Erick Ko writes about talent acquisition and sales development, connecting recruiting practices with sales ideas such as defining an ideal candidate profile, tracking offer acceptance, and building relationships with candidates.
Erick Ko connects recruiting practices with sales ideas for talent acquisition and sales development talks or articles.
Best for
B2B SaaS recruiting, talent acquisition, or sales development software seeking talks, workshops, or practitioner articles.
Not for
Paid sponsorship or broad-reach brand awareness is not a fit without audience and format details.
Key takeaways
Hiring and talent acquisition is a sales process.
Track offer acceptance rates the way sales teams track close rates.
Prior experience does not predict a new hire's success.
Check first: Ask for current media kit, rate card, sponsorship formats, labeling, turnaround, approval steps, and audience demographics.
Main ideas
Hiring and talent acquisition is a sales process · Track offer acceptance rates the way sales teams track close rates · Prior experience does not predict a new hire’s success
Erick Ko writes about talent acquisition and sales development, often using sales concepts to make recruiting practices more concrete.
They compare candidate sourcing with outbound prospecting and the recruiting funnel with a sales pipeline, while stressing that employers must build relationships with candidates—not just assess them.
Other posts explore using offer-acceptance rates to spot hiring-process problems, recognizing the demands of BDR work, and considering candidates for potential as well as prior experience.
Ko connects recruiting metrics and process design with the human side of hiring.
In a post on offer-acceptance rates, they frame the metric as a way to investigate where candidates drop off and why, not just as a score to improve.
In another, they argue that candidates without conventional experience can bring fresh perspectives, while acknowledging the extra onboarding time that may require.
The practical thread is to improve the hiring process without losing sight of the people moving through it.
Erick Ko writes about hiring and sales development as one connected discipline.
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Their central argument: run recruiting like sales—define who you want, source proactively instead of waiting for inbound applicants, measure the funnel as sales teams measure close rates, and treat candidates as long-term relationships rather than one-off applications. A related point is that entry-level sales development is harder and broader than outsiders assume, and hiring teams rely too heavily on prior experience, which does not predict performance.
Hiring and talent acquisition is a sales process
Erick Ko argues that recruiting funnels and sales pipelines have the same shape and should be managed alike.
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Employer branding brings candidates in, much like inbound marketing, but most of the work is filtering and qualifying—and that often takes more time than qualifying leads.
Forward-thinking companies define an ideal candidate profile, the recruiting equivalent of an ideal customer profile, and proactively source those people.
The funnel then needs continuous attention: move candidates forward, keep them engaged through the offer, and sell them on the organization as they sell themselves.
Keep candidates who are not a fit now in a nurtured relationship for future openings rather than dropping them.
Erick Ko compares the time recruiters spend disqualifying applicants with the time sales teams spend qualifying inbound leads.
They argue that, as in outbound sales, proactive hiring means searching for an ideal candidate profile instead of waiting for applications.
At the offer stage, both sides are investing in a new journey together and must persuade each other.
Track offer acceptance rates the way sales teams track close rates
Erick Ko argues that offer acceptance is an underused recruiting metric.
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The rate matters less than what it reveals: where candidates drop off, which sourcing channels work, how the employer value proposition is landing, which competitors win candidates, and which hiring committee members add the most value for candidates. The reasoning mirrors sales win/loss analysis, where understanding why deals are won or lost informs adjustments to targeting, pricing, and process.
Erick Ko reports that the team’s offer acceptance rate topped 90 percent in the previous quarter, reaching 100 percent in engineering, and credits Dominique Simoneau-Ritchie for the result.
Prior experience does not predict a new hire’s success
Erick Ko questions the default of screening candidates by background.
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They cite a Florida State University review of 81 studies that found no significant correlation between a person’s prior work experience and their performance in a new organization, even when the earlier work was closely related.
Ko argues that hiring teams use experience to reduce risk and partly to spread blame if a hire goes badly.
In their experience, nontraditional hires—described as wild cards—have been among the best, bringing fresh perspectives and different approaches to problems.
The tradeoff is real but, in Ko’s account, worth it.
