Case Study
A custom approach for cybersecurity startups recruiting Field Engineers.
All Case StudiesStellar Cyber relies on technology professionals to develop, sell, and implement its industry leading network-based XDR platform. As the company expanded its US-based footprint, it encountered a familiar problem in the cybersecurity industry: the so-called skills gap.
Stellar Cyber is an A-round start-up with the industry's leading XDR platform. Since being established in 2015, Stellar has raised ~$22M in VC funding and is deployed in enterprise environments.
Stellar had a problem many of Pinpoint's startup clients experience: it needed a Hybrid Field Engineer.
A Hybrid Field Engineer has the soft skills and customer-facing experience of a Sales Engineer, while also maintaining hands-on deployment capabilities. Because companies tend to separate Pre-Sales and Post-Sales into different organizations, the talent pool for Sales Engineers that can deploy products is limited.
Based on the discovery call conducted by Pinpoint, a recruitment strategy was designed to focus on two types of professional profiles:
With a career history of working at early stage startups, this person would have experience working as a hybrid resource as many early stage companies combine the role to start.
Senior-level, Post-Sales professionals with hands-on network security deployment expertise could ramp up on Sales Engineering skills more quickly than the reverse.
Pinpoint presented the Custom Search Form™ to Stellar Cyber's VP of Sales Engineering. By collaborating with clients on this process we achieve three main objectives:
Pinpoint's recruiters used the Custom Search Form to qualify candidates and communicate Stellar Cyber's value proposition with messaging created collaboratively with Stellar's VP of Sales Engineering.
Pinpoint really did their due-diligence on all of the candidates before introducing them to us. Every person they brought to us was a possible candidate. Mark, Managing Partner of Pinpoint, spent many hours understanding our needs and exactly what we were looking for in the candidate. As a result, they fulfilled all of our recs in a very efficient time period and were extremely professional to work with.
Pinpoint understood the challenge and the needs of Stellar. Instead of recruiting off a job description and wasting time presenting traditional Sales Engineering candidates, Pinpoint knew what questions to ask based on experience filling similar searches for early-stage startup clients.
With Stellar's VP fully entrenched as a partner in the creation of Pinpoint's Custom Search Form, Pinpoint was positioned to conduct the search efficiently. A select number of qualified candidates were presented for interviews — resulting in countless hours saved as the VP only interviewed relevant candidates. Relevancy is based on skills, budget, location, motivation for change, and a fit based on the candidate's desired career progression.
The position was filled and both the new hire and VP are very pleased with the result.
