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Lauren Hughes took a job that came with no playbook.
She was the first-ever leader of Revenue Effectiveness at Justworks, a function the company had only just built by merging revenue operations and revenue enablement, two teams that had always run in separate silos. She spent her first year rebuilding the team around it. Roughly 75% of it ended up new or in a different seat than before.
That's a lot of exposure for one person. New function, new mandate, a boss who'd made the bet on it, and a market that was changing faster than almost anyone's org chart could keep up with.
The hard part wasn't the volume of hiring. It was that some of the roles she needed didn't have a definition yet.
That rebuild turned out to be the beginning of something longer. The work that started inside Revenue Effectiveness has since moved into sales, and now marketing. Nine hires in, the roles are still opening. But it started with the ones nobody had figured out how to hire for.
GTM Engineering was the clearest example, and the hardest to hire for.
"The title spread faster than the capability," Lauren said. The job was only a couple of years old, so the pool of people who'd actually done it was tiny, and the title was showing up on résumés that didn't have the substance underneath.
Companies had decided AI belonged in the customer journey, demand for someone who could actually build that spiked, and the market started slapping a trendy new title on an old job.
A Salesforce admin who's good in ChatGPT? Not a GTM Engineer.
A RevOps analyst who can write a prompt? Not a GTM Engineer.
But that's how a lot of the market was defining the role.
So the usual approach broke down. With no clean résumé to match against and the role still taking shape in real time, "here's the req, send me people who fit it" was never going to work. The one detail that did narrow the field: the only people with a real track record were the handful who'd spent the last two years building the function at Clay.
What Lauren needed was a partner who understood where the function was going, not one keyword-matching against old RevOps job descriptions.
Lauren had known Bri Doyle for years before any of this, on both sides. She'd hired through her, and she'd been a candidate herself.
So when Captivate came in, there wasn't much of a translation layer to build. Bri already understood how Lauren thinks about org design, talent density, and where she pushes hard versus where she stays flexible. That shared history matters most when the role itself is still forming, because the work becomes less about matching a spec and more about recognizing capability that doesn't show up in a job title.
"The conversations were much more nuanced than 'here's a req, send candidates,'" Lauren said. "We were actively shaping what these roles should even look like."
GTM Operations already existed on Lauren's team. She had someone running it, with a group of analysts under her. What didn't exist yet was the layer that came next.
Bri brought in a candidate who was, in Lauren's words, a little ahead of the role she had open at the time. He had the kind of strategic and operational capability Lauren knew she wanted more of, and talking to him made something click: as the team grew, she was going to need another strong strategic person above the analyst level, not just more analysts. The GTM Strategy & Ops function was still in its early days, and the conversation made clear it needed that hire sooner than her roadmap said.
The candidate himself passed. The role as scoped wasn't quite what he was after, and Lauren ultimately filled it independently. But the exercise paid off anyway, because it helped her see the shape of the team she needed before it had made it onto a hiring plan.
"Sometimes the market teaches you what your team needs before your org chart does," she said.
It wasn't the only search that changed shape. Two more that started as single roles ended as two hires each.
With the GTM Engineers, the two skill sets fit together so well that Justworks brought on both. One leaned into systems and automation architecture, the other brought strong operational and commercial instincts, and together they moved faster than a single hire could have.
The Partnerships Operations search went the same way. Partnerships were becoming strategically important fast, and it was clear the function needed more operational rigor and scale than anyone had planned for.
Comp and leveling shifted too. Early on, the market still wanted to benchmark GTM Engineers against traditional RevOps or Salesforce admin pay bands. But the strongest candidates were operating at a different level, technically and strategically, and Captivate's live read from those conversations made that clear quickly. It moved both the comp and the leveling. These weren't incremental admin hires. They were high-leverage builders.
Ask Lauren where the impact shows up and she points to how the org runs now.
