James Congdon recruits search and growth marketing professionals for agencies and businesses, including eCommerce and SaaS companies. Congdon's posts describe hiring for roles from specialist to executive level, with a focus on what candidates have actually done—not just their job titles.
Useful for recruitment-focused content aimed at search and growth practitioners and hiring managers.
Best for
It fits search and growth recruitment firms or businesses doing their own senior hiring.
Not for
It does not fit consumer awareness campaigns or deals needing packaged sponsorship, rate cards or verified audience demographics.
Key takeaways
A job title is a poor guide to what someone can do
Hiring paid media people is mostly about ownership and client judgement
Two senior roles can look alike and still need different people
Check first: Confirm whether any sponsorship formats or commercial terms exist and request audience and engagement data.
Main ideas
A job title is a poor guide to what someone can do · Hiring paid media people is mostly about ownership and client judgement · Bringing a channel in-house still needs someone who understands agencies
James Congdon recruits search and growth marketing professionals for agencies and businesses, including eCommerce and SaaS companies.
Their posts cover roles from specialist to C-suite and show how they assess candidates by their actual responsibilities and decisions, not their job titles.
Follow their work for practical examples of how businesses can define hiring needs, from an in-house SEO manager who must work well with an existing agency to distinct tests for two senior agency leadership roles.
Congdon makes the reasoning behind recruitment decisions visible.
In an Osprey example, the need was not simply for technical SEO: the new manager had to own the channel, work effectively with the incumbent agency, and bring product, content, development and senior stakeholders along.
In a separate post about two MNC executive hires, they explain why a chief strategy officer and a chief operating officer called for different career experience and tests.
Across these examples and their writing about inflated job titles, Congdon draws a useful distinction: what someone has actually owned, decided and delivered matters more than the seniority their title suggests.
Their posts also give concrete role details, including scope, channels, location and pay, showing the range of search and growth positions they handle.
James Congdon recruits search and growth marketing people for agencies, eCommerce businesses, SaaS companies and marketplaces, and these posts draw on that work.
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Two ideas run through them.
A job title tells you little about what someone can do, so the useful questions concern scope: which clients, how complicated the accounts, what budgets and which decisions were the person's own.
A hiring brief should be built around the decisions a role owns, not a seniority label, because two senior roles that look alike can need different people.
Congdon writes short, practical posts that often end with a question set a hiring manager could reuse.
The market roundup applies the same instinct to public job listings: state the pay, location and scope.
A job title is a poor guide to what someone can do
Congdon argues that inflated titles in paid media and performance agencies make it harder for capable people to move jobs.
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Someone with three years' experience can be called a senior performance manager, a performance lead or even head of digital without having led a team or department.
The problem surfaces when that person goes back to market: a sensible move reads as a step backwards, and a strong candidate rules themselves out.
Congdon's alternative is to ask about scope: whether the person managed people, owned a function, worked with demanding clients, controlled budgets and made the actual decisions.
Congdon describes the same trap from personal experience: they held a director of growth title whose scope did not match what most businesses would read into it. The post closes with the point that a title can be anything at all, but the role's scope eventually has to back it up.
The post allows that agencies may hand out senior titles to attract people or make their structure look more senior, without treating the practice as malicious. The concern is the gap between title and responsibility, which Congdon says agencies should watch.
Hiring paid media people is mostly about ownership and client judgement
Drawing on eight years working with the eCommerce agency Vervaunt and roughly forty placements there, Congdon sets out what they probe in paid media candidates, from junior consultant to account director.
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Even at consultant level, the job involves speaking directly to sophisticated eCommerce clients, so candidates need to understand the wider business and explain why they recommend something, not just run campaigns. Congdon asks what a person has owned: which clients, how complicated the accounts were, and whether they executed someone else's strategy or helped decide where the budget went and why performance moved.
For eCommerce, the test covers breadth.
Shopping and feeds matter, but so do attribution, creative performance, acquisition, retention and how they affect one another.