Erick Ko says wild-card hires may need more onboarding, but require much less time to unlearn bad habits picked up elsewhere.
This position sits in some tension with Erick Ko’s emphasis elsewhere on defining an ideal candidate profile and running a disciplined selection funnel. Read together, the posts make a distinction: be rigorous about selection, but do not mistake a resume for evidence of fit.
Erick Ko argues that few people can do the job of a business development representative, and that the difficulty is structural, not a matter of effort.
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A BDR must keep CRM data clean, identify the right companies and people, understand buyer priorities without having held those roles, write human, buyer-centric outreach, absorb daily rejection while staying positive, build relationships, prioritize prospects and internal teams—including sales and marketing—and manage their career development for what comes next. As an entry point into sales, the role often asks people to do all this with limited experience.
The list of demands makes the point: Erick Ko notes that a BDR’s work rarely earns positive reinforcement from recipients, and every outreach is a fresh first impression that could go either way.
Erick Ko’s sales guidance comes down to a few plain points: there is no silver bullet; hustle, heart, and creativity win in any market.
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Outreach should be human and empathetic, and a genuine sale must benefit both sides because eagerness to close drives prospects away. Ko also treats participation in a team or community as part of the work, where people share best practices.
Erick Ko summarized a Q&A hosted by Morgan J Ingram with the Lever sales development team, organized by Giorgia Ortiz and Kaitlyn Buckheit.
Ko reports that the session’s warning against pushing too hard was phrased as “your commission breath will turn your prospect off,” a line they credit to Josh Braun.
The views belong to Morgan J Ingram and Josh Braun, as reported by Ko.
Employer brand and hiring operations are the same project
Erick Ko connects culture-building with the operational machinery of a sales development team.
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Celebrating milestones and telling stories about people who took ownership of their success also builds employer brand; Ko treats it as an operational input, not decoration.
They also point to concrete hiring infrastructure, such as a dedicated operations role responsible for recruiting, onboarding, and team reporting, with a data-driven approach to improving people and process efficiency.
Ko amplifies outside views on sourcing when labor markets tighten.
Erick Ko marked six months for the first Toronto team members and linked to a three-part blog series on Lever Toronto featuring SDR Dylan Hunt and how he took ownership of finding his success.
On sourcing, Ko shared a post by Michael Dunne about record-low unemployment in Canada and the United States and ideas for thinking outside the box, including diversity and inclusion in hiring.
Read it before designing sales development training or hiring criteria: it names the specific demands that make the role difficult.
Erick Ko lists what BDRs must handle: keep CRM data clean; identify the right companies and people; understand buyer priorities and challenges, often without having held those roles; write human, buyer-centric outreach; face daily rejection while staying positive; build relationships; uncover win-win opportunities; and manage expectations across prospects, teammates, managers, sales and marketing.
They must also take control of their own career development.
BDRs often do this with limited experience because the role is usually an entry point into sales.
For brands planning a campaign
This post supports a workshop module on realistic SDR and BDR role expectations, coaching needs and the skills entry-level sales hires must build.
This post shows how a recruiting team can use one metric to diagnose its funnel.
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Open it to see how Erick Ko turns a sales habit into a practical recruiting question.
Erick Ko asks whether recruiting and hiring teams track offer acceptance rates.
Sales teams track close rates to understand why they win or lose deals, and they apply the same logic to hiring.
Dissecting offer acceptance rates can reveal where candidates drop off, which talent sources work best, how candidates perceive the employer value proposition, which companies win the candidates they lose, and which hiring committee members create the most value for candidates.
Erick Ko reports that the team reached an offer acceptance rate above 90 percent in the previous quarter, including 100 percent in engineering.
For brands planning a campaign
A talk can use this post to connect recruiting outcomes with sales pipeline measurement and build a simple diagnostic exercise around acceptance rates and candidate drop-off.
This challenges the common hiring default of screening mainly on prior experience.
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Read it to understand Erick Ko's position on potential, risk and onboarding.
Erick Ko cites a Florida State University review of 81 studies that found no significant correlation between a person's prior work experience and performance in a new organization.
They suggest hiring teams may use experience to mitigate risk and share blame for a bad hire.
