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If you’ve ever:
You’re not alone.
We sat down with Sunny - a senior talent leader who has worked with Artemis Canada across Points, Koho, and AgencyAnalytics.
She shared:
“I’ve now worked with Artemis three times. And I feel like if I leave here, I’ll take you again with me. Just calling a spade a spade.”
But of course - not every search calls for a partnership with a search firm. So when does it, and when doesn’t it? And if you do pull in external support, how can you make sure that relationship acts like a true partnership with dependable, positive outcomes - vs. feeling like yet another vendor you have to manage?
We covered:
👉 When it actually makes sense for an internal TA team to bring in a search partner (and when it doesn’t!)
👉 Why “capacity” is not always as simple as having too many roles open
👉 Why external search partners should feel like an extension or your internal team, not a vendor… and how to make this type of relationship possible
👉 How market intel helps talent leaders manage hiring manager expectations
👉 Why external search support is not giving up
👉 How to get buy-in from cross-functional leaders on working with a dedicated search partner
Whether you’re a talent leader trying not to manage more searches than humanly possible, a People leader deciding when to invest in external support, or a hiring manager wondering why the “right person” is not magically appearing in the pipeline… we’ve got you covered. Let’s dig in.
Sunny worked with Artemis across three very different environments.
At Points, she was part of a founder-led, public company with about 300 employees and a small talent team.
At Koho, she was in a VC-backed fintech that had just raised and was moving through a period of hyper-growth.
And at AgencyAnalytics, she joined a bootstrapped, profitable, founder-led martech company of around 100 people, with no VC or board of directors.
Public, VC-backed, bootstrapped. Travel tech, fintech, martech. B2B2C, B2C, B2B.
Different companies. Different funding structures and stages. Different domains.
But when Sunny engaged Artemis, the reason was almost always the same:
“It really came down to two things: Capacity and niche searches.”
Let’s pause for a sec: Capacity is a word that gets flattened in talent conversations.
It doesn’t mean that internal talent acquisition teams are overwhelmed and can’t do the work. Instead, it could mean:
And for Sunny, Artemis became the partner she trusted in those moments.
Not because Artemis could “take work off her plate” in a generic sense, but because the team could go deep, understand the business, and operate with the same care she would bring internally.
As she put it:
“Artemis is like an extension of our internal talent team. You’re not really like a vendor to manage. It’s more so that you fully embed, and the foundation is built on trust and transparency.”
We asked Sunny what was happening internally when she realized she needed Artemis’ support.
Her answer didn’t come from a place of panic or from fear of failure. It came from a place of maturity:
“I don’t want to be a bottleneck for the business. I’ve never been about not being able to do the work. It’s about recognizing when a search deserves more focus than I can give it at that time.”
Internal TA teams are often expected to be everywhere at once. They are managing hiring managers, candidates, intake meetings, interview process design, feedback loops, compensation expectations, funnel health, employer brand, reporting, and every “quick question” that pops up in Slack.
And then, on top of that, they are expected to go deep on the hardest searches. Y’know, the niche ones? The needle in a haystack, hyper-specialized, the dream-candidates-are-gainfully-employed-at-top-companies ones?
Yeah, we see you. So does Sunny, when she described it this way:
“When you’re looking for a very specific profile, when you’re doing ten different searches, when you’re managing internal stakeholders, you need to be able to go deep in some searches and embed in that talent pool and bring back intel… real market intel. That’s where Artemis comes in and supplements me.”
That distinction is important: A search partner isn’t there to replace an internal talent function, it’s there to extend it.
That’s one of the reasons Sunny kept coming back to Artemis: The support wasn’t surface level. It was embedded, informed, and close to the actual work. She says,
“You don’t just take a job description and source and just present candidates. You get into the market. You bring back real market intelligence, and it feels like an internal arm of the business versus an outside transaction.”
When Sunny moved from Points to Koho, and later to AgencyAnalytics, Artemis was the first search partner she thought of.
At Points, Artemis had been introduced by her Chief People Officer.
But after that, Sunny brought Artemis in herself.
“When I moved to Koho and I needed support on more niche searches, also due to capacity, Artemis was the first one that I thought of, and also here…
There are good recruitment agencies. There are excellent ones, and then there’s Artemis.”
That’s the difference between adding an agency and adding leverage: When an internal TA team is already stretched, the last thing they need is another relationship that creates more work.
They need someone who can understand the role, represent the company well, communicate clearly, pressure-test the market, and help bring stakeholders along with real information.
We asked Sunny to take us back to the moment where she realized she could not fill certain roles alone:
“Every search that I’ve used Artemis for reaches an inflection point where input stops being reflected in output. You’re putting in that work. You’re putting in the quality, but it’s not translating into actual metrics and conversions.”