The client-facing side usually becomes clear in conversation: Congdon listens for whether a candidate can explain a complicated performance problem simply and challenge a client without damaging the relationship.
At account director level, the bar rises to owning complex relationships, managing people and acting as a strategic partner.
Bringing a channel in-house still needs someone who understands agencies
Congdon's account of the Osprey Packs SEO hire makes a counter-intuitive point: a company bringing SEO in-house while keeping its agency needs someone who can work both sides of that relationship.
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The role called for eCommerce and international SEO experience, plus the ability to challenge an agency recommendation and know when to lean on specialists instead. Stakeholder management mattered as much as channel skill, because product, content, development and senior teams all have to be brought along before SEO work gets done.
Melissa Wong, the person hired, had worked in-house with global eCommerce brands and on the agency side.
The task set for the role tested commercial thinking and how they would work across internal teams.
Congdon frames the hire as someone brought in to make the existing in-house and agency setup work better, not replace the agency, and cites positive early feedback about five months in.
Two senior roles can look alike and still need different people
When MNC hired a chief strategy officer and a chief operating officer at the same time, Congdon argued the two briefs required different career backgrounds, even though both were senior roles in DTC and eCommerce agency work.
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The CSO needed to help set direction across the agency's media, club and ventures businesses and lead strategy for challenger-brand clients.
The COO needed paid performance depth, large-team leadership, experience working with founders and commercial responsibility close to managing-director level.
Congdon's method is to identify the decisions each role owns, then assess individual careers against that test rather than filter by seniority.
The client initially considered people from major DTC brands.
Once the full remit was clear, Congdon steered them toward candidates who had built their careers inside agencies, because the roles required moving between different client problems and advising senior stakeholders.
They also set expectations early that the candidate pool would be shallow, and report the appointments of Tim B. as CSO and Damien Bennett as CCO.
These posts offer a clear case of Congdon's criteria changing as the hiring need comes into focus: the shift from brand-side to agency-side candidates.
A public brief should carry the money, the place and the scope
Congdon's market roundup is a job list rather than an argument, and that is the point: every entry states salary, location, office expectation, channels and responsibilities.
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The roles span an AI and search business, independent and eCommerce agencies, a US travel marketplace and a Miami DTC business, showing the range of employers they work with and the detail they put into a public brief.
One entry seeks a performance marketing lead at a fast-scaling AI and search business, paying £80,000 to £85,000 plus meaningful equity.
The role is five days a week in London and covers paid search, paid social and creative strategy across Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, X and YouTube.
Another describes a role at a US travel and parking marketplace, paying up to $100,000 and fully remote, where paid search is the biggest channel and CRM, retention, SEO and analytics can be picked up on the job.
The numbering runs 1 to 5 and then jumps to 8 and 9, so this is an edited slice of a longer list rather than the whole board.
Start here to see the work James Congdon recruits for.
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This is the widest single view of their roles, channels and salary bands, in their own words.
This is a job roundup, not an argument.
It lists roles at digital agencies, eCommerce businesses and SaaS companies across London, the wider UK and the US; each entry gives the office expectation and pay.
A fast-scaling AI and search business that raised $18m in nine months wants a performance marketing lead on £80–85k plus equity, five days a week in London, covering paid search, paid social and creative strategy.
Audiences, hooks, messaging and creative testing will be guided by performance data across Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, X, YouTube and emerging AI ad platforms.
An award-winning independent consultancy wants a senior performance consultant at up to £70k as number two to the head of performance, two days a week in London, owning strategy and client relationships across eCommerce and B2B.
A UK eCommerce SEO agency is hiring a strategist at £35k for a development role suited to someone earlier in an SEO career.
A US travel and parking marketplace wants a senior growth marketing manager for up to $100k, fully remote; paid search is the biggest channel, and the successful candidate can pick up the rest of the stack on the job.
A Miami DTC business wants its first senior marketing hire at $200k–220k base plus an uncapped bonus, with a performance-led remit centered on paid search and paid social.
