From Personal Pain to Market Solution: How Crosschq is Revolutionizing the Hiring Intelligence Space

A failed hire can derail even the most successful company. For Mike Fitzsimmons, this wasn't just theoretical – it was a painful reality that inspired his current venture. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Mike shared how a few crucial hiring missteps at his previous company, which had grown to $200 million in revenue pre-IPO, ultimately impaired its trajectory and outcome.

This experience led to a critical question: "God, is it me? How did I miss? How did we miss? Is this a me problem or is this a bigger problem than that?" The answer was sobering. As Mike discovered, "hiring still in this country has a 45% fail rate, which means that our companies are ROI negative on almost half of the hires we make."

This realization sparked the creation of Crosschq, a hiring intelligence platform aimed at fundamentally improving how companies hire. But launching into an unfamiliar industry came with its own set of challenges and learning opportunities.

The Outsider's Advantage

While entering the HR tech space as an outsider presented certain obstacles, it also offered unique advantages. As Mike explains, being new to the industry meant "being feature constrained by legacy expectations." This fresh perspective allowed Crosschq to innovate without being bound by traditional industry assumptions.

However, the trade-off was clear: "Just route understanding the ecosystem, understanding where the bodies are buried, what channels you're going to need to figure out what partners you're going to need to align with, all that kind of stuff... it takes a little bit of time."

Evolving Go-to-Market Strategy

Crosschq's go-to-market journey reflects the dramatic shifts in B2B sales and marketing over recent years. Mike is particularly candid about the death of traditional B2B marketing approaches: "I will tell you that I don't even know what year to put this in brackets, but called the 2016 17-18 B2B SaaS demand gen playbook that everybody kind of runs, you know, scrap it."

Instead, Crosschq has found success through high-touch, personal engagement. The company now regularly hosts intimate dinners and roadshows, bringing together carefully curated groups of prospects, customers, and industry analysts. "We're doing Boston, New York, Miami, Atlanta. We're kind of stretching our legs a little bit this year," Mike shares, noting that "early read is... it's a winning play."

The Partnership Myth

One particularly interesting insight from Mike concerns the common misconception about B2B partnerships. "The term is so loosely used," he explains, especially when companies announce integrations and referral agreements. The reality? "Just having a partner marketing manager to help you exploit that channel opportunity, that's not how it works."

Instead, success in partnerships comes down to grassroots engagement: "The art there is you actually have to get hand to hand combat with the actual sellers at your partner to make sure that they are incentivized to go sell your stuff."

Category Creation and Analyst Relations

In defining the hiring intelligence category, Mike emphasizes the importance of analyst relations, particularly for enterprise sales. Rather than attempting to immediately secure attention from major firms like Gartner, he advises founders to "calibrate your expectations but don't sort of stare a gift horse in the mouth and put the effort in, especially on those influencers that maybe don't have a national brand because they truly can help."

Looking ahead, Mike sees hiring intelligence following a similar trajectory to sales intelligence, just on a delayed timeline. "Hiring is ten years behind sales and everything," he notes, drawing parallels to Salesforce's journey in transforming sales operations. His vision? Making hiring intelligence "an absolute necessity for every organization to have a platform by which they can better forecast and optimize their hiring."

For B2B founders, Mike's journey with Crosschq offers valuable lessons about the importance of challenging industry assumptions, adapting go-to-market strategies to changing conditions, and maintaining focus on solving fundamental problems rather than just following established playbooks.