Q1 Pulse Check: Trends Shaping GTM & Corporate Functions

[00:00:00] Hello and thank you to everyone tuning in to today’s episode of The Hirewell Update. I’m your host, Ryan Brown, Vice President of our Corporate Functions team, and this is my co host. I’m Emily Goor, director on our Go To Market recruiting team. Before we kick off the show, you can find all of our content at talentinsights.hirewell.com, or if you’d like to learn more about Hirewell and our service offerings, check out our website, www.hirewell.com.
[00:00:25] it’s been an interesting start to the year, to say the least. There’s been a lot that’s happened a lot that’s happening. So we have a lot to go over today. And I think what we want to focus on in terms of today’s episode is what we’re seeing in our respective focus areas, you for go to market, me for corporate functions, and also how it’s comparing to Q1 of last year.
[00:00:45] So, I want you to kick us off. What trends are you currently seeing in go to market? Yes, I know. We’re like you said, we’re focusing today on go to market and corporate functions. That’s really our areas of expertise. So just to remind you, HireWell [00:01:00] has other areas. We have a fabulous team of tech recruiters, fabulous team that’s focused on industrial recruiting, you know, et cetera.
[00:01:07] but like, if you wanted to hire an engineer, like you would not want me doing that for you, which is why we have these specialized areas. We’d send you to our tech team. So I’ll focus, like you said, on go to market. That is what I know. I live. I breathe. But seriously, we are really busy like that. Just like plain and simple to put it very, very straightforward.
[00:01:28] Go to market teams are hiring, right? Because we are crazy busy. So this is actually kind of a solid continuation of what we were already seeing in. Q4 of last year, our January numbers just officially came in and our go to market team achieved over 100 percent of our monthly goal, which was the highest attainment like across our practices.
[00:01:49] We were over 100%. I think 1 of the major differences, though, that we are seeing from like quarter 3 and quarter 4 of 2024. To [00:02:00] quarter one of this year is the rise in demand of marketing positions. I think we’re currently seeing a lot in content marketing arise in like design roles, actually, which we hadn’t seen in a bit.
[00:02:12] But honestly, really, marketing is up across the board. So even outside of those two areas, you can hear it in the crowd. I’d say in terms of sales, which, you know, is like kind of what I live and breathe a little bit I know
[00:02:24] I actually already said this on the show this year, but we’re seeing a huge uptick in customer success manager roles.
[00:02:31] We did not see a lot of CSM roles last year, like honestly at all until like quarter four, which is very rare for us, usually it’s a very market center position. Last year, I think we saw companies were investing more in, like the net new revenue side of their business, and we’re still seeing that this year.
[00:02:50] I’ll kind of get to that in a little bit, but with now the influx of those new customers that they invested in last year, companies are now needing to invest in taking care of and [00:03:00] retaining those existing clients. So we’re seeing CSM roles now than we’ve seen in a while. We have like multiple on our desk at the moment that we’re looking to fill.
[00:03:09] Across the country. And as I mentioned, we are still seeing companies investing in like that new logo side of the business. We have so many open account executive positions right now. We’re seeing a lot of mid market, I would say, but it’s really across the board from SMB to enterprise. And we’re actually seeing, which is interesting, a bit of an uptick in SDR and BDR positions.
[00:03:34] I know it’s nice. We saw less like sales development and business development representative positions last year and instead companies were hiring just AEs that were like you need to prospect also like we don’t have SDR support, but it seems like SDR roles are coming back a bit.
[00:03:50] To give AEs like that support and honestly, it’s a really good selling point for candidates like AE candidates frequently asked us like, you know, in terms of [00:04:00] prospecting what is SDR support look like it’s a good sell for companies. I don’t know. I feel like industry wise, maybe to share that like we’ve seen things across a ton of different industries were working as always with a lot of software as a service companies, a few very early stage and working on some founding roles right now.