The numbering runs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, suggesting this is an edited slice of a longer list, not the whole board.
For brands planning a campaign
For a recruitment firm, this shows the format and detail to expect: not just a title, but the money, office days, channels and business challenge. The brief spans paid search, paid social, creative, CRM and email, retention, CRO, SEO and analytics.
This is the clearest account of what Congdon screens for and how.
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Read the criteria to assess whether their shortlists would be useful.
James Congdon describes an eight-year relationship with eCommerce agency Vervaunt, placing almost 40 people across paid media and affiliates, from junior consultant to account director.
They explain why campaign-running ability is not enough, even at consultant level: these hires speak directly with sophisticated eCommerce clients, so they must understand the wider business and explain their recommendations.
Their questions focus on ownership, not tenure: which clients candidates have worked with, how complicated the accounts were, and whether they mainly executed someone else's strategy or helped decide where the client should spend and why performance was changing.
In eCommerce, they look for breadth: shopping and feeds matter, as do attribution, creative performance, acquisition, retention and how these affect one another.
Client skills are harder to judge on paper: can the candidate explain a complicated performance problem simply, and challenge a client without damaging the relationship?
At account director level, they look for complex relationship ownership, people management and the ability to act as a genuine strategic partner.
Vervaunt, they note, develops that thinking earlier than most.
For brands planning a campaign
These criteria can go almost straight into a hiring brief for senior paid media or performance roles, and offer a yardstick for assessing this recruiter's shortlists. They also show what evidence candidates should bring: specific accounts and decisions, not just a job title.
This is the most complete example in the set of how Congdon turns a hiring problem into a role description, showing the reasoning from business need to hire.
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Osprey Packs decided to bring SEO in-house while keeping its external agency.
As Congdon describes it, the business needed its first SEO manager to own the channel internally and get more from the existing team.
The role called for more than technical SEO: it needed eCommerce and international SEO experience, plus an understanding of how agencies work—when to challenge a recommendation and when to lean on specialists.
Congdon also emphasizes stakeholder management: knowing what SEO requires is only half the job when product, content, development and senior stakeholders all need to come along.
Melissa Wong had worked in-house with global eCommerce brands and in an agency, giving them experience of both sides of the relationship.
The task set for the role tested their commercial thinking and how they would work across internal teams.
Congdon reports that Wong joined around five months before the post and that early feedback has been positive.
The hire shows how bringing SEO in-house can strengthen the existing setup rather than replace the agency.
For brands planning a campaign
For a recruitment firm, this is a worked example of translating a brief into criteria, including the counter-intuitive point that an in-house hire may need agency-side experience to manage an incumbent agency well. It also offers a template for the evidence to request when a recruiter says a placement is going well.
This shows how Congdon approaches executive search, where the challenge is judging which career path produces the right person, not listing skills.
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Read it alongside the Osprey post to compare the seniority of the two searches.
MNC was hiring a chief strategy officer and a chief operating officer, both new roles central to building out the C-suite.
Congdon explains why the roles called for different backgrounds, despite both sitting in senior DTC and eCommerce agency work.
The CSO would help set direction across MNC's Media, Club and Ventures businesses while leading strategy for challenger-brand clients; the COO would focus on operations and innovation.
The company had considered people from major DTC brands, a logical fit given its client base, but after discussing the full remit, agreed to focus on agency veterans.
The roles required moving between different client challenges, advising senior stakeholders and understanding the agency being led.
The COO role called for a different mix: a strong paid performance background, experience leading large teams and working with founders, and commercial responsibility close to managing-director level.
Congdon says the candidate pool was always going to be shallow and that they managed expectations from the start, mapping DTC and eCommerce agencies and reviewing the careers of people within them.
They set a different test for each role.
The post names the appointees, Tim B. as CSO and Damien Bennett as CCO, and invites approaches for head of, director or C-suite hiring in DTC, eCommerce and search-led agencies.
