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Human-First: The GTM Hiring Show

Human-First: The GTM Hiring Show

Autor: Captivate Talent
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AI is rewriting what "great" looks like across sales, marketing, customer success, and RevOps. Old playbooks have stopped working. And most founders are hiring in the dark.

Human-First: The GTM Hiring Show cuts through the noise with high-signal conversations for B2B Tech founders, revenue leaders, and the VCs who back them - from the team at Captivate Talent.

Unlike other shows about hiring, we pull back the curtain on what a search actually looks like: real funnel data, real candidate feedback, and the kind of market intelligence that helps you make decisions based on reality, not guesswork.

Every episode is built around three questions every leader asks before making a GTM hire:

  • Am I ready to hire? (And what to do when the honest answer is "not yet")
  • How do I hire? (How to run a tight process and spot "great" when you've never seen it before)
  • Did I hire the right person? (How to diagnose whether it's the role, the comp, the process, or the person)

Each episode features founders, revenue leaders, VCs, and operators who've made the hard calls firsthand - sharing what worked, what didn't, and what they'd do differently. We also tackle the AI fluency question head-on: not the hype, not the fear, just what's actually changing in GTM hiring and how to evaluate it in candidates.

Human-First is produced by Captivate Talent, a boutique recruiting firm specializing in go-to-market hires for seed through Series B B2B Tech companies.

If you're building a GTM team and want to hire with more clarity and less chaos, this show is for you.

Subscribe so you don't miss an episode - and join the founders, VCs, and revenue leaders already listening.

2026 Captivate Talent
Ekonomia Sukces osobisty
  • How to Hire Gaming Talent to Make Your B2B Product Stickier with Joe Burridge
    Oct 13 2026

    The gaming industry has shed more than 25,000 jobs in two years. A lot of that talent is now building B2B software.

    Your users sign up, click around once, and never come back. Then you raise a round and hire a big-name leader who wants to build a team before shipping anything.

    Joe Burridge is Head of Talent at Play Ventures, a gaming-focused VC firm that now invests in B2B tech. He recruited through Hudl's growth from 200 to 1,000 people, worked at EA, and saw Epic Games scale from 2,000 to 6,000 during the Fortnite era.

    You'll get a clear read on which gaming hires translate to B2B tech and which don't. Joe also shares the startup recruiting mistakes he sees across a portfolio of around 90 companies. He explains how early-stage founders win GTM talent against much bigger budgets.

    This episode is for founders and revenue leaders at pre-seed to Series B working on product retention, onboarding, and their first go-to-market hires. If you already have a mature talent team and a polished hiring process, the startup process advice will feel basic.


    Key Takeaways

    - Gamification works best a la carte. One or two mechanics that fit your product beat a "Duolingo for X" pile of streaks and leaderboards.

    - Product and design people from mobile gaming bring the strongest crossover, especially on onboarding. Joe explains why level one of a game gets its own dedicated designer.

    - If you hire fast, you have to fire fast. Get exits and performance management sorted before the hiring mistakes arrive.

    - A big-company CMO who wants to build a team on day one is a red flag at seed. Joe screens for startup mindset first and experience second.


    Chapter Markers

    00:00 Startup fit or just laid off?

    00:18 Gaming layoffs and where the talent went

    02:09 Joe's path from Hudl to EA, Epic, Play Ventures

    03:42 How the pandemic gaming boom became a crash

    05:34 Where gaming jobs were really lost

    07:00 Gamification moves into B2B software

    08:28 Apps overtake games on app store revenue

    10:34 A vibe-coded leaderboard for G2 reviews

    15:00 What gaming hires bring that others don't

    15:33 "Duolingo for X" and shoehorned gamification

    16:51 Why product and design talent crosses over

    19:37 Why gaming marketers struggle in B2B SaaS

    21:07 The first GTM hires after funding

    24:21 Founder mistakes: no process, no exit plan

    26:23 The big-company CMO trap

    27:47 How slow processes lose top candidates

    30:16 Moving from corporate back to startups

    33:36 How startups win talent without big budgets

    37:23 When a streak doesn't belong in your app


    Useful Links & Resources

    - Joe Burridge on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joeburridge/

    - Play Ventures: https://www.play.vc/

    - Duolingo: https://www.duolingo.com/

    - Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai/

    - Captivate Talent: https://captivatetalent.com


    Connect With the Show

    - Captivate Talent on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/captivate-talent

    - Danielle Parker on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniellemessler/


    Have you hired someone from gaming into a B2B tech role? Tell us in the comments whether the skills carried over. And which app has a streak you honestly couldn't care less about?

    Visit captivatetalent.com to learn how we help B2B tech companies hire exceptional GTM talent. Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode.

    #HumanFirst #GTMHiring #Gamification #StartupHiring

    Rozwiń Zwiń
    38 min
  • The Day Paddle's Entire Sales Team Quit, And What It Taught Harrison Rose About Building GTM Teams That Last
    Sep 29 2026

    Most founders don't lose their first sales team because they hired badly. They lose them because they never gave them a real chance to win.

    Harrison Rose cofounded Paddle at 18: no VC network, no domain credibility, no idea what a sales quota was and helped scale it to unicorn status. Along the way, his entire sales team quit. Not in a dramatic walkout, but slowly, over four months, because they thought the company was failing. It wasn't. They were tripling year-on-year and about to be named the fastest-growing software company in the UK. The problem wasn't performance. It was that nobody knew it.

