“The search market is very fragmented. There are the big guys who tend to operate at the top of the market, then the rest of it is a very fragmented market. Having a recruitment partner that's been around a long time and has got real tenure in its staff so they know the market, they know who's out there and type of capabilities you can tap into is essential. Getting a perspective on market rates and competition around certain roles is really helpful.

We've got an internal HR and recruitment team and they're certainly good at mid to junior roles, but when it comes to more specialist or senior roles, we want to work with people who have got a reputation in the market and who are going to attract the right type of candidates as an extension of our own business, and give us access to a really solid talent pool. That’s certainly what Oakstone did for us.

Recruiting Senior go-to-market and commercial roles is pivotal to our value creation plan as an organisation. In my role in the go to market world it’s really important that I don't make missteps in recruitment. Working with the Oakstone team allows me to have certainty around the type and quality of candidate that’s put forward. It reduces a lot of the headache at the front end and gets me a solid shortlist quickly. They allow me to get into the detail of conversations with prospective candidates and not have to trawl the market and sift through a lot of individuals. This allows us to move quickly when we get good quality candidates.

Good quality candidates want certainty as quickly as they can. Working with Oakstone allowed us to do that.”

Iain Regan, CCO Totara.

“HiBob are still scaling and Oakstone have hired a couple of roles for us and continuing to do so. I know the candidates that Oakstone put forward have been properly briefed and their drivers are understood before I have calls with them. I'm very confident that candidates that Oakstone has put forward are going to be credible, and they're already sold on the opportunity.

I would absolutely recommend Oakstone - I have already have!”

Chris Bown, HiBob Sales Director

“The SaaS industry has numerous key recruiters. Oakstone has always been one of those, and I've known the team at Oakstone for over 20 years.

Oakstone has placed me in a couple of roles, and I've used them to build my own teams. It’s a partnership that has been forged over 15-20 years. In terms of industry knowledge, the candidate profiling is absolutely fantastic. I would definitely recommend.”

Matthew Wise, CRO Kovai.co

“Two key things stood out to me the most when working with Oakstone. One is a sense of empathy for what it is we do and the pressures of the role. Sometimes I have conversations with Oakstone, and really, we're just discussing the challenges we're facing. It doesn't feel like Oakstone is putting on the hard sell for candidates, and that's important.

When you are in the market for talent, it's essential that you know that they've built that same type of rapport with the candidates, so you're both coming into conversations really well-versed. You're able to get to that human-level conversation quickly.”

Nick Bareham, CRO at Cadmus Tech

“Working with Oakstone is working with an extension of our business, true partners in recruiting, and you stay in pace with what's going on in the market, understanding what the situation is with top talent. I’ve worked with Tristan the most, and he really listens to what we need. It’s not usual in my experience of working with recruitment agencies that they genuinely listen to what you need and follow the brief.

Oakstone’s sense of urgency and genuinely understanding what our needs are and keeping true to that has impressed me the most.”

Spencer Earp, SVP Conga

“It's always a challenge finding the right quality candidates. I lead an EMEA-wide sales team and consistently require top-quality sales professionals. They’re very difficult to find. There's a lot of mediocre out there. Working with Oakstone over the years has helped me weed through the not-so-good and find the great. I think that's built on a good relationship and built on a good understanding between myself and Steve.”

Phil Young, VP EMEA Botify

"One of the things I've done a lot of is open up US companies into Europe. I can think of many examples where I needed to hire rapidly. Oakstone were outstanding; they got me the right people at the right time. Two of the hires that they made for me I've hired into other roles in companies in my portfolio. It's really about the quality. If you get good people, particularly in sales, they onboard quickly, you ramp them quickly, they get to quota quickly, and you can just be relying on that skillset.

I've used Oakstone when I was an operator, when I was running international sales organisations, when I came out of full-time work, and now I am in a plural role as a board member/ chairman/ investor. They've always been consistent in being able to help me. That's why I come back to Oakstone an awful lot because I know that I can rely on the work that they do and the quality of the CVs and the people they put in front of me.

What sets Oakstone apart from their competitors is their ability to be clear about the remit. Oakstone won't just take on any role. They know what they are experts in. That's a differentiator. It is that level of connection; the feedback you get is consistent, it's continual. So, you always know where you are in the cycle.”

Martin Moran - Advisor, One Peak Partners Growth Investors & founding member at Salesforce.com

“I can recommend this team for their depth of expertise and domain knowledge. It goes deeper than this as Paul's team have an uncanny knack of working with the players in the sectors before they break into the mainstream. Opportunity for everyone.”

SVP LastPass, regarding their experience with Oakstone International.