For brands planning a campaign
Useful when a brief covers two senior roles that look similar on paper. The post shows how to distinguish them by the decisions each owns and describes a shallow candidate pool—an important consideration when setting executive-search timelines rather than specialist-hiring timelines.
This explains Congdon's view of titles, which informs their writing about candidates.
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Read it to see why their posts return to what people actually did.
Congdon argues that job titles in paid media and performance agencies are making it harder for people to move jobs.
Someone with three years' experience might be called a senior performance manager, performance lead or even head of digital without leading a team or department.
They are unsure why agencies do it: to attract people, make the structure look more senior, or simply because it is the norm.
The problem emerges when that person returns to the job market.
Congdon describes finding candidates who match a role on experience, salary and day-to-day work, only to hear that they are now head of digital and do not want to step backwards.
They were caught up in the same pattern earlier in their career, ending up with a director of growth title whose scope did not match what most businesses would consider a growth director.
Their counter-argument: nobody sensible sees a move from head of digital to manager as a disaster.
What matters is whether someone managed people, owned a function, which clients they worked with, what budgets they managed and which decisions were theirs.
A title can be anything, even Donald Duck, but the role's scope has to back it up.
Agencies should be mindful of handing out senior titles without matching responsibility.
For brands planning a campaign
For a recruitment firm writing job specifications, this makes the case for describing scope rather than relying on seniority labels—a way to widen the candidate pool and avoid screening out strong people. For anyone assessing this recruiter's shortlist, it explains why Congdon's questions focus on ownership and budget rather than title history.
Hiring on what someone has actually done, not their job title
Congdon argues that inflated job titles in paid media and performance agencies make it harder for capable people to move jobs.
Read more
Someone with three years' experience might be called a Senior Performance Manager or Head of Digital without leading a team, then see a sensible next move as a step backwards.
The questions that matter are concrete: did the person manage people, own a function, work with demanding clients, control budgets and make decisions?
Congdon applies the same test to their own career, noting they once held a Director of Growth title whose scope did not match how most businesses would read it.
Assesses candidates by the scope behind the title — ownership, team, budgets and clients — rather than matching job titles between a brief and a CV.
Congdon notes that a better career move can come with a less impressive job title. Agencies that hand out senior titles without matching responsibility can distort candidates’ sense of their market position.
For brands planning a campaign
For a recruitment firm or agency hiring senior search and growth marketers, this offers a ready-made argument for candidate-facing content: scope, clients and budget ownership determine level, not the label on a contract. It also suits a campaign aimed at hiring managers, framing title inflation as an agency habit with real costs for candidates.
Placement case study: bringing SEO in-house without replacing the agency
Congdon describes hiring the first SEO Manager at Osprey Packs, Inc., which wanted to own SEO internally while keeping its existing agency.
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The brief called for more than technical SEO expertise: Congdon looked for eCommerce and international SEO experience, plus an understanding of how agencies work — someone able to challenge a recommendation while making good use of the specialists already in place.
Stakeholder management was another test: how candidates work with product, content, development and senior teams to get SEO changes through.
Congdon says the hire, Melissa Wong, combined in-house work with global eCommerce brands and agency experience, and cites positive early feedback.
The post argues that the person hired was not there to replace the agency, but to make the existing in-house and agency setup work better together.
For brands planning a campaign
Useful evidence for content about hybrid in-house and agency search teams. A recruitment brand could use this as a worked example of an internal SEO brief that screens for agency literacy and stakeholder skills, not just channel expertise.
Senior agency searches: two C-suite briefs, two different tests of experience
Congdon describes searches for a Chief Strategy Officer and a Chief Operating Officer at MNC, both new roles at the centre of a new leadership layer.
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Although both were senior DTC and eCommerce agency positions, the experience required for each differed: the CSO needed to help set direction across the agency's media, club and ventures businesses and lead strategy for challenger-brand clients, while the COO needed paid performance depth, large-team leadership, experience working with founders and commercial responsibility close to managing director level.