Wild cards have been some of their best hires, bringing fresh perspectives and different approaches to problems.
The tradeoff is more onboarding time but much less time getting people to unlearn bad habits.
For brands planning a campaign
This post can support a workshop segment on skills-based or potential-based hiring, structured onboarding and evaluating candidates beyond past job titles.
This shows the team culture and ownership language around Erick Ko's sales development work.
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Read it to see the operating context behind the recruiting and outreach ideas.
Erick Ko celebrates a six-month Lever-versary with the first group of Leveroos in Toronto, Canada.
They say the team has played an integral role in building culture and has come a long way since opening earlier that year.
The post links to the first blog in a three-part series on Lever Toronto, featuring one of the SDRs, Dylan Hunt, and how he took ownership around finding his success.
For brands planning a campaign
This post can serve as an employer brand and SDR ownership example for a recruiting marketing segment or a discussion of how sales development teams build culture.
Team culture, employer brand, and hiring operations3
BDR and SDR role demands and appreciation2
Recruiting as a sales process1
Offer acceptance as a recruiting diagnostic1
Experience versus performance and wild-card hiring1
Recruiting as a sales process
Erick Ko argues that hiring and talent acquisition work like a sales process.
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Employer branding brings candidates in like inbound leads, but much of the work is filtering and qualifying.
Forward-thinking companies define an ideal candidate profile and proactively source candidates as an outbound sales team would.
The recruiting funnel needs the same attention as a sales pipeline: moving candidates forward, maintaining engagement until an offer is made, and continuing to foster relationships with candidates who are not a fit now but could be later.
Uses the sales funnel and ideal customer profile as direct analogies for the recruiting funnel and ideal candidate profile.
For brands planning a campaign
For a B2B SaaS company improving sales-development hiring, this supports a talk or workshop that maps recruiting stages to sales stages, defines an ideal candidate profile, and treats candidate qualification and nurture as pipeline work rather than a single job posting.
Erick Ko compares offer acceptance rates in recruiting to close rates in sales.
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The value lies not in the number alone but in what it reveals: where candidates drop off, which talent sources work, how the employer value proposition is landing, which competitors the company loses candidates to, and which members of the hiring committee create the most value for candidates. They report a quarterly offer acceptance rate above 90% and 100% in engineering, crediting Dominique Simoneau-Ritchie.
Tracks acceptance rates and win/loss reasons as a sales team reviews close rates and deal losses.
For brands planning a campaign
A workshop can show sales-development leaders how to track offer acceptance, segment it by source and department, and use it to diagnose employer positioning and friction in the hiring process.
Erick Ko describes the BDR job as broad and difficult.
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BDRs need to keep CRM data clean, identify the right companies and people, understand buyer priorities without having held those roles, write buyer-centric outreach, face daily rejection, stay positive, build relationships, prioritize across prospects and internal teams, and own their career development after succeeding in the role.
They also share takeaways from a Morgan J Ingram Q&A with a sales development team: there is no silver bullet, hustle, heart, and creativity matter, people should lead with empathy, and community participation helps.
The post warns that commission breath turns prospects off.
Combines a detailed skill inventory for BDRs with practical sales-development coaching lessons from a team Q&A.
For brands planning a campaign
For sales-development hiring, this points to role design and coaching that address resilience, buyer centricity, data discipline, and career progression—not just sourcing volume or quota pressure.
Experience versus performance and wild-card hiring
Erick Ko cites a Florida State University review of 81 studies that found no significant correlation between prior work experience and performance in a new organization.
Read more
They suggest hiring teams may use experience to reduce risk and blame after a bad hire.
They call some wild-card hires among the best, saying they bring fresh perspectives and different problem-solving approaches.
These hires may need more onboarding, but Ko spends much less time getting them to unlearn bad habits.
Contrasts prior experience as a screening proxy with the observed performance of nontraditional hires.
For brands planning a campaign
A B2B SaaS company can use this to challenge experience-heavy screening for sales-development roles and build structured assessment and onboarding for candidates without a traditional sales background.
Team culture, employer brand, and hiring operations
Erick Ko writes about building Lever's Toronto team, celebrating six-month milestones, and highlighting an SDR who took ownership of finding success.
