Customer story · Recruiting
Coastal Recruiting grew accepted candidate intros 4.7x in four months with OneGTM
Coastal used to get interested candidates in bursts. Now they arrive every day of the week, weekends included, and recruiters accept about ten intros a day.
4.7x
more accepted candidate intros per month (72 in April, 340 in August)
~10 a day
candidate intros accepted by recruiters, every day since August
71 of 72
days with at least one interested candidate reply (Jul 20 to Sep 29)
“Whatever y'all have done over the last three weeks, it's working. Now we want to scale.”
David FriedmanCo-founder, Coastal Recruiting
Key takeaways
- OneGTM built Coastal Recruiting a candidate outbound engine between April and September 2026, working inside the team with the founders and recruiters.
- Recruiter-accepted candidate intros grew from 72 in April to 340 in August, and 1,149 in total.
- Positive candidate replies went from about 35 a week to about 125 a week, arriving every day instead of in campaign bursts.
- Quality held as volume grew: every candidate is scored the way a Coastal recruiter would score them, and every accept or pass makes the next batch better.
At a glance
- Company
- Coastal Recruiting, a recruiting firm placing engineering, go-to-market and customer success talent at high-growth startups
- Motion
- Candidate outbound: finding people clients want to hire, and getting them into a recruiter conversation
- Channels
- Personalized cold email, LinkedIn
- Previous approach
- Recruiters sourcing by hand, a CRM that refreshed candidate data every 180 days, one-off email campaigns per client
- Engagement
- April to September 2026
- OneGTM team
- Garrett Wolfe, Sahil Valecha
01 Before
Great recruiters, and an outbound engine that ran in bursts
Coastal places engineers, sellers and customer success leaders at venture-backed startups. Their recruiters are excellent on a call. The hard part was getting enough of the right people onto one.
Outbound ran campaign by campaign. A new client search meant a new list, a new sequence and a new round of manual sourcing, and interested replies came in waves when a campaign launched, then tapered off. Candidate data went stale between CRM refreshes, so recruiters sometimes messaged people who had already moved to a client. And AI-written copy never sounded like a recruiter, so the team kept writing it by hand.
“[Our CRM] refreshes like every 180 days and it's killing us. A candidate started at a client, but they are not reflected as that client, and then we message them and it puts us in a bad position.”
David FriedmanCo-founder, Coastal Recruiting
02 How we worked
Embedded with the founders and recruiters, shipping every week
OneGTM worked inside Coastal's team rather than beside it. We set the logic with the founders and recruiters (which roles to recruit for, what a strong candidate looks like for each one, how much volume each role gets) and then changed the system every week based on what recruiters said about the candidates it sent them.
- 01Find~1M candidate profiles, kept fresh
- 02Score15 role scorecards, recruiter-calibrated
- 03Reach outShort notes from real recruiters
- 04TriageReplies sorted in seconds
- 05DecideAccept or pass in Slack
Play 01
Score every candidate the way a Coastal recruiter would
Fifteen roles, from junior engineer to head of sales, each with its own definition of a strong candidate, built with Coastal's recruiters and calibrated on 1,880 of their decisions. Outreach only goes to the people a recruiter would actually want to talk to.
Play 02
One candidate database, always fresh
Coastal's candidate data (about a million profiles across 196,000 companies) stays current instead of waiting on a CRM refresh, so candidates hear from Coastal when they're most open to a move, and clients' own employees are never contacted.
Play 03
Notes that sound like a recruiter wrote them, at a volume no recruiter could
Coastal's team had given up on AI copy, so we built the writing around their voice instead of a template. Every email is short, comes from a real Coastal recruiter, and is specific to the person reading it. The result reads one-to-one and runs every day.
Play 04
Every reply on a recruiter's desk in seconds
Interested replies land in Slack with the context a recruiter needs to accept or pass in one click, and every decision makes the next batch of candidates better. Every one of 5,271 replies over six months has a recorded outcome.
“With everything that you've built, the process, the system, the flow, the scoring, the attribution, it's actually what we've needed.”
Asher HoffmanCo-founder, Coastal Recruiting
03 After
Interested candidates every day, and recruiters who can tell the difference
From bursts to a daily habit
By late July the engine was running every day without anyone pushing it. Since July 20, interested candidates have replied on 71 of 72 days, Saturdays and Sundays included. Positive replies went from about 35 a week before the engagement to about 125 a week from August on, an average of 17 a day.
Ten accepted intros a day
An interested reply only counts once a recruiter says yes to it. Since August, Coastal's recruiters have accepted about 10 candidate intros a day and more than 300 a month, up from 72 in April. Across the whole engagement they accepted 1,149 intros, on 147 separate days.
~10 / day
accepted intros since August (7 a day across the engagement)
300+ / month
accepted intros since August, up from 72 in April
~125 / week
positive candidate replies, up from ~35 before
1,149
intros accepted since April, on 147 different days
More candidates, and better ones
The quality held as volume grew. Recruiters reported stronger candidates, not just more of them, and the targeting kept improving with every recruiter decision.
“The team gave us the feedback overwhelmingly that the leads, just after they talk to them, are just really, really strong.”
David FriedmanCo-founder, Coastal Recruiting
“We've definitely seen an uptake of highly qualified candidates for us to engage with and then convert.”
VP of GTM Recruiting, Coastal Recruiting
Calls, placements and revenue
Hundreds of those candidates booked calls with Coastal's team, and the engine produced placements and revenue for the firm. Nothing fell through the cracks along the way: every reply has a recorded outcome, and the share of replies lost in transit fell from as much as half a week's worth to 0.26%.
04 In their words
What Coastal's founders say
“Truly, you've been the best partner / consultant we've ever worked with (and we've worked with a lot).”
Co-founder, Coastal Recruiting
“You've truly been the best partner we've worked with and would recommend you 10 out of 10 times to anyone we know.”
Co-founder, Coastal Recruiting
Coastal Recruiting case study FAQ
What results did Coastal Recruiting get from working with OneGTM?
What did OneGTM build for Coastal Recruiting?
How long did the Coastal Recruiting engagement take?
Can outbound work for a recruiting firm or staffing agency?
How is a recruiter-accepted intro counted?
How we measured: numbers come from Coastal's own database, pulled September 30, 2026. Accepted intros are recruiter approve clicks on the Slack reply desk. Positive replies are candidates who said they were interested, curious, or asked about a role, with out-of-office replies excluded. Quotes from recorded calls are lightly edited to remove filler words. See more of what OneGTM builds, or how we approach signal-based outbound.
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