The client's initial idea — people from major DTC brands — gave way to a focus on agency-built careers once the full remit was discussed.
Congdon mapped the agency market against two different tests and says the candidate pool was always going to be shallow, setting that expectation early.
MNC appointed Tim B. as CSO and Damien Bennett as CCO.
Maps the relevant part of the agency market, then assesses individual careers against a defined test for each role rather than a shared seniority filter.
For brands planning a campaign
A concrete illustration for campaign content on executive search in search-led and eCommerce agencies: how to distinguish two leadership briefs that look similar from the outside, and how to be candid about a limited candidate pool.
What gets checked when hiring for eCommerce paid media and affiliates
Reflecting on eight years working with Vervaunt and roughly forty placements there, Congdon outlines what they probe in paid media candidates, from junior consultant to account director.
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Even consultant-level staff speak directly to sophisticated eCommerce clients, so Congdon asks what a candidate has owned: the types of clients and account complexity, and whether they executed someone else's strategy or helped decide where budget should go and why performance moved.
For eCommerce roles, they look for breadth across shopping and feeds, attribution, creative performance, acquisition and retention, and how those areas affect one another.
Client-facing skills usually emerge through conversation: can the person explain a complicated performance problem simply and challenge a client without damaging the relationship?
At account director level, the bar rises to owning complex relationships, managing people and acting as a strategic partner.
Uses a benchmark built through repeated placements in the same business rather than starting with a job title and working backwards.
For brands planning a campaign
Directly relevant to a recruitment firm briefing on senior paid media hires. It offers a specific screening framework — ownership, account complexity, breadth across the eCommerce performance stack and client handling — that can become a checklist, interview guide or series of candidate-facing posts.
Market roundups: roles, pay and locations across search and growth
One post rounds up roles from Congdon's search and growth recruitment work: performance marketing leadership with equity at an AI/search business; senior and mid-level performance consultancy roles in London; an SEO strategist role at an eCommerce SEO agency; a remote US growth marketing manager role for a travel and parking marketplace; a VP or head of eCommerce and growth role in Miami; and a growth and marketing manager role at a new AI consultancy.
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Each listing includes salary, location and working pattern, alongside the channels and responsibilities involved. Together, they show the range of sectors Congdon recruits for — digital agencies, eCommerce, SaaS, marketplaces and AI businesses — and the level of detail in a public listing.
For brands planning a campaign
Shows Congdon producing detailed role descriptions at volume, across markets and levels — a fit for co-branded hiring content or a paid or organic campaign built around live search and growth roles. The listings also show how role requirements connect to channel mix, offering a reusable campaign template.
James Congdon's posts document recruitment work for named businesses, not sponsorships or brand partnerships.
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Three clients appear directly: the eCommerce agency Vervaunt, the DTC and eCommerce agency MNC, and the pack maker Osprey Packs.
Other posts advertise open roles at paid search, growth, and SEO employers without naming the hiring companies.
Ask for those company names before recording them as brands.
Vervaunt
Client
Congdon says they have worked with the eCommerce agency Vervaunt for eight years and placed almost 40 people across the business, hiring for paid media and affiliate roles from junior consultant to account director.
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They describe what they look for in candidates, including client-facing strategy and commercial judgement.
Congdon ran the search for MNC's first Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Operating Officer, adding two roles to the DTC and eCommerce agency's leadership team.
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They mapped DTC and eCommerce agencies with MNC, then narrowed the search to people who had built careers inside agencies. The post names Tim B. as CSO and Damien Bennett as CCO.
Congdon recruited Osprey Packs' first SEO Manager, Melissa Wong.
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The role required someone to own the channel internally while getting more from Osprey's existing agency. They describe a search for eCommerce and international SEO experience, plus the ability to work with an external team and win over internal stakeholders.
James Congdon writes short, specific hiring stories from the search and growth marketing job market.
