and it's the reason the relationship keeps paying.
In most SaaS orgs, the relationship changes hands.
The seller owns acquisition, customer success owns what happens after the sale. A rational way to run a software business. It also means the relationship you spent months earning moves on without you.
Here, it stays attached to your book.
The hiring manager who trusted you the first time calls you the fifth time, and the tenth, and again from their next company. Nobody can reassign it, and it doesn't reset in January.
What's actually at stake
We built the lab that keeps a Fortune 50 company from being disrupted.
Verticalmove was retained by a Fortune 40 retailer from employee #3, before its innovation lab had a name, and built the engineering organization behind its computer vision, generative AI, spatial computing, digital twins and in-store robotics work.
Here is why that matters more than a placement count. That company employs roughly 300,000 people across North America. Amazon has already put hundreds of iconic businesses out of the market entirely. When an incumbent that size loses, it is not a line on a stock chart. It is stores closing in towns that have few other employers, and families losing the income they built a life around.
An innovation lab is how a company that size stays ten steps ahead of the thing trying to end it. Every engineer hired into it is part of that defense. You would not be filling requisitions. You would be building the teams that decide whether a household name is still here in ten years.
How one relationship pays for years
You don't close forty customers. You close one relationship forty times.
Imagine you cold-call an engineering leader at a growing company. You earn one search. You make the hire. Then another, then five more. Over three years they make forty hires through you. You opened it once. It paid you forty times. Move the inputs and model it against numbers you'd believe.
Revenue produced by the relationship
$1,800,000
Commission to the desk that owns it
$270,000
Illustrative model. Actual fees, rates and outcomes vary by search, vertical and performance.
Where the advantage compounds
One placement in 2002 is still paying us today.
In 2002 we placed an individual into his first Vice President of Engineering role. That was the entire transaction: one search, one fee, one happy client, and of course one ecstatic candidate. What happened next is the reason this page exists.
2002
The first placement.
A single VP of Engineering search. One search, one fee, one happy client, and of course one ecstatic candidate.
2006
He lands a leadership seat at IBM. He calls us.
Not because we chased him. Because we were the call he wanted to make.
2013
Move again to SAP Ariba. He calls us.
He moves again and takes us with him. Every stop opens a new organization of engineering leaders who see how we work.
2015
On to Ellie Mae. Same number, same call.
A technology organization of roughly 900 people to build and scale. The hires stack into the hundreds, and leaders we place start pulling us into their own searches.
2019
BlackLine. By now it's not a habit, it's a fact.
By the fourth enterprise, the pattern is the point. People move. Trust moves with them.
Today
One relationship became a network. The network became a book.
Twenty years later, the first relationship is still the one paying.
2002
the year of the first placement. A single VP of Engineering search
4
enterprises he took us into, plus everyone we met inside them
$10M+
revenue attributable to that one relationship, and it is still producing
Your book is the network of clients, candidates and referrals that keeps producing over time. Nobody can reassign it, and it doesn't reset in January.
The engineer you place this year is a Director in three and a VP in six, and by then she's the buyer. It's the difference between starting every quarter at zero and starting it with people who already trust you.
What we put behind you
Most firms give you a week in a conference room and a login.
Then they hand you a phone list, and if you don't produce by month four they replace you. That model is cheap for the firm and brutal for the person. We do the opposite, because it's the only way this works. Your first year is expensive for us and we plan for it: real training in the craft, deals reviewed while they're live, feedback the same day, and access to people who have run these desks for two decades.
The other half of the investment is the platform. Every competitor licenses their software and waits on a vendor roadmap. We write ours, and ship improvements every week. You describe who you need in plain English. It searches our database and the open world at once, enriches what it finds, scores candidates against the role, and stages everything for your approval. Nothing sends until you say so. The judgment stays yours. The grind doesn't.
The $20 hour
- Building lists by hand
- Finding and verifying emails
- Formatting and scrubbing resumes
- CRM entry and cleanup
- Rebuilding the same search
The $200 hour
- Closing and offer strategy
- Advising executives on their org
- Reading people, not keywords
- Negotiating the hard moments
- Turning one req into ten
Every hour on $20 work is an hour stolen from $200 work. We automate the first column so you live in the second one. That's the reason a disciplined person can build a book here faster than they could almost anywhere else.