[00:04:19] Some more established and then seeing a lot in financial services and even retail. I know we have like a huge retail project going on. I know that was a lot. I’m sure I’ve missed so, so much too because. Like you said, so much has happened in the first, like, it’s almost, filming this at the very end of February.
[00:04:38] You tell me though, what’s going on? That was kind of go to market side of the business. What are you seeing on the corporate functions side of things? It’s been an interesting start to the year for us on the corporate functions side. Not in a bad way. It’s exciting. It’s interesting. Yes, it’s new. It’s fresh.
[00:04:54] It’s all of those things. And I will say Q1 of 2025 looks drastically different than it [00:05:00] did in 2024. I say this frequently when I talk about corporate functions roles, accounting and finance is housed under, under my team, as well as administrative roles in HR, but F&A roles tend to remain pretty in demand throughout the year.
[00:05:13] This is one of those skill sets that just tends to be highly sought after kind of any point within the year. We’ve talked about in the past, just kind of the bottleneck that we’ve seen in the talent market with these skill sets, you know, less people are going into these programs and undergrad, which is, you know,
[00:05:31] basically creating like the super tight market for accounting and finance professionals and we’re seeing that continue to decrease like year over year. But the skill set remains super in demand. I think that what’s most interesting are some of the trends that we’re seeing across HR. So in 2024, most of the work we did was in true HR generalist positions So for those that aren’t familiar, HR generalists are folks that touch like every single aspect of the people function. So thinking all things [00:06:00] employee benefits, recruitment, talent performance, total rewards, they house all HR functions within their skill set. We saw a lot of those last year, which makes sense because many organizations were trying to do more with less.
[00:06:12] So having somebody that can touch all facets of the people function was important then. We hardly saw. Any specialized positions in HR, but this year we’re seeing a little bit of a shift. So generalist positions are still on high demand. They kind of always are in terms of the HR skill set, but still an increase in demand for those.
[00:06:32] But we’re also seeing some of those specialized positions start to come back, which is super exciting. And when I say specialized positions, it’s like recruiting. Yay. If you’ve been in talent acquisition or recruiter, you know, the last couple of years have been super hard for people in those roles.
[00:06:46] They’ve been really impacted. So it’s so exciting to see recruiting roles finally coming back. We’ve also seen some learning and development positions, total rewards and some others too. We’re currently working and this is what I think is like a really interesting fact. We’re currently [00:07:00] working on more recruiter positions right now in this current month than we did all of 2024.
[00:07:06] So, That’s an insane increase. I think last year in total we worked on less than 10 positions all of 2024 in terms of true recruiter positions. So to say we’re working on more than that this quarter and in this month alone I think is really exciting. It’s wild. It’s absolutely wild. You know, there was a moment where I was like, are we ever going to recruit on a recruiting role ever again?
[00:07:31] This is crazy. We just like don’t see them anymore. But typically, this tends to mean that when we’re seeing like an increase in talent acquisition roles, the market is in for some pretty positive momentum when companies are hiring talent to bring in talent. That’s typically a, you know, a pretty good sign of things.
[00:07:48] Same with some of the other specialized positions though. Like this typically echoes growth for organizations. They’re leading teams wanting to scale, become more focused, provide extra support. So we’re [00:08:00] seeing some really positive movement and growth, which is super exciting. Outside of that, we’re
[00:08:05] seeing an increase in contract roles. This is also risen dramatically since 2024. That project based support in corporate functions is at a high compared to this time last year. This increase, I think, in both the interim support, so consultant type positions and then permanent openings should be, I think, pretty interesting in terms of the momentum we’re seeing now moving into Q2. I’m hopeful that this means this is going to be a big year for hiring, that organizations are like looking to grow, looking to scale, But it’s, it’s interesting to see this type of movement in early Q1 because that typically doesn’t happen, so that’s why I’m feeling pretty positive about the direction the job market’s going this year.
[00:08:46] That’s crazy. I mean, I’m I’m personally really happy to hear that you guys are seeing more in specialized areas of HR because I mean, obviously, like you said, like, that’s a good sign for the market. If companies are hiring people to hire [00:09:00] people, it’s a good sign. And. Like, you know, we’re seeing the same signs of that because we are so busy.
