Your North Star for Talent.
For over 12 years, Commodore Partners has helped some of the most innovative companies in the world build and scale their go-to-market teams. We're the search firm for go-to-market and technical leaders at AI and vertical SaaS companies, from first sales hire to the desk of a public company. Fast-growing companies win on speed and quality of hire, without taking their eyes off the revenue, brand, and market they're actually paid to build.
Chances are, it's one of these
Expanding into the US from abroad?
60% of the companies we've worked with were founded outside the US and came to Commodore to build their American go-to-market team. We know what it takes to hire right the first time in a market you don't have local instincts for yet.
Build your US team →Just closed a round?
The clock starts the moment the round closes, and the first leadership hire after it sets the tone for the stage ahead. We've built go-to-market and technical teams from pre-seed through IPO, moving at the pace your board expects, not a generalist recruiter's queue.
Talk to us directly →Backing the company?
Portfolio companies can't spend their first 90 days waiting on a generalist firm to learn the category. We work alongside operating partners and talent teams at firms including TA Associates, Vista Equity Partners, CVC Capital Partners, Insight Partners, Sequoia Capital, a16z, and Entree Capital to staff portfolio companies fast: one relationship, every company in the portfolio.
Refer a portfolio company →Heard good things, want to see for yourself?
Fair enough. Look through the partner companies, the placements, and the team below, then come back when you're ready to talk about what you're hiring for.
See our track record →Been searching and it's not working?
Whether the role's been open too long or the pipeline's full of the wrong people, a deeper network in your category changes the math fast.
Tell us about the role →Ready to build your go-to-market bench?
Sales, customer success, marketing: the specialists who come in after the founders. We've built these teams from scratch many times over.
Start building →Three ways to bring on the right people
Every engagement runs through one of three divisions, matched to how urgent, senior, or specialized the seat is.
Strategic Search
A retained model built for startups: niche, critical, or confidential roles. Leaner and faster than old-school executive search, with a guarantee to fill the seat.
Retained · Executive & niche rolesContingent Search
Commodore's flagship service for everything in between — built for clients who need volume and speed on straightforward, high-confidence hires.
Flagship · Volume & speedRPO
We embed as an extension of your internal talent team, running full-cycle recruiting against an ongoing volume of roles instead of one search at a time. Same sourcing engine and process, priced for scale.
Embedded · Ongoing volume hiringWe don't take "I use AI sometimes" for an answer
The AI Fluency Belt System is Commodore's proprietary framework for measuring how a person or team actually works with AI — not tool familiarity, but frequency, independence, complexity, impact, and transfer. Five belts, real evidence at every rank.
The AI Fluency Playbook for Professionals
Score your belt, close the gap to your next promotion, and learn how to prove it on your résumé and in the room.
"Helping great people find great companies." Download the guide →Hiring for AI Fluency
The north-star belt by function and seniority, JD language that attracts it, and a 20-minute interview module to test for it.
"Helping great companies find great people." Download the guide →Building an AI-Fluent Team
A belt audit for your existing team, a gap-to-value map, and a 90-day rollout to grow more Purple and Brown belts.
"Helping great companies build great teams." Download the guide →Want to see where your team lands? Take the free 50-question Belt Test — about six minutes, built for AdTech, SaaS & AI professionals.
Most GTM hires fail on fit, not skill.
We screen for what a resume can't show: whether this seller can build a territory from zero at a company your stage and your size.
A ranked slate, not a resume dump.
Four to six calibrated candidates with a written point of view on each. Fewer interviews, faster decisions, no wading through forty profiles.
Operators, not resume brokers.
Our leadership built and scaled GTM orgs from first hire through exit. We help define the role, structure the loop, and manage the offer to a close.
Two areas. Real depth in each.
We don't spread thin across all of tech — we go deep in AI and the vertical SaaS categories quietly running critical business functions, from the Ad Tech roots our founders started in to fintech, legal ops, hospitality, and more. Every search is led by someone who already knows the category: its metrics, its buyers, and where its best operators come from.
AI
The AI-native companies building the tools everyone else will use — from AI-powered OCR to autonomous negotiation agents. We recruit the operators who can tell a genuine AI product from a wrapper.
Vertical SaaS
One deep bench across the SaaS categories quietly running critical business functions — starting with Ad Tech, where our founders built and led go-to-market teams before recruiting for it, and extending into fintech infrastructure, legal ops, hospitality, and more.
We stay with a company from seed to the bell
80 partner companies, mapped by the stage they were at when we started working together.
Monday.com
NASDAQ: MNDYWe began working with monday.com's people team during their Series B raise, building out founding leadership roles alongside their VP of People. We stayed through every round that followed — into their run as a publicly traded company. It's the shape of partnership we aim for with every client: in early, and still there at the milestones that matter.
Flashtalking → Innovid
Part of MediaoceanCommodore came in when Flashtalking was a 12-person, pre-seed startup out of the UK looking to break into the U.S. market. We became an embedded part of their talent acquisition team, building out sales, marketing, solutions engineering, and account management as the U.S. team grew to 150 people ahead of their first institutional round, from TA Associates. The company kept scaling past 300 before being acquired by Mediaocean (backed first by Vista, then CVC). Today, Mediaocean and Flashtalking — rebranded Innovid — employ more than 1,500 people worldwide, and we're still part of how they hire.
