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“Sam has been highly professional and dedicated to helping our organisation grow. His resourcefulness, whilst hiring both pre-sales and sales team members, was exceptional. His communication is always very clear, and his approach has been reassuring during all steps of the process. He has maintained a very level-headed and pragmatic approach whilst ensuring communication to prospective candidates is clear and precise. Sam has a solid understanding of the Cyber Security marketplace in terms of the expectations of candidates in a highly competitive space - this enabled us to successfully recruit team members across EMEA in a timely and professional manner. I’d have no hesitation in recommending Sam if you are looking to expand your teams.”

Scaling at pace

Pentera (formerly Pcysys) is an Israel-headquarted Cyber Security start-up. They are the category leader for Automated Security Validation, allowing every organisation to test the integrity of all Cyber Security layers with ease, unfolding true, current security exposures at any moment, on any scale. Their latest round of funding has enabled them to take their company valuation to $1 billion after we have supported them hiring in key regions.

Key results

26 senior hires across sales, including a number of first-in-country roles

A consistent approach to hiring senior salespeople across multiple geographical locations

A collaborative solution that assisted with candidate attraction in unknown locations to the client

What was the challenge?

Following series B funding in September 2020, Pentera were looking to scale their sales team quickly, and initially needed to hire 7+ senior sales professionals by November 1st, 2020.

Identification of talent and time to hire were the two main challenges – these roles needed to be filled within less than 8 weeks, whilst ensuring the candidates were of very high quality. Many of these positions were the first hire into a new country, so we worked closely with the client to provide legal and compliance advice in order to ensure we were able to offer candidates compelling benefits packages.
Characteristics of our solution

Our pop-up RPO model acted as an extension of Pentera’s business, and we became a truly collaborative resourcing partner to make these strategic hires. Due to timeframes, an Opus Talent Solutions project team was formed to give Pentera access to Recruitment, HR, Marketing, and Legal expertise.

The Account Manager coordinated the Opus Talent Solutions delivery team throughout this project, providing real-time recruitment reporting and metrics for up-to-date results.

Before we commenced the search, we thoroughly qualified each role with the individual Hiring Managers to ensure we truly understood their needs and, crucially, how best to position and sell the opportunity to candidates. Once we had a clear understanding of their needs, we mapped out the market to identify the most suitable candidates, and then created a candidate pool to resource from.

Due to our wealth of experience and insight into the market and location, including candidate
motivations, we were able to efficiently source and engage hard-to-reach, highly-sought-after top talent to successfully join the Pentera team.

We interviewed each candidate pre- and post-interview to prepare them accordingly and facilitate feedback. We challenged candidates’ commitment throughout the process to ensure the opportunity was right for both them and our client. We remained in close contact with candidates throughout the notice and onboarding periods to ensure rejected offers were kept to the minimum.
Outcomes and benefits

We acted as an extension of Pentera’s business, and provided a full-time, dedicated
consultant to source and thoroughly pre-screen all candidates before submitting the shortlist.
This ensured that the candidates selected for shortlist were of the highest quality.

We consulted for Pentera throughout the process on various HR- and legal-related queries and, due to the high level of our service, we continue to have an exclusive relationship with Pentera on all EMEA roles.

In addition, we are now assisting them with scaling their sales and pre-sales teams in the USA. Since establishing our partnership with Pentera, we have placed 26 sales and pre-sales candidates across EMEA and the US. Pentera have also referred us to many of their contacts who have similar plans to scale.
Projected cost savings

During our initial project with Pentera, we will have saved them £35,000+ over 7 hires in 8 weeks versus a traditional recruitment model.
Number of placements and time to hire
In total, we have made 26 placements with Pentera, a number of which were first-on-the-ground hires. We have placed in locations including the UK, France, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Poland, UAE, and the USA.

The typical time to hire for these sales roles would be 8-10 weeks – our average time for these roles to reach offer acceptance stage was just 5-6 weeks.

These roles included:
- Regional Sales Manager, France (first hire in country)
- Regional Sales Manager, Nordics (first hire in country)
- Regional Sales Manager, Iberia (first hire in country)
- Regional Sales Manager, Italy (first hire in country)
- Regional Sales Manager, Central Eastern Europe (first hire in country)
- Regional Sales Manager, UAE (first hire in country)
- Regional Sales Manager, Germany
- Sales Engineer, France
- Sales Engineer, Nordics
- Sales Engineer, Iberia
Contact Us

Interested in finding out how we can help you? Please contact us at CLIENTSOLUTIONS@OPUSTALENTSOLUTIONS.COM and a member of our Global Client Solutions team will be in touch shortly.

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