[00:09:07] But even when you saw like L and D, like we talked so much, I remember so frequently it came up last year that companies were divesting and learning and not having as many resources for onboarding and ramping and support. So I’m happy to hear that companies, and hopefully like we’re learning lessons, like we’re assessing the gaps from last year.
[00:09:29] That’s what I would hope is like. You know, we’ve talked and this is a whole other topic, but we’ve talked so much about that cycle of hiring recruiters and then hiring a ton and then, you know, letting go recruiters and the need to hire them again. So, I mean, that’s one thing. And then hopefully people are learning from
[00:09:46] maybe retention suffering last year because there wasn’t enough learning and development opportunities and onboarding support. So I do hope people, I think 2024 was a year of kind of learning. I hope [00:10:00] people are kind of looking back like, assessing gaps, seeing what went well, seeing what could potentially go better this year.
[00:10:06] And I do think it’s kind of informing the market so far. I could not agree with you more Em, I do think a lot of lessons were learned last year and listen, like, it was a tight market, right? Like, we went through a lot from an economic standpoint. It made sense that organizations were making decisions. In some capacity, I can’t speak to things as a whole, but in some capacities, making decisions to do a little bit more with a little bit less.
[00:10:30] But I think, you know, that, that mind frame is kind of shifting now because we are seeing some positive growth and momentum and we’re recognizing that we can’t always stay in that space of doing more with less. So it’s important to, it’s important to build. And I think if, organizations are looking to grow doing that at, you know, a feasible scalability and making sure that like the ramping up of their employees is just as enriched as the retention programs and the learning and development [00:11:00] programs that they have for folks. Like those things are super important. So like you said, I think it was a year of learning and I’m hoping that this is the year we see all of those lessons kind of play out and come to fruition.
[00:11:11] I hope so. And so far, yeah, so. We’ll keep you informed. Maybe even like one of these next shows, we can, like we said, Hirewell has other practices. But there’s a reason we each specialize in our own things because we are very good at what we do specifically. So maybe in one of our next shows, we can have somebody from like the tech recruiting team to hear what’s going on with them, because we could, we could try to update you.
[00:11:34] We just. Like they are truly market experts and this is, this is our lane where we’re market experts that we’ll have to bring one of them in I think you’re right and I think we’ve learned our lesson to like we do not speak the technical language very well we’ve tried to and I’m pretty sure we haven’t pronounced things correctly many shows so yeah we definitely need to bring in an expert to talk about it so that we don’t make fools of ourselves.[00:12:00]
[00:12:00] Oh, no, and I certainly will. I’ll like never forget when I’m speaking at Hirewell like trying to like say one of the coding languages and someone like pinging me on the side being like, that’s not how you say it. Yeah, this is I am going to stick with go to market recruiting. So absolutely, absolutely.
[00:12:16] Well, I’m excited to see just where we’ve come from the holidays to now being cash almost in the last month of q1, which is It’s insane to think about things are moving quickly, but we’re seeing a lot of positive things. So I’m excited about the momentum that we’re seeing in the job market. I know you are too.
[00:12:34] We’re both really hopeful that this means there’s going to be continued momentum throughout the rest of the year. We’ll obviously keep everyone posted on what we continue to see and learn throughout each quarter, but for all intents and purposes, things are looking pretty good in Q1. Things are looking good.
[00:12:50] Let us know if you have any other questions. We’re always happy to. You know, chat about just what’s going on in the market. So absolutely. All we got. [00:13:00] Well, I’ll see you soon. See you in what? Two weeks next week. See you like, yeah, next weekend. That is all for this week’s episode of the higher well update.
[00:13:11] Thank you all so much for joining us. As a reminder, you can find all of our content at talent insights.hirewell.com. Or if you’d like to learn more about Hirewell and our service offerings, check out our website. It’s www.hirewell.com. Tune in next time. We will see y’all soon.