Throughout my tenure as a VP of People, I've relied heavily upon Commodore Partners to help me build founding leadership teams at monday.com, Carbyne, and now at Healthee. With John's support, I have confidence that we're hiring the best talent in the market for critical leadership positions.
Joe doesn't just fill roles — he helps define them. Their team finds hidden gems, excites passive talent, and expertly guides both sides through to close. Many of our top performers came through his network.
John and the team at Commodore are among the best talent partners I've ever worked with. They hit the ground running and delivered two excellent Sales placements right away.
Our conversations were not transactional, they were strategic — they synthesized our preferences and goals with each hire into actionable criteria evaluated with diligence.
Joe had a sixth sense for finding the right people — not just skilled professionals, but culture-builders who helped define our DNA. Joe doesn't just help companies hire — he helps them win.
Roles we fill across the org chart
Sales
- Chief Revenue Officer / Head of Sales
- Sales Director · Sales Manager · SDR Manager
- Account Executive (SMB, MM, Ent, Strat)
- Partner Account Manager · Vertical Lead
Customer Success
- Director of Account Management
- Account Manager
- Customer Success Manager
- Implementation Specialist
Marketing
- VP of Marketing · Director of Marketing
- Director of Demand Generation
- Product Marketing Manager
- Marketing Operations · Campaign Manager
Strategy, Ops & Product
- Director of Enterprise Sales
- RevOps · Strategy & Ops Analyst
- Product Management (VP & Director)
- Solutions Engineer / Sales Engineer
Recruiters who've sat in the seats they fill
Commodore's leadership built and led go-to-market teams inside SaaS and Ad Tech companies before recruiting for them — including a founding U.S. sales run at an Ad Tech company through to its acquisition.
John Vogel
John captained the wrestling team at Montclair State University, then spent his early career in education, earning a Master's in Educational Leadership before deciding to chase his competitive streak into recruiting. He joined a small firm, built a book of business from scratch, and discovered that entrepreneurship and helping people were more connected than he'd realized — so in 2013 he co-founded Commodore Partners to build the kind of contingency recruiting firm he wished existed: one clients and candidates could actually rely on as a partner, not just a vendor. He still leads Commodore's strategic search practice and stays on the front lines with clients daily — it's why partner leaders point to his hands-on follow-through, from monday.com's founding leadership team through its run as a public company. On LinkedIn he describes himself simply as someone who loves "learning about new tech and its impact" — the same curiosity that now drives Commodore's own AI Fluency research. John lives in Monmouth County, NJ, with his wife and two children, and spends his downtime at the beach or on a skateboard.
Joe Sabol
Joe brings more than 25 years in digital advertising and ad tech to Commodore, built by leading teams rather than staffing them from the outside. He co-founded Flashtalking's U.S. business and led its growth from the ground up to a 300-person organization generating $100 million in annual recurring revenue, culminating in a $500 million exit in 2020, building and nurturing teams across sales, account management, operations, and technology along the way. Outside the office, Joe is an active coach and competitor in wrestling and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, disciplines he credits with the humility, curiosity, grit, and compassion he brings to leading and mentoring both individuals and teams.
Hunter Moreland
Hunter was promoted to VP of Sales Recruiting after building his career at Michael Page and Commodore Partners, where a meticulous vetting process became the foundation of how he works. In the role, he's building out a specialized recruiting division for strategic sales talent across every vertical Commodore serves — winning new clients, growing existing relationships, mentoring the team, and tracking the market shifts that shape hiring in SaaS.
His approach has always come down to relationships: understanding what a client actually needs and what a candidate is actually looking for, then doing the vetting in between. A former All-American lacrosse player at Johns Hopkins — one of the winningest programs in Division I history — Hunter still brings the teamwork and determination from his four years on the field to how he leads today.
Jessica Casale
Jessica's career spans more than two decades across a range of leadership roles. She joined Commodore Partners in 2016 and has spent the years since recruiting and placing executive talent at start-up, emerging, and established companies as VP, Recruiting, running the day-to-day search process with the same detailed vetting that's defined Commodore's approach since it was founded.
Before Commodore, Jessica was Director of Client Services at Tribe Pictures, leading strategic planning and business development, and earlier held leadership roles at entertainment companies in Los Angeles, including Grammnet Productions at Paramount Pictures — experience that shaped the relationship-first approach she still brings to matching clients with candidates today.
Karen Deville
Meredith Vogel
Dimitria Stevenson
Free guides from the AI Fluency series
The AI Fluency Playbook for Professionals
Self-assessment worksheets and a 90-day plan to earn your next belt.
Read the guide →Hiring for AI Fluency
JD language, a question bank, and a candidate scorecard by belt.
Read the guide →Building an AI-Fluent Team
A belt audit, a gap-to-value matrix, and a 90-day rollout playbook.
Read the guide →The AI Fluency Belt Test
50 questions. Find your belt and stripes, and the exact next step to earn a promotion.
Take the test →Tell us who you need to hire
A member of our team will reach out within 24 hours. For candidates, browse open roles or take the Belt Test above to get on our radar.