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A separate post advertises a new BDR Operations Specialist role focused on recruiting, onboarding, and team reporting, with a data-driven approach to improving people and process efficiency. They also share a post about record-low unemployment in Canada and the United States, prompting outside-the-box sourcing and diversity and inclusion in hiring.
Links employer branding and team storytelling to concrete hiring operations and sourcing practices.
For brands planning a campaign
A talk or workshop can connect employer value proposition and team culture to the operational infrastructure needed to scale a sales-development team, including recruiting operations, onboarding, and reporting.
The posts document employment at Lever and a Benevity mention in a hiring post.
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Ask Erick Ko to clarify any sponsor, affiliate, client, investment, or owned-business relationships.
Lever
Employment
Erick Ko marks a six-month “Lever-versary” as part of the first group of “Leveroos” in Toronto and refers to the “Lever Sales Development team,” indicating employment at Lever.
Erick Ko writes short LinkedIn posts that frame hiring and talent acquisition as a sales process.
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Start with their argument for defining an ideal candidate profile and sourcing outbound rather than waiting for inbound applications, then read their posts on offer acceptance as a recruiting diagnostic and what the business development representative role demands.
The writing is aimed at talent acquisition and sales development leaders looking to apply pipeline thinking, measurement, and candidate experience to hiring.
For a different angle on employer brand measurement, see Maria Christopoulos Katris; for talent acquisition operating models, see Gabrielle Carlson; for a more confrontational candidate-sales argument, see Viktor Donner.
Writes about employer branding, talent brand, and how candidates research employers before applying, with a focus on measurement and attribution.
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Maria concentrates on AI-driven candidate discovery and new measurement frameworks for talent brand investments. Erick Ko applies sales-funnel mechanics to recruiting, examining BDR role demands and offer acceptance.
Writes about building and scaling talent acquisition functions, hiring metrics, workforce planning, and employer brand as an operating system.
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Gabrielle frames talent acquisition as a revenue growth engine and covers workforce planning and hiring-manager discipline. Erick Ko draws on sales pipeline and BDR role analogies, focusing on offer acceptance and experience-based screening.
Argues recruiting should operate like sales and be candidate-centred, and criticises poor candidate feedback and HR practices.
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Viktor calls for a paradigm shift from recruitment to candidate sales and recruiters as salespeople, taking a critical view of HR. Erick Ko focuses on recruiting process metrics and sales development team operations.
For a B2B SaaS recruiting campaign aimed at a specific audience, Erick Ko’s LinkedIn following was 2,534 on 9 October 2026.
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Eight posts dated July 2019 to February 2022 speak directly to recruiting and sales development practitioners: hiring as a sales process, offer acceptance rates as a diagnostic, the range of skills BDRs are expected to carry, and experience as a weak predictor of new-hire performance.
Several posts are internal-facing — team milestones, a job opening, a shout-out to colleagues — and are more likely to circulate among peers and industry contacts than reach a broad buyer audience.
The content could support a talk or workshop for talent acquisition and sales development teams, but its fit for a specific company depends on who follows and engages.
Before booking, ask for recent post-level results — impressions, comments, and shares — on comparable recruiting and sales development posts, plus an audience survey documenting job function, seniority, and geography, age, or gender if those demographics matter to the campaign.
Erick Ko's posts do not describe partnership, sponsorship, or paid-collaboration formats.
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The eight posts available here, from 2019 to 2022, focus on hiring and recruiting observations, sales-development team appreciation, and colleague or employer shoutouts.
They reference organizations Ko worked with or hired for, such as Lever's Toronto sales-development team and a Benevity recruiting role, but these are employment and team references, not disclosed commercial partnerships.
No post carries a sponsorship disclosure, media kit, rate card, or audience-deliverable description, and no official partnership page, sponsor policy, or inquiry route appears.
Before budgeting for a paid engagement, ask Ko directly for a current media kit or rate card and details on deliverables, labeling, turnaround, and approval steps.
A B2B SaaS company selling recruiting, talent-acquisition, or sales-development software should consider Erick Ko for a talk, workshop, or practitioner article aimed at talent acquisition and sales leaders.
