I’ve been on both sides of this equation. As a SaaS sales professional, I’ve been headhunted for roles that made no sense. As a recruiter, I’ve watched founders waste months searching for unicorns that simply don’t exist. The difference between a three-week hire and an eight-month nightmare is understanding your Total Addressable Candidates (TAC) before you start your search.
The wishlist trap
Here’s what I see typically happen. Founders are ready to hire, they open a Google Doc and start listing everything you want in their next sales hire, including:
- Must have sold at exactly our ACV.
- Must have worked for a competitor.
- Must have experience at our exact stage.
- Must have hit quota three years running.
The reality is that creating a wishlist is easy. It feels productive. But these people might not actually exist. And even if they do, there might only be twelve of them in your entire market, and eleven are perfectly happy where they are.
Before you waste weeks or months hunting for ghosts, you need to understand your TAC. Think of it like your Total Addressable Market in sales, but for candidates.
Do the people you’re looking for exist? Have you been too aggressive with your requirements? Or are there 20,000 people who match your criteria and you need to be more specific?
Why your job description is your north star
Your job description is the most important document you’ll create before starting your search. And no, I don’t mean important because you’re going to post it on LinkedIn and hope for the best. That strategy doesn’t work, and we both know it.
Your JD is critical because you’ll use snippets of it throughout your entire headhunting process. When you reach out to candidates, when you’re filtering through profiles, when you’re explaining the role to investors or your board, everyone should look at that document and say, “Yes, that’s exactly what we need.”
At Cosmic, we make our JDs brutally transparent. We include numbers, conversion rates, ARR figures, investor details, win rates. Because when you copy-paste a generic AE job description from another company you end up hiring someone who’s a great fit for that other company, not yours.
Your JD should be specific to your business. If you’re massively inbound-led, you need someone who excels at converting warm leads, not someone who’s spent their career cold-calling. If you’re a pure outbound company, there’s no point interviewing someone who’s only ever handled inbound enquiries. These are fundamentally different skill sets, and your JD needs to reflect what moves the needle for your business.
The two-tier approach to building your TAC
Once you’ve nailed your JD, it’s time to understand your market. I use a two-tier system that’s proven effective across hundreds of searches:
Tier 1: The Slam Dunks (200-300 people)
These are your absolute dream candidates. If any of these 200-300 people respond to your outreach about the role, you’re in an excellent position. These are the profiles where you look at their experience and think, “If we could get this person, we’d be thrilled.” This tier represents your core target market.
Tier 2: The Total Pool (3,000-4,000 people)
To identify those 200-300 slam dunks, you’ll typically need to review a pool of 3,000-4,000 relevant profiles. This broader pool helps you understand the landscape, spot patterns, and refine your criteria. Those 3,000-4,000 profiles will yield your 200-300 perfect fits, and that’s where your focused headhunting begins.
How to map your TAC
LinkedIn is your primary tool here, but you need to use it strategically. Here’s my process:
- Start by taking the key criteria from your JD and building a Boolean search.
- Input the specific experience, skills, industries, and other factors that are genuinely important.
- Then look at what the search returns.
If you’re seeing 10,000+ results, you need to add more must-have criteria. Your search is too broad, and you’ll waste time reviewing irrelevant profiles.
If you’re seeing fewer than 1,000 results, you might be too restrictive. This is your reality check.
The goal is to land in that 3,000-4,000 range for your total pool. From there, you can manually identify your 200-300 slam dunks through detailed profile review.
What matters and what doesn’t
Just because someone works at a competitor doesn’t mean they’ll be a great salesperson for you. I’ve seen it time and again where founders fixate on competitor experience when it’s really other attributes that predict success.
Ask yourself what really matters for this specific role:
- Is it outbound prospecting skills or inbound conversion ability?
- Is it experience selling at a particular ACV or deal complexity?
- Is it navigating a specific buyer persona or industry vertical?
- Is it building pipeline from scratch or managing an existing book of business?
These distinctions matter enormously. A brilliant enterprise AE who works six-month sales cycles will struggle in a high-velocity, 30-day sales cycle environment. Someone who’s thrived with abundant inbound leads may flounder when they need to generate their own pipeline.
Take the time to genuinely reflect on what drives success in your specific sales environment, then build your TAC around those attributes.
The cost of getting this wrong
Let me share a recent example that illustrates the stakes here. We worked with a PE-backed company that had six internal talent acquisition people. They spent eight months searching for a £200,000 AE with a million-pound quota. Eight months. Six recruiters. Zero results.