“Great results, even better experience! I have had the pleasure to work with Arran at Oakstone over the last 6+ months on some very unique and niche requirements. My expectations were low as I had already been working with a recruitment firm for the previous 6 months with no success. Arran took the time to really understand what I was looking for and was able to find me some great candidates that I was able to hire; Arran was able to successfully do his job, but what separates him and Oakstone from the other recruitment firms I have dealt with is his attention to detail, his thoroughness, and most importantly his thoughtfulness. I genuinely felt that Arran's top priority was servicing both me (client) and the candidate in finding a perfect match. I would recommend Arran and Oakstone to anyone looking to hire top talent.”

Hiring Manager at IFS UK

“Over the past four years, Oakstone has sourced many key hires for us in EMEA across all departments – key managers, sales executives, pre-sales and professional services team members. Their focus on delivery, cultural fit, background checks, transparency and overall professionalism fits well with our own company ethos. This has reflected in the high retention of people we’ve hired through Oakstone”

Rob Bernshteyn - Coupa Software CEO

“It’s the personal touch and the amount of work that goes into finding the right people. To find the right people, understand what you’re looking for and then match them to the roles is what sets Oakstone apart. Consistent, trustworthy and reliable.”

Coupa, VP UK & IRE

‘The best thing about working with Oakstone is a deep, personal relationship.  Early on in my time at Coupa, we really relied on Oakstone to help and be an accelerant for us in Europe and the EMEA region. I think Oakstone is better than others because of the deep connections they build, and they take their time to understand the culture of an organisation.  In this industry, many individuals may be very strong, but they’re not necessarily a good fit for the organisations. But by relying on Oakstone heavily, we could really tune the individuals in terms of how they would fit within a particular organisation.’

Alex Kleiner, CEO of Frictionless Holdings. Previous VP of Customer Success, Coupa

"I have worked with Oakstone over a number of years, with multiple companies, to help recruit the best talent into my respective organisations. What sets Oakstone apart from their competitors is the amount of upfront research and planning that it undertake to initially understand the role and profile of the individual that you are looking to recruit, then the methodical approach that they use to identify suitable candidates, manage the whole process on both sides and adding value at each step to both parties. Ultimately, this approach has delivered excellent candidates, resulting in the best talent joining my teams. Due to this, I exclusively use Oakstone for all of my recruitment requirements."

Head of Technical Services, EMEA, Splunk

“What differentiates Oakstone from its competitors? One would be their ability to consistently deliver very high levels of integrity and accountability, they also do everything will a good degree of fun, humour and humanity.

The significant value added in terms of the service that Oakstone delivers? – my organisation recently did a cost analysis of each day we go by without filling a headcount, particularly in sales – it’s a lot of money.  Oakstone help us deliver results by bringing in talent sooner rather than later – that is of considerable value.”

Sales Director, LogMeIn

‘Overall very responsive and professional with a demonstration of a wealth of negotiating experience which enables us to manage the recruitment process effectively.’

Nick Pegram, Head of EMEA Sales, LogMeIn

‘Companies work with Oakstone because they bring great value, integrity and honesty to the conversation. I’ve never found Oakstone to be afraid of saying it how it is – they give advice, guidance and insight to the market and have good quality candidates who are well coached and understand the opportunity - they are enthusiastic about coming to the initial sessions. I think it’s the full breadth and depth of professionalism across each aspect of the process that sets Oakstone apart.’

Will Lovatt, General Manager, Pros Europe

“I always think of Oakstone as the professionals and the grown ups when it comes to recruitment. Honesty and integrity are vital in this industry. I think recruitment gets a bad rap for lack of integrity. That's certainly the opposite of the experience I get with Oakstone. I think it's clear that you make honesty and integrity part of your business and your everyday practices, and that certainly comes through when I speak with any of you. That comes through as well when it comes to the calibre and the types of candidates that you put in front of us as well. I think those values and the way that you source and identify candidates makes it very clear that honesty and integrity are a big part of that as well. I'm always delighted with the results."

Ben Liddell - RVP Sales Engineering EMEA, SiteImprove

"I have worked with Oakstone for the past eight years now, and they consistently find great talent for us for each and every challenging role that we give them. What I like the most is they are a truly client-focused executive search agency. They will always get the right specifications before starting any search and take the heavy lifting of us by understanding our culture, requirements and timescales and producing a short list who are usually very hard to pick from. In an overcrowded market, it’s sometimes disheartening working with search firms that spray the market looking for candidates. Oakstone is a selective business that only gives us the best candidates in line with our requirements."