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The fit is topical, not a matter of reach.
Across the eight posts reviewed, they argue that hiring and talent acquisition operate like a sales process: employer branding brings candidates in like inbound leads, but the real work is filtering and qualifying.
Forward-thinking companies define an ideal candidate profile and source proactively, as an outbound sales team does.
That maps directly onto the product story a recruiting-software vendor sells.
They also bring a practical metric: treating offer acceptance rates like sales close rates to reveal where candidates drop off, which sources work, how the employer value proposition lands, and which competitors candidates are lost to.
They report a quarterly acceptance rate above 90 percent and 100 percent in engineering.
A third angle is role design: a detailed inventory of what BDRs actually carry, from CRM hygiene and buyer research to daily rejection and career ownership.
They also say they are willing to hire for potential over prior experience, citing a Florida State University review of 81 studies that found no significant correlation between prior experience and performance in a new organization.
For a vendor whose buyers are sales-development and recruiting leaders, these are specific positions to build a session around.
The audience is small (2,534 LinkedIn followers as of 9 October 2026), so treat a booking as a credibility and content play, not a reach play.
Before booking, confirm their current role and availability, ask for recent posts on these themes, and request references from comparable sessions.
When to choose a specialist
A poor fit based on the posts reviewed is a paid sponsorship or broad-reach brand-awareness campaign.
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The profile shows 2,534 LinkedIn followers, but provides no audience survey or geographic breakdown.
Before committing, ask for a current media kit, rate card, details on sponsorship formats and labeling, turnaround and approval steps, and audience demographics.
Without that information, buyers cannot budget or brief a paid placement or assess whether the audience matches their target.
A general business or consumer audience is also a weak match: the content is aimed at recruiting and sales-development practitioners, and several posts cover internal team milestones and shout-outs, which are more likely to circulate among peers than reach a broad buyer market.
A worked campaign example
Brief: A B2B SaaS company wants to improve its talent acquisition strategy for sales development roles and is considering a talk or workshop. Working angle: run recruiting like a sales pipeline.
Structure a 60 to 90 minute workshop for recruiting and sales-development leaders in four moves.
First, lead an ideal-candidate-profile exercise: define the profile as a sales team would define an ideal customer profile, then compare it with the candidates the company is actually screening.
Second, instrument the funnel.
Teach the offer-acceptance-rate diagnostic, segmented by source, department, and hiring committee, so the team can see where candidates drop off and which sources produce hires rather than volume.
Third, challenge experience-based screening using the finding that prior experience did not predict performance across 81 studies.
Replace it with a structured assessment and a deliberate onboarding plan for candidates hired on potential, including how to measure the extra onboarding time against the time saved on unlearning habits.
Fourth, close on role reality and retention: what BDRs actually carry day to day, where entry-level hires struggle, and how career development inside the role keeps them.
The session deliverable could be a one-page acceptance-rate worksheet that the team fills in using its own data from the last two quarters.
Why this angle: it uses Erick Ko’s central recruiting-as-sales argument as the through-line, pairs it with an operational metric and a contrarian hiring position, and ends with the BDR role demands that make sales-development hiring distinctive.
Before booking, confirm their current role and speaking availability, ask for recent posts or sessions on these themes, and clarify that the company must supply its own funnel data for the worksheet.
If audience demographics or references are unavailable, keep the engagement to a supported workshop rather than making reach or sponsorship commitments.
Choose Maria Christopoulos Katris when the session is about measurement and visibility rather than funnel mechanics — for example, when the buyer needs to defend employer-brand and talent-brand spend to finance.
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Their two posts argue that talent acquisition keeps asking for proof of attribution while marketing has already dropped that bar: they would rather be visible and trusted where decisions happen.
The framework poses three questions — visibility (are we showing up for the talent we want?), reputation (what do candidates think when they research us?), and outcomes in total — measured by market, function, and role rather than company-wide, with applicant quality, mid-funnel conversion, offer acceptance, and hires tracked across all channels.
The second post explains why the question has shifted: candidates increasingly discover and evaluate employers inside Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Perplexity before visiting a career site, so the final application source tells only part of the story.
