Clarion Health - Finding Their Founding Marketer

We worked with Clarion Health through the Paraform platform, which allows multiple recruiters to engage with clients and suggest candidates. Our approach was to develop a deep understanding of Clarion and the wider ecosystem before sourcing for talent, and to build that understanding into our AI models as they searched our database and beyond for the right people.

As with all founding growth roles, the remit was extensive - but what was clearly important to Clarion was that this hire should own & build the company's brand narrative and public-facing identity from scratch, in close alignment with the founders. This implied a level of product marketing knowledge for brand and positioning purposes, along with the usual "wear many hats" requirement.

Knowing Clarion's GTM motions meant that we had to find someone who had experience of targeting C-suite individuals through ABM methodologies, while also having the experience of running events and conferences, as well as driving inbound leads through paid channels. Given that the ambition was to reach large specialty clinics, we knew that we were looking for someone who could express a deep understanding of their current target ICP and demonstrate how they distilled that into targeting.

Our conclusion was that we needed a former founding marketer - not someone who was fresh to the 0-1 environment, but someone who could land, work at speed, and be able to quickly build personal relationships with the founders to gain their confidence and take them on the journey.

That's what we fed our AI agents as they worked together across different methodologies, and one candidate stood out above the rest. Indeed, we rebuilt our scoring methodology around this role because it was important that the AI agents' findings be surfaced quickly to us.

A longlist of 30 was brought down to a shorter list of 20 within a morning's deep study of each profile. The majority of those shortlisted were already on our extensive database of NYC marketers - and some we had already spoken to. In some cases, we slightly broke the mould, but we stayed as close to the archetype as we could.

Designing the pitch was built around the challenge - to come to a well-funded startup that is already driving significant ARR, help them build the narrative and then to drive pipeline to a very well-defined ICP.

In conversations, a number of candidates stood out, and all progressed deep through the process - and the client provided amazing feedback throughout that helped guide us in the extended sourcing & conversations we subsequently had, landing us on one candidate who gave us enormous confidence in her ability during the initial call we had. The client accelerated the process, knowing she was in other conversations, and made the hire within four weeks of the process starting.