Recruiters trained in DTC: how Constant Hire hires for consumer brands
Connor Gross is the owner of Constant Hire, a recruiting agency that places talent exclusively with direct-to-consumer and consumer brands. The firm trains every recruiter on DTC business models and runs a Claude-built dashboard for core business vitals while keeping client and candidate conversations human-led.
Specialization wins: focused expertise in DTC operations and relationships is the main differentiator for landing and retaining clients. Use AI to consolidate internal data and dashboards, but avoid AI-written outreach where authenticity matters.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
My Co-Founder and I both built & sold 2 different consumer brands.
During that process we tried working with a number of recruiting agencies who didn’t understand performance marketing & the intricacies of a DTC business. So, we built Constant Hire to become the go to recruiting agency for Consumer Brands.
#1 way that we are different. This is all that we do. Every recruiter on our team has been trained on different sectors of direct-to-consumer and understands the business model extremely well.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Primarily all from word of mouth & LinkedIn!
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
We use Claude to build a custom dashboard for us to review all core business vitals and not have to piecemeal everything together on Google Sheets.
One area that we’ve had to revert was on the writing side. Some writing can be done with AI, such as job descriptions, but engaging with clients and candidates, we have found that when somebody can tell something’s written by AI, the chances that they continue to read it are very low.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
We’ve slowly seen a couple of leads trickling in through AI over the last 12 months
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Focus: Double down on relationships. In the B2B Services world, that is the number one reason we are still getting business and repeat clients.
Ignore: AI Consulting – seems like nearly every service business has rolled out a version of this in the last few months.
Thank you to Connor Gross and the team at Constant Hire for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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