Why hire an American?
Two answers, depending on which side of the Atlantic you're on.
What we look for
Experience inside American business. Not a passport.
Most people we place hold US passports. That’s a side effect of where we look. It isn’t the qualification.
The qualification is what they’ve done: sold to American buyers, held American hours, worked at American pace, and can show the results.
A dual national who ran US enterprise sales for six years qualifies.
So does a Brit who spent a decade inside an American company.
Someone holding a US passport who last touched the US market in 2019 doesn’t.
We never ask a candidate about citizenship, visa type, permit expiry, or how they came to be in Europe. We ask two questions: can they work legally without sponsorship, and which employment structures do they accept.
Documents are your job at offer stage. We’ll tell you which ones.
How we vet
Five stages. Most of the pool falls out at the first one.
Every check below is one you could run yourself. None of it rests on a claim you can’t verify.
Stage 01
Eligibility and structure
Two questions, asked before anyone’s time gets spent: can they work legally where they live, and which employment structures are they open to. Almost nobody asks before the introduction.
We ask
Whether they’re legally able to work in their country of residence without sponsorship, and whether they’re open to local employment, a contract, or an employer of record.
We check
That their answer matches what you can actually offer. A candidate who only works on contract and a company that only hires on payroll is a dead search — know that in week one, not week nine.
You get
Both answers in writing before you meet them. Right-to-work documents are verified by you at offer stage, where that check belongs.
Most searches in this market die on structure, not on candidates. An offer that stalls because nobody asked how the person could be paid costs you the search, their goodwill and the role.
Structures we screen for
Where the pool lives
Eight-plus shared hours a day with your US team.
3,785 top American professionals living in Europe are already in our pool.
How it works
Three steps, ten working days.
The role review.
Twenty minutes. If your role needs boots in a US territory — field sales, enterprise deals closed over steak — we tell you to hire in the US and point you to who does that. Inside sales, SDR, customer success, marketing, RevOps, partnerships: the buyer sees a Zoom window and hears an accent. Those roles are ours.
The shortlist.
Five to eight named candidates in ten working days. Each one: work-rights route confirmed, comp expectation in euros, US references you can call, timezone fit mapped to your buyers.
You hire. We don't take a cut of the salary.
Fixed fee per role. No 20% of first-year comp, no exclusivity, no invoice that scales with the candidate's success.
A contingency agency charges 20–25% of first-year salary — €15,000 to €30,000 on the roles we cover, payable whether or not the hire lasts a year. We charge for the search, not a percentage of the person.
If none of the shortlist fits, you've spent €5,000 to learn in two weeks what a failed hire teaches in nine months — and you keep the written read on why.
Why us, not a traditional recruiting firm?
Four differences you can verify.
The pool already exists.
3,785 vetted Americans living in Europe, screened before you ever call us. A traditional firm starts your search the day you sign. We start it from names we already know — which is how a shortlist arrives in ten days, not ten weeks.
Fluent on both sides of the Atlantic.
We understand US companies and their working culture, and we understand European companies trying to break into the US market. Most firms know one side. The whole point of this hire is the bridge between the two.
Operators, not recruiters by trade.
We're unicorn operators turned headhunters. We've hired hundreds of people into teams we ran ourselves — so we can consult on your hiring structure, the role's shape and the comp plan as part of the search, without the consulting fee.
A fixed fee that sits on your side.
A commission firm earns more when the candidate's salary goes up. We charge a fixed fee, so we have no reason to bump the number — our only interest is a hire that sticks at a salary you both believe in.
Objections
The questions we get before the first call.
For enterprise field sales — yes, and we'll tell you that in the first twenty minutes rather than take your money. For every role your buyer experiences through a screen, what matters is fluency and hours, and a zip code adds nothing but $80k to the comp line.
If they live in your country: a normal local contract — that's the point. If they're elsewhere in the EU: a contractor agreement or an EOR at €600–1,000 a month, still cheaper and faster than anything involving a US entity.
Contractor invoicing from their country of registration, or an EOR like Deel from $599 a month. One warning we give for free: a full-time, single-client contractor in France, Germany, Spain, Italy or the Netherlands draws reclassification risk. We tell you which side of that line your setup falls on before you sign anything.
Many are — and that's who your offer competes with, which is why we make you price the role before we search. The pool we work is people who chose Europe on purpose: spouses, dual citizens, people who built a life here. They're not discounted Americans. They're Americans whose cost of living lets them say yes to a number that works for both of you.
Then we say so in the role review and you pay nothing. A fixed fee only works if we refuse the searches we'd lose.