    Now building Good Fit, a platform that helps founders answer the question that should come before every GTM hire, Harrison brings the hard-won lessons from Paddle to bear on how founders should think about ICP, founder privilege, the future of the BDR role, and what it actually means to be ready to hire.

    This episode is for B2B tech founders approaching their first GTM hire, revenue leaders rethinking how AI is changing their function, and VCs helping portfolio companies navigate the transition from founder-led to scalable sales. Harrison covers founder privilege, the qualified vs. ideal ICP distinction, individual vs. team quotas, the resource allocation skill every future revenue leader needs, and the one question every founder should ask before they post a job description.


    Key Takeaways

    • Before you hire anyone in GTM, the process needs to be so repeatable it bores you. Your hire's job is either to repeat it or scale it and until you know which one you're asking for, you're not ready to hire.
    • Founder privilege is the ability to negotiate any price, commit any feature, and compute product limitations on the fly. Your rep has none of that and that's not their fault.
    • Most founders describe a qualified account when they think they're describing an ideal one. A list of tens of thousands of companies is a qualification filter, not an ICP.
    • A shared team target tied to an aggressive financial plan means everyone feels like they're losing, even when they're not. Individual quotas let reps feel their own success.
    • The core skill of the future revenue leader isn't headcount scaling. It's resource allocation: tokens versus people, automation versus humans, across more GTM channels than existed five years ago.
    • AI should be determining how you go to market — who, through what channels, at what spend. Right now, humans decide how to deploy AI. That needs to flip.


    Chapter Markers

    (00:00) Cold open: Harrison on raising the bar

    (01:57) Founding Paddle at 18: first principles hiring

    (03:08) The founder-led sales trap

    (06:54) The day Paddle's entire sales team quit

    (08:15) What the walkout taught Harrison about culture

    (12:39) Shifting to a performance culture

    (15:31) Qualified vs. ideal: where ICP thinking breaks down

    (17:48) How Harrison would have launched in the US with Good Fit

    (20:12) The BDR role and AI: what to automate and what not to

    (25:28) Gen Z buyers and the habit of buying from people

    (26:00) Who owns top of funnel: CRO, CMO, or Rev Ops?

    (29:06) How the Rev Ops function is evolving

    (30:49) Why Harrison rehired his Paddle VP of Sales

    (35:39) Building around skill set gaps

    (39:05) What to do before posting your first GTM job description


    Useful Links & Resources

    • Harrison Rose on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harrisonrose/
    • Good Fit: https://www.goodfit.io


    Connect With the Show

    • Captivate Talent on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/captivate-talent/
    • Christopher Gannon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gannonchristopher/
    • Danielle Parker on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniellemessler/
    • Captivate Talent website: https://www.captivatetalent.com/
    Rozwiń Zwiń
    42 min
  • AI Doesn't Fix Bad Data, It Weaponizes It with Elio Narciso
    Sep 15 2026

    AI doesn't fix bad revenue data. It scales it, with total confidence, across your entire go-to-market engine.

    You're deploying AI agents for outbound, enrichment, and pre-call research, but nobody's asked whether the CRM data underneath is actually trustworthy. If your ICP has ten different answers depending on who you ask, AI won't catch that. It will just run with it, faster.

    Elio Narciso is Co-Founder and CEO of Scalestack, the GTM data infrastructure platform used by MongoDB, Redis, and Typeform to clean and prioritize revenue data before it hits an AI agent. He spent years leading GTM strategy at AWS working with hundreds of scaling startups, and now hosts the Revenue Engine Masters podcast, interviewing senior revenue and RevOps leaders about building modern go-to-market engines.

    Elio gives you a clear-eyed look at what's actually breaking in GTM hiring right now. You'll walk away with a sharper view of which tasks still need a human, what the bar for entry-level recruitment looks like today, and where to start fixing your data before you hire or automate anything else.

    This episode covers why AI "weaponizes" bad data at scale, who should own AI adoption inside a revenue org, and why the hiring bar for SDRs and RevOps analysts has quietly gone up. It's built for founders, CROs, and Heads of Talent making go-to-market hiring decisions, not for anyone looking for a generic AI hype reel.


    Key Takeaways

    - AI doesn't just repeat bad CRM data, it runs confidently on top of it, at a scale no human team could match, across hundreds of agents at once.

    - Most of the last 20 years of GTM spend went into the system of record. Elio argues the next wave of value sits in a completely different layer, and most companies haven't built it yet.

    - The bar for entry-level GTM hires has quietly risen. Data entry and basic research aren't jobs anymore. Curiosity, business context, and judgment under uncertainty are.

    - Elio watches for one thing before a candidate gets past the first interview: do they understand how the business actually makes money, without being told.


    Useful Links & Resources

    Elio Narciso on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elionarciso/

    Scalestack: the GTM data infrastructure platform Elio and his team built, discussed throughout the episode https://scalestack.ai/

    Revenue Engine Masters: Elio's podcast interviewing senior revenue and RevOps leaders

    Captivate Talent: https://captivatetalent.com


    Connect With the Show

    Host Danielle Parker on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniellemessler/

    Captivate Talent on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/captivate-talent

    If your team is deploying AI agents on top of a CRM nobody trusts, you're not alone. Tell us in the comments: what's the one piece of your revenue data you'd never let an AI touch unsupervised?

    We'd also love to hear how your org is deciding who owns AI adoption. RevOps? The founder? IT? Drop your take below.

    Visit captivatetalent.com to learn how we help B2B tech companies hire exceptional GTM talent.


    #HumanFirst #GTMHiring #RevOps #SaaSRecruitment #AIinHiring

    Rozwiń Zwiń
    34 min
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