It's faster, for one. More of the manual work is automated, the workflows are tighter, and there's less friction between teams. Training and reinforcement were significantly modernized, which sped up time-to-productivity and cut the reliance on pulling people off the floor for hours of live enablement. Forecasting rigor, planning, and cross-functional alignment around revenue priorities all got stronger.
But the biggest shift she points to is cultural. The team now runs more like a product and engineering organization, highly iterative, highly accountable, focused on measurable business outcomes instead of just executing tasks.
For someone who walked in to rebuild a function from scratch, in a market that kept changing the rules, that's the thing that makes her look right to the people watching.
The RevOps rebuild was the start, not the scope.
Once the hard, undefined roles were filled, the work kept widening. The same partnership that built out GTM Engineering, Partnerships Operations, Deal Desk, and Revenue Planning moved into Justworks' sales hiring, where Justin Jensen placed two Account Executives, Daniel Sandoghdar Montero and Jeremiah Bauer. It's since extended into marketing, with roles still open.
This is the part that actually says something. Lots of firms can fill one role. Getting asked back for the next is rarer, and having the work cross from one function into the next two is rarer still. That only happens when a client trusts you with the roles that are hardest to define, and keeps calling as the stakes move across the org.
Lauren didn't have to say any of this. The work was done, the seats were filled, and nothing she'd been asked hinged on whether she'd recommend her recruiter.
She brought it up anyway.
"Being partners with Captivate has been awesome for us," she said. She talked about knowing Bri for a long time, called her one of the first RevOps recruiters out there, and described having been on both sides of working with her, hiring for her own teams and looking for her own next roles. "I recommend her to anyone who's looking to hire unique talent in this kind of futuristic role of revenue operations."
The best endorsements are the ones nobody asks for. This was one of them.
Roles placed: Across Revenue Effectiveness, GTM Engineers (2), Senior Partnerships Analysts (2), RevOps Analyst, Manager of Deal Desk & Monetization Strategy, Senior Revenue Planning Analyst. Across Sales, Account Executives (2). Marketing roles open. Nine placements to date.
Captivate team members: Bri Doyle, Justin Jensen
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Lauren Hughes took a job that came with no playbook.
She was the first-ever leader of Revenue Effectiveness at Justworks, a function the company had only just built by merging revenue operations and revenue enablement, two teams that had always run in separate silos. She spent her first year rebuilding the team around it. Roughly 75% of it ended up new or in a different seat than before.
That's a lot of exposure for one person. New function, new mandate, a boss who'd made the bet on it, and a market that was changing faster than almost anyone's org chart could keep up with.
The hard part wasn't the volume of hiring. It was that some of the roles she needed didn't have a definition yet.
That rebuild turned out to be the beginning of something longer. The work that started inside Revenue Effectiveness has since moved into sales, and now marketing. Nine hires in, the roles are still opening. But it started with the ones nobody had figured out how to hire for.
GTM Engineering was the clearest example, and the hardest to hire for.
"The title spread faster than the capability," Lauren said. The job was only a couple of years old, so the pool of people who'd actually done it was tiny, and the title was showing up on résumés that didn't have the substance underneath.
Companies had decided AI belonged in the customer journey, demand for someone who could actually build that spiked, and the market started slapping a trendy new title on an old job.
A Salesforce admin who's good in ChatGPT? Not a GTM Engineer.
A RevOps analyst who can write a prompt? Not a GTM Engineer.
But that's how a lot of the market was defining the role.
So the usual approach broke down. With no clean résumé to match against and the role still taking shape in real time, "here's the req, send me people who fit it" was never going to work. The one detail that did narrow the field: the only people with a real track record were the handful who'd spent the last two years building the function at Clay.
What Lauren needed was a partner who understood where the function was going, not one keyword-matching against old RevOps job descriptions.
Lauren had known Bri Doyle for years before any of this, on both sides. She'd hired through her, and she'd been a candidate herself.
So when Captivate came in, there wasn't much of a translation layer to build. Bri already understood how Lauren thinks about org design, talent density, and where she pushes hard versus where she stays flexible. That shared history matters most when the role itself is still forming, because the work becomes less about matching a spec and more about recognizing capability that doesn't show up in a job title.
