We help founders improve their hiring quality.
Most hires that don't work out were readable before the offer. The signals sit scattered across the CV, the interview, the take-home, the references and the founder's own instinct. Nobody has time to assemble them.
Beam has twelve commercial seats open across the UK and the US. Finding people was never going to be the hard part. The risk at that volume is the bar drifting between the UK team and the US team, unnoticed until a cohort misses quota.
Spine assembles the evidence into one decision document per candidate, every claim cited, then tracks each hire for 180 days to tell you whether the prediction held. We are not starting cold: we already hold screened profiles in both markets from recent searches.
We learn everything we can about the candidate.
We give you one decision document, citing the evidence. The decision remains yours.
We track the hire for 180 days. We tell you if the hire was right, what to look for, and how to adapt.
Before any candidate, we study Beam.
Beam builds AI for frontline social services. Over 100,000 frontline workers use Beam Notes, Talk and Interpret to cut the admin between them and the people they support. Swindon Council measured a 63% reduction. Kent, Birmingham, Oxfordshire and NHS bodies are on the customer wall.
Founded in 2017, Shoreditch, 200-plus staff, Series A, backed by the founders of Booking.com, Calm, Shazam and Dropbox. The commercial motion is now being built in the UK and the US at the same time.
Before we read a single CV, we write down your stage, your team, what the next 24 months have to produce, and what you screen for in candidates.
The candidate-fit conversation only makes sense in that context.
Open the full memo →We don't just copy the job description. We track what matters. All customisable.
Every job description has a floor. The bar is somewhere above it.
For the London Account Executive, the floor is one to two years in B2B sales or a BDR seat and a clean HubSpot. The bar is different: carrying a number for the first time and not dropping it, holding a nine-month public-sector cycle together when the buyer has no budget line yet, and being visibly better in month three than in month one.
Step 2 is writing that bar down so we can score against it. The same document carries the Senior, Enterprise and founding US variants, scoped separately, because they are not the same hire.
Open the full role profile →We work with whatever evidence you already have.
Six artefacts per candidate: the CV, the interview transcript, the take-home, a behavioural profile, the reference calls, and a verified record of what they have actually closed.
We read all six in full. Anything else you hold, we will take: the live role-play, a HubSpot export, the ramp curve from their last seat. More evidence makes the read tighter, and none of it is wasted.
Eighteen documents per slate. Each one citation-anchored back to the source.
Account Executive / Slate B
You tell us what matters most for Beam, your ideal killer team.
Beam already knows its bar: coachable, smart, commercially aware, strong in conversation, ideally a startup background and time spent selling into local government. That is a real profile. It is also five adjectives, and adjectives do not survive a dozen parallel processes across two markets.
Step 4 turns it into something scoreable. Weights across the dimensions. What counts as evidence of coachability rather than a claim of it. Your anti-patterns, and the ones your last two AE cohorts taught you.
We layer it on top of our base framework, so every search runs against your bar rather than a generic one, and the bar is identical in the UK and the US.
Open the full intake →We score your gut alongside ours.
After the role-play and the final round, you score the candidate on five dimensions (Commercial Awareness, Coachability, Relationship Building, Resilience, Role-Specific Fit). We score the same five from the evidence, without seeing your answers first.
Then we compare. Where we agree, you can move quickly. Where we disagree by more than a point, the memo says so on the first page and shows the evidence behind our number, because that argument is usually worth having before the offer rather than after it.
One form, one scale. A hiring manager scoring a candidate for the US team produces a number you can read against your own.
Open the full impressions form →Three candidates. One recommendation.
Pristine CV. Every number was scored inside someone else's playbook.
Trajectory hire. Undersold in interview. Has held a council procurement cycle together for nine months.
Best in the room, worst on the cycle. Transactional motion, no multi-stakeholder evidence.
Where the numbers come from. APP is the A-Player Probability band our framework produces from the five weighted dimensions agreed at intake, the width reflecting how much evidence we hold. This slate is illustrative, built to show the method.
We don't disappear after the offer is signed.
Most hiring goes wrong in the first six months, once the recruiter has collected the success fee and is long gone. On a five-month sales cycle the damage hides inside a healthy-looking pipeline, and a 90-day window closes before a single deal has had time to sign. We track three signals from Day 1: how fast the hire self-sources a first meeting, what qualified pipeline they build without help, and how they behave in the first deal that stalls. At Day 180 we deliver a verdict and a decision.
26 November 2026
10 January 2027
10 April 2027
Trajectory to A on the current slope. Pre-hire prediction held across all five framework dimensions. Methodology APP at hire was 58–74%; realised trajectory at the upper bound of that range.
Pipeline was 1.4x target with nothing closing. The accounts were SMB charities on a six-week cycle; the evidence said local authority. Patch moved at Day 94, first close landed 19 days later.
Illustrative worked example. On a live engagement these are your numbers, pipeline and closes and cycle length pulled from your CRM, read against what we predicted before the offer.
Quality-Aligned Hiring Placement
Placement fee
20% of first-year base salary, stepping down with volume. No retainer. Nothing payable if there is no placement.
| Hires | Fee on first-year base |
|---|---|
| 1 to 3 | 20% |
| 4 to 10 | 17% |
| 11 and beyond | 15% |
- 1Pre-placement: search against the criteria agreed at kickoff, the candidate dossier, a pre-hire memo per final candidate, and the slate verdict.
- 2Post-placement: Day 45 / 90 / 180 calibration and a written verdict at Day 180 on every hire, included in the fee.
- 3Invoiced in full at placement, one invoice per hire. Replacement search at no fee if a hire leaves or is exited inside Day 180.
- 4One criteria intake covers the whole Account Executive profile, so the bar is written once and applied in every geography.
Talk with Spine.
The search does not start cold. We already hold screened commercial profiles in the UK and the US from recent searches against a comparable bar, so a first slate lands in four working days rather than four weeks. We would start with two seats in parallel, the London Account Executive and one founding seat in the US, and scale from what the first verdicts say.
Get Started →lucas@withspine.co / www.withspine.co