Chief of Growth and Strategy placement

Q&A with Seth Weinberger, Founder and Chairman

Introduction to Chapter One

Chapter One want to create a world where all children have the literacy skills needed to thrive. That’s why they provide one-to-one reading support at the time children need it most.

Learning to read is not just about succeeding in school, it’s about succeeding in life. They develop fundamental reading skills and inspire a love for reading from an early age, helping to build confidence in children who might otherwise slip through the cracks.

What was your recruitment challenge?

We had hit a point in our growth curve, where we had prioritised one of our services and as a result seen a great uptick in sales. Due to this growth in sales, we decided we needed a sales team, and shortly after that we knew we needed someone in to manage that sales function.

We were thinking about how we could support growth in general for this new product, and so we were looking for a candidate that could build the infrastructure needed, lead capital raising etc, as well as leading the sales function. This led us to create the Chief of Growth and Strategy role, a leadership role to take us to the next level.

We weren’t in any particular hurry to recruit for this position as the product was already live and generating good sales. More importantly was finding the right candidate, with the right mix of skills and experience to drive growth for our business.

What made you approach / work with Intelligent People?

I had initially reached out to Intelligent People to help recruit for a senior Product Management role.

I had found them through a google search as they came up top in most of the search results. As we are a global company across the UK, US and Canada, I was looking for a search firm with capabilities across both sides of the pond, who also had demonstrable experience within the product field. I enquired with Intelligent People through the website after reading their case studies as they were on point, concise and quite inspiring.

After approaching them the first time, Doug was very responsive and got in touch within a day. After chatting with co-founder Doug, I knew he was the right person to work with moving forward. When the need for the Chief of Growth and Strategy came up, I went straight back to Intelligent People to get going on another headhunting recruitment project.

What services did Intelligent People provide?

Intelligent People did everything within the headhunting process, and it was all done really well. They did everything from scoping the position, creating the job description, going out to the market and finding passive candidates who had the right skills and experience for our role. The best part was that every candidate that was sent over to me was a highly qualified candidate that was very closely matched to the brief. That was important to me as a Founder of the business, to protect my time working on other business needs.

Doug and Jen (Associate Director), did a great job of engaging the candidates – engaging them in our business from the outset, including our roadmap and strategy. I liked the way they followed up with the candidates post interview too, gathering feedback enabling us to run the search smoothly.

Would you recommend working with Intelligent People?

The outcome of working with Intelligent People as a recruitment agency was very successful – we ended up securing a great candidate. I’m sure we would not have found this candidate through our own recruitment methods of job ads, so utilising an international executive search firm to headhunt for us, find the candidate and sell them on our business, was definitely the best strategy.

I’d highly recommend Intelligent People to other businesses, particularly those looking to secure top leadership or executive level talent, in a very competitive recruitment market.

Case studies: read about other C-level placements that we’ve made

Chief Customer Officer at Milk & More

Chief Marketing Officer at Goodfellow