Cosmic took over the search and found the right person in three weeks. We’re now at the offer stage.
What was the difference? They never properly defined their TAC. They didn’t build a specific, detailed JD. Their TA team sent generic messages that didn’t resonate with high-performing salespeople earning £400,000 who get approached constantly.
That company lost eight months on a role with a million-pound target. That’s potentially £600,000-£700,000 in revenue that could have been generated but wasn’t. Every month without someone in seat is three to four months of lost productivity once you factor in ramp time.
If you start searching in January and it takes three months to find someone, it’s March before you make an offer. Add notice periods, and they start in April or May. Factor in a three-month ramp, and suddenly it’s Q4 before they’re productive. You’ve effectively written off the entire year.
This is a speed game. Get the right person in the job faster, and everyone wins – the founder, the investors, the team, and the hire themselves.
The measure twice, drill once philosophy
I’m a big believer in the carpenter’s approach of measure twice, drill once. In recruitment terms, this means doing the upfront work to understand your TAC before you start reaching out to candidates.
Yes, it requires discipline. Yes, it might feel slow when you’re eager to start interviewing. But the alternative spending months chasing candidates who don’t exist, or hiring the wrong person because you didn’t properly define what “right” looks like.
The beautiful thing about understanding your TAC is that it forces clarity.
When you can only find 50 people who match your criteria, you need to ask hard questions. Are our requirements realistic? Are we being too prescriptive? What are we willing to be flexible on?
Conversely, if you find 15,000 matches, you haven’t been specific enough. You’ll waste time reviewing irrelevant profiles and confuse your messaging when you do start outreach.
From TAC to action
Once you’ve mapped your TAC and identified your slam dunks, you’re ready to begin targeted outreach. But that outreach needs to be personalized and compelling. This is where those JD snippets become valuable.
High-performing salespeople aren’t browsing job boards. To get their attention, you need specific, relevant information such as conversion rates, company backing, growth trajectory, and the problem they’d be solving.
Generic messages fail because they don’t give top performers a reason to care. Specific, transparent messages that pull from your well-crafted JD succeed because they demonstrate you’ve done your homework and have something genuinely interesting to offer.
Making this work for your business
I understand the temptation to skip this step. You need someone yesterday. Your pipeline requires attention. Revenue targets are looming. But the founders who invest time upfront in understanding their TAC make faster, better hires than those who jump straight into interviewing.
Three weeks versus eight months. The right person versus a costly mis-hire. These aren’t small differences but business-defining outcomes.
So, before you post that JD or start messaging candidates, take the time to understand your Total Addressable Candidates. Define what you really need, map the market, identify your slam dunks, and then execute with focus and speed.
FAQ
How long should I spend mapping my TAC before starting outreach?
For most roles, you can complete a thorough TAC analysis in 1-2 days. This includes writing or refining your JD, running Boolean searches, and reviewing profiles to identify your slam dunk tier. It’s a small time investment that will save you weeks or months down the line.
What if I can’t find enough candidates in my TAC?
This is actually valuable information. It tells you that your requirements may be unrealistic or too restrictive. You’ll need to decide which criteria are truly non-negotiable and where you can be flexible. Sometimes the “perfect” candidate doesn’t exist, but the “excellent with room to grow” candidate does.
Should I expand my geographic search if my TAC is too small?
It depends on your business and the role. Remote work has expanded TAC significantly for many companies. However, factor in time zones, work authorization requirements, and your company culture around remote work. Geographic expansion can solve a small TAC problem, but only if you’re genuinely set up to support it.
How often should I revisit my TAC during a search?
If you’re not getting responses or the candidates you’re speaking with aren’t quite right, revisit your TAC after 2-3 weeks. You may need to adjust your criteria or refine your messaging. Your TAC isn’t set in stone; it’s a working document that should evolve based on market feedback.
What’s the minimum TAC size that’s workable?
Aim for at least 200-300 slam dunk candidates in your tier 1. If you’re below this, you’re likely being too restrictive. Remember, not everyone will respond, not everyone will be interested, and not everyone will pass your interview process. You need enough pipeline at the top of the funnel to result in a successful hire.
Author: Matthew Codd
I’m Matthew, I have 15 years of commercial leadership experience, helping VC-backed B2B technology companies scale revenue and transition from founder-led sales.
I use my experience to help early-stage start-ups with GTM expertise, sales best practice, and hiring insights.
I co-founded Cosmic Partners in 2022. We are SaaS sales recruitment specialists for VC backed B2B tech companies.