Sound familiar?
You’re putting in the time. Doing the right things. Having conversations, adjusting the profile, keeping stakeholders updated and aligned, doing market research, iterating…
But you’re also probably doing 100 other time sensitive and business critical searches and projects.
Sunny explained that the trigger is not always a specific timeline.
“It’s not about giving up. It’s about recognizing when a dedicated partner gets a better outcome faster. The trigger isn’t a calendar date. It could be 30 days, it could be 60 days, it could be 90 days. It’s about reading the data and being realistic about what the market is telling you.”
Speaking of market intelligence: Sunny shared how Artemis Canada brought back something more useful than activity updates.
“You get into the market. You bring back real market intelligence.”
And for an internal TA leader, that information is gold. It gives you grounded intel to bring back to the business. It shifts the conversation away from opinion and toward evidence.
All that being said, we know that bringing in an external search partner is not always an easy conversation for talent leaders. Whether there’s fear around the perception of failure, or hiring managers not understanding how much work has happened behind the scenes.
So we asked Sunny: How did you get internal buy-in to bring in Artemis Canada as your search partner?
Turns out, the trust-building process starts long before the search itself.
“It’s about the internal relationship that you have with the business. And it all starts with trust. You’ve got to build that long before you ever bring in an external talent partner.”
Sunny thinks about her role almost like an internal product manager.
She supports the business. She measures outcomes. She iterates. She keeps hiring managers informed on what is happening, what the funnel looks like, what the inputs are, and where the search is getting stuck.
So when she does recommend outside help, it doesn’t come as a surprise.
“When I need to get to a point where I need outside help, it’s not a hard sell. The buy-in is essentially a no-brainer, and the trust is already there.”
We asked Sunny when it makes sense for an internal talent team to bring in external search support.
Her answer was simple:
“I think it comes down to three things: bandwidth, complexity, and niche.”
Bandwidth: You have too many searches, too many stakeholders, or too many competing priorities to give this role the daily focus it needs.
Complexity: The role is not straightforward. The profile needs refinement, the market is hard to read, or the hiring team needs help understanding what is realistic.
Niche: The talent pool is specific, hard to reach, or unlikely to come through inbound applications.
At a certain point, Sunny said, the decision has to come back to business outcomes.
“If you’re holding up a search because you can’t give it the attention that it deserves, you become the bottleneck. And that’s a big problem for the business.”
We asked Sunny what she would say to another internal talent leader who is on the fence about using an external search firm.
She says,
“Hiring external support isn’t giving up. I think a lot of talent partners tend to think that it is giving up on a search. It’s more about self-awareness.”
For internal TA leaders, bringing in a search partner can feel like a big decision. You know the business. You know the hiring managers. You know the role. And in many cases, you’ve already put real time, thought, and effort into the search before you even consider external support.
So the question isn’t always, “Can we do this ourselves?”
Instead, it’s, “Is this search getting the focused attention it needs, at the pace the business needs it?”
That’s where Sunny sees the ROI.
“The long-term cost of a bad hire or a slow hire or a missed hire is almost always higher than the cost of getting in the right help.”
Sometimes the cost is not dramatic or obvious. It’s the leader who should have been in seat months ago. The team that’s been waiting for a critical skill set. The hiring manager who is trying to cover the gap. The TA partner who is keeping the search moving while also juggling everything else on their plate.
None of that means the internal team is doing anything wrong. It usually means the role matters enough to deserve more dedicated focus.
But Sunny was also clear that the partner has to be the right one.
“Finding a talent partner that matches your philosophy, embeds in your business, and operates like an extension of your own team is really a win. It shouldn’t be a transaction.”
We hope Sunny’s story is helpful for any internal talent leader who is trying to balance high expectations, lean teams, and critical searches.
Bringing in external support can feel complicated, and you might wonder if managing a search firm will create more work than it solves.
If your search partner feels more like a vendor, it could.
But with the right partner, it can give your team the focus, market access, and momentum you need to get the hire right.
As Sunny reminded us, external support is not giving up. It’s doing what all great tech companies do to their core: Try something, accept when it didn’t get the outcomes they hoped for, iterate, and tackle the problem in a different way.
And when search support comes from a partner who embeds in your business, brings back real market intelligence, and operates like an extension of your own team, it can make all the difference.
Until next time,
Negin & The Artemis Canada Team
Read more insights from our team.
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Founded by Kristina McDougall in 2013, Artemis has grown to become Canada’s most trusted boutique executive search firm for startups.
We recognize that our work takes place on the traditional lands of the Attawandaron, Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, and Mississaugas of the Credit. We honour Indigenous stewardship and commit to embedding reconciliation into our work, holding ourselves and our clients accountable.
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