Lindsay McEwan – previous General Manager EMEA, Tealium

‘I’ve been at Tealium for four years now, and very shortly after joining, I had a long session with Steve (Oakstone Divisional Director) where he dug into the details of our needs and requirements on a very granular level.  We see each other very regularly; we talk on the phone regularly; Steve always checks in on the phone to make sure he’s capturing all the things we are trying to achieve and figuring out whether our needs and requirements are changing. This is something that not everyone does, and very few recruiting organisations do that.

The track record speaks for itself – the candidates who have come through over the years from Oakstone have been really high quality, and we have hired a lot of people off the back of introductions that Oakstone has made.’

Phil Young, previous VP Sales, Tealium

“Oakstone began working with me at Eloqua in 2010.

At first I was sceptical as all recruiters say they can deliver great results and many ask to be retained and work exclusively – up to that point my view was this a risky strategy that I didn’t want to commit to.

Oakstone was happy to prove their delivery capability on a contingency basis but soon we were keen to move to a sole supplier arrangement as this allowed Oakstone to focus more resources on my behalf and the results followed.

Over the following 3 years I worked exclusively with Oakstone to search out the best talent to join our Sales and PreSales teams in EMEA – the results were excellent with Oakstone recruiting 35 people for us which was about 75% of the EMEA team.

Partnering with Oakstone was a real win win – I recommend them highly.”

Bijan Bedroud - VP, EMEA at Eloqua

“When I started at Icertis, Oakstone was an existing recruiter. We had an incredible amount of heads to fill. I quickly became aware of the depth of how much you knew about our business, and so it’s been a partnership ever since.

You’ve taken the time to get to know our business and our people. You know what our customers want, and you look after us by bringing us the standards we require.”

Icertis, SVP EMEA

“Oakstone tend to have a lot more knowledge about what we do as a business, they care about candidates and they’re able to support their career and our vision rather than just try to sell a role. It’s more about the people.”

Icertis, VP Sales

“Over the last 3 years I have worked closely with the team at Oakstone. I value their insight and their honest assessment of candidates that they put in front of us as well as their ability to deliver. They have really taken the time to understand Alfresco and this comes across in the quality of the candidates. Oakstone has placed strong senior sales and marketing talent within Alfresco and we often retain Oakstone on senior level searches throughout EMEA. Oakstone has successfully led retained campaigns for us in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Benelux and Spain. I consider Oakstone to be a real partner to myself and Alfresco.”

Paul Hennessey, Global head of talent at Alfresco

“I’ve used Oakstone for over 10 years across 3 businesses. I use them because I trust them, and they’ve placed a lot of good people for me, and I get on really well with the team.

They cut to the chase. They’re very direct and know me well enough after all this time and know the types of profile I’m looking for, and they always source good candidates.”

Newstore, Anthony Gavin - VP of Sales.

‘I’ve actually known Oakstone for over 20 years and always utilise the relationship I’ve had with Paul and with Steve and Tristan – they understand the quality of people I like, with the particular experiences and skill sets that I look for within people that I can put in a sales environment.’

Martin Hucker, Sales Director at Concentra Analytics

“Oakstone make a real effort to find good quality candidates that fit into the profile of the people I’m looking for as opposed to blindly throwing CVs at me, which is what a lot of recruitment consultants do.

Their specialisations are really in a number of areas – technical skills, business skills and the third and most important thing for me is personality, is this personality really going to fit into my current team and really not upset the team ethic? That’s how I would differentiate Oakstone from other recruitment consultants.

Recruiting people is a very time-consuming process, but it is also a very important one.  The value Oakstone brings to me is bringing me quality candidates in a short amount of time and helping me get that candidate through the process as quickly as possible.  Oakstone is absolutely a quality organisation.”

EMEA Solutions Consultant Director, Service Max/ GE Digital.

“I have a really simple rule for working with recruitment companies, and that is they have to save me work. Oakstone has consistently understood what kind of personalities I like, what traits I like, and they have always been incredibly good at giving me shortlists that I found very difficult to choose between, which is precisely where I've wanted to be. If you can't trust the people you deal with, you have to stop dealing with them very fast. Authenticity is an essential part of any business transaction, and that's one of the reasons I've continued to do business with Oakstone over the years.

Oakstone has always done exactly what they said they'd do when they said they'd do it. It's just a standard in the service.”

Perry Gale - Fractional CRO, Previous VP EMEA, Cyara

‘How many phone calls do I get from recruiters who don’t know my business, who don’t know the roles, who don’t know the industry, that when I give them the brief, they don’t understand? With Oakstone, you understand me, you understand what I need, you understand my team culture, and those things are important, but also, what I see in Oakstone is a company that knows the marketplace and knows people rather than someone who just knows CVs and profiles.‘

Mike Ferguson, VP EMEA, Redpoint Global