This is a sharper fit than Erick Ko when the deliverable is a modern measurement model or an argument about AI-era candidate discovery.
The topics are complementary, not competing.
The posts do not cover the recruiting-as-sales-pipeline material needed for a sales-development hiring campaign: there’s no ideal-candidate-profile exercise, outbound-sourcing parallel, account of what BDRs carry day to day, or offer-acceptance diagnostic by hiring committee.
A session on sales-development hiring would need Erick Ko’s funnel and role content alongside this.
Both posts date from mid-2026 and advocate for a proposed framework; they identify no organization that has adopted it or report results.
Treat the three questions as a discussion structure, not a tested method.
Choose Gabrielle Carlson when the buyer wants an operating-system view of building or scaling a talent acquisition function rather than one funnel technique.
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The two posts set out five recurring lessons: structure enables speed (hiring slows when roles, decision rights, and processes are unclear); workforce planning beats requisition management; metrics should drive decisions and demonstrate results; hiring managers are the biggest variable and need coaching; and employer brand starts inside the business and affects retention as much as attraction.
The second post argues that recruiting directly drives revenue and should be part of business conversations: how much revenue is at risk if hiring stalls, where talent is over- or under-invested, and which roles unlock growth versus merely maintain it — rather than req count, time-to-fill, and cost-per-hire.
This framing suits a session for talent acquisition leaders who need to justify the function to a CFO or CHRO, where Erick Ko’s pipeline argument alone will not carry the room.
The sales-process analogy central to a sales-development hiring campaign is absent: there’s no ideal-customer-profile parallel, outbound-sourcing model, or specific guidance on sales-development or BDR hiring.
The posts also offer less operational detail than Erick Ko’s: no reported acceptance-rate figures, segmented diagnostic, or worksheet a team could fill in.
These short, listicle-style summaries make revenue claims without underlying numbers, so buyers should expect a framing conversation rather than a measured case study.
Choose Viktor Donner when the need is candidate experience and the employer’s side of selling the role.
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The posts argue that recruitment should shift from company-centred to candidate-centred, recruiters should act as human sales representatives, and rejected candidates who invested time in a CV deserve concrete feedback and recommendations for improvement because the way rejection feels is what people associate with the brand.
The other post pitches recruitment-as-a-service and lists practical signs of transparency: naming the hiring company and salary ranges in outreach, tracking projects in one system, using automation, and running remote asynchronous work without corporate meetings.
If the buyer wants a speaker on why candidates disengage and what employers owe them after rejection, this is a more direct match than Ko, whose posts focus mostly on employer-side process.
The perspective is agency-side recruitment, not that of a software vendor’s buyers.
The posts date from June 2020 and May 2023, so recent practitioner context is thin.
They offer no BDR or sales-development content, funnel or acceptance-rate measurement, or reported outcomes; the claims are positions, not results, making a paid session harder to justify on evidence.
The recruitment-as-a-service post also serves as a hiring advertisement for the author’s own team, so parts describe internal working style rather than a method a client can adopt.
Erick Ko published eight LinkedIn posts between July 2019 and February 2022, and the page showed 2,534 followers on 9 October 2026.
The posts are short text pieces about talent acquisition and sales development: treating recruiting as a sales process, offer-acceptance rates as a hiring diagnostic, what the BDR role actually requires, hiring on potential rather than prior experience, employer branding, and hiring operations.
All eight posts form the basis for the summary, ideas, relationships, and campaign-fit sections.
Where Erick Ko quotes or reshapes someone else's point, that is identified in the text.
Several posts link to outside pages, a job description, and a blog series that are not discussed in the posts here, and the individual posts have no dates.
No transcripts, long-form articles, media kit, rate card, sponsor disclosures, or audience demographics are published in the posts here.
As a result, the posts support judgments about subject matter, arguments, and practical positions, but do not speak to reach, audience seniority or geography, or any paid-partnership format.
Comparisons draw on two LinkedIn posts each from Maria Christopoulos Katris, Gabrielle Carlson, and Viktor Donner, whose dates range from June 2020 to July 2026.