"The conversations were much more nuanced than 'here's a req, send candidates,'" Lauren said. "We were actively shaping what these roles should even look like."
GTM Operations already existed on Lauren's team. She had someone running it, with a group of analysts under her. What didn't exist yet was the layer that came next.
Bri brought in a candidate who was, in Lauren's words, a little ahead of the role she had open at the time. He had the kind of strategic and operational capability Lauren knew she wanted more of, and talking to him made something click: as the team grew, she was going to need another strong strategic person above the analyst level, not just more analysts. The GTM Strategy & Ops function was still in its early days, and the conversation made clear it needed that hire sooner than her roadmap said.
The candidate himself passed. The role as scoped wasn't quite what he was after, and Lauren ultimately filled it independently. But the exercise paid off anyway, because it helped her see the shape of the team she needed before it had made it onto a hiring plan.
"Sometimes the market teaches you what your team needs before your org chart does," she said.
It wasn't the only search that changed shape. Two more that started as single roles ended as two hires each.
With the GTM Engineers, the two skill sets fit together so well that Justworks brought on both. One leaned into systems and automation architecture, the other brought strong operational and commercial instincts, and together they moved faster than a single hire could have.
The Partnerships Operations search went the same way. Partnerships were becoming strategically important fast, and it was clear the function needed more operational rigor and scale than anyone had planned for.
Comp and leveling shifted too. Early on, the market still wanted to benchmark GTM Engineers against traditional RevOps or Salesforce admin pay bands. But the strongest candidates were operating at a different level, technically and strategically, and Captivate's live read from those conversations made that clear quickly. It moved both the comp and the leveling. These weren't incremental admin hires. They were high-leverage builders.
Ask Lauren where the impact shows up and she points to how the org runs now.
It's faster, for one. More of the manual work is automated, the workflows are tighter, and there's less friction between teams. Training and reinforcement were significantly modernized, which sped up time-to-productivity and cut the reliance on pulling people off the floor for hours of live enablement. Forecasting rigor, planning, and cross-functional alignment around revenue priorities all got stronger.
But the biggest shift she points to is cultural. The team now runs more like a product and engineering organization, highly iterative, highly accountable, focused on measurable business outcomes instead of just executing tasks.
For someone who walked in to rebuild a function from scratch, in a market that kept changing the rules, that's the thing that makes her look right to the people watching.
The RevOps rebuild was the start, not the scope.
Once the hard, undefined roles were filled, the work kept widening. The same partnership that built out GTM Engineering, Partnerships Operations, Deal Desk, and Revenue Planning moved into Justworks' sales hiring, where Justin Jensen placed two Account Executives, Daniel Sandoghdar Montero and Jeremiah Bauer. It's since extended into marketing, with roles still open.
This is the part that actually says something. Lots of firms can fill one role. Getting asked back for the next is rarer, and having the work cross from one function into the next two is rarer still. That only happens when a client trusts you with the roles that are hardest to define, and keeps calling as the stakes move across the org.
Lauren didn't have to say any of this. The work was done, the seats were filled, and nothing she'd been asked hinged on whether she'd recommend her recruiter.
She brought it up anyway.
"Being partners with Captivate has been awesome for us," she said. She talked about knowing Bri for a long time, called her one of the first RevOps recruiters out there, and described having been on both sides of working with her, hiring for her own teams and looking for her own next roles. "I recommend her to anyone who's looking to hire unique talent in this kind of futuristic role of revenue operations."
The best endorsements are the ones nobody asks for. This was one of them.
Roles placed: Across Revenue Effectiveness, GTM Engineers (2), Senior Partnerships Analysts (2), RevOps Analyst, Manager of Deal Desk & Monetization Strategy, Senior Revenue Planning Analyst. Across Sales, Account Executives (2). Marketing roles open. Nine placements to date.
Captivate team members: Bri Doyle, Justin Jensen