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Start with the post about eight years of placements at the eCommerce agency Vervaunt, where they list what they check in paid media candidates: which clients they worked with, how complicated the accounts were, whether they helped decide where budget went, and whether they can explain a performance problem to a client and push back without damaging the relationship.
The Osprey Packs and MNC posts work as case studies, showing how a brief changes as the role's real decisions come into focus.
At Osprey, the person taking SEO in-house still had to work with the agency already in place; at MNC, two senior briefs that looked alike called for different career backgrounds.
The multi-role roundup shows the market itself, with pay, location and working pattern for every listing.
The post on inflated job titles is for people applying rather than hiring.
For campaign tactics or channel how-to, look elsewhere; if you are hiring, being hired, or working out what a senior marketing role involves, these posts are unusually concrete.
Koffler writes from inside the paid media agency world about how agency work should be judged, including what clients should hold an agency accountable for and where its responsibility stops.
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A post comparing an agency fee with the cost of building the same function in-house covers ground Congdon approaches from the hiring side.
Koffler runs a paid media agency and argues as the service provider being judged, so the posts focus on setting client expectations and defending the agency model. Congdon recruits from outside the agency, so they focus on assessing individuals and writing briefs rather than delivering campaigns.
Bottura founded an eCommerce paid media agency and writes openly about the hard parts of running it: pricing on gut feel, keeping the wrong clients, and what has to line up before a stranger trusts you with a marketing budget.
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That is the same agency market Congdon recruits into, described from the seller's side.
Bottura's examples are their own client-acquisition calls and the agency's first four clients and their fees. Congdon's examples are candidate assessments and placement outcomes, so the focus is a person being hired rather than an agency being sold.
Chiaravallo writes short, explanatory LinkedIn posts about B2B media planning: reaching buyers outside working hours and giving each ad in a campaign a distinct job instead of loading everything into one creative.
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Both write in the same register for roughly the same B2B marketing readership.
Chiaravallo advises brands on campaign structure and creative. Congdon writes about the people who would run those campaigns and how to distinguish a strong candidate from someone with an impressive title, focusing on hiring rather than media planning.
Assess audience fit using LinkedIn’s only platform-reported figure—28,238 followers, observed 7 October 2026—and the audiences the writing addresses.
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The posts do not report engagement rates or follower data on geography, age, gender, seniority, or employer composition.
They do show a clear focus: a numbered list of live paid search, SEO, growth, and eCommerce roles across UK and US agencies and businesses; a post on inflated job titles in paid media and performance agencies; and hiring case notes on searches for Vervaunt, MNC, and Osprey Packs.
Together, these posts speak to search, growth, and performance marketing practitioners and the managers who hire them, largely in agency, eCommerce, and SaaS settings.
For a B2B recruitment firm, that suggests topic alignment, but not verified access to agency employees, decision-makers, or UK-based followers.
Before booking, ask Congdon for follower or engagement data—or a short audience survey—covering seniority, function, employer type, and geography, plus recent engagement figures for posts comparable to the campaign in subject, depth, and format.
If the data is thin, plan for reach among search and growth practitioners rather than targeted access to senior decision-makers.
LinkedIn followers
28238
Follower count as listed on the LinkedIn profile · 2026-10-07
James Congdon's posts focus on recruitment, not media or sponsorship.
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The five posts in this section are job listings and hiring commentary: they describe open roles in search, growth and performance marketing, and explain how they recruit for specific hiring needs.
Vervaunt, Osprey Packs and MNC appear as clients or employers they have placed candidates with, not as sponsors.
No post describes a sponsored format, rate card, media kit or inquiry route for partnership or advertising work.
Buyers planning a campaign should ask whether they accept sponsorships and, if so, what terms they offer; there is no published partnership package to select from.
A good fit: a search and growth recruitment firm — or an agency, marketplace or software business doing its own senior hiring — wants to reach senior paid media, SEO and growth practitioners and the managers who hire them, and join the conversation about how those roles should be specified and assessed.
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James Congdon's existing output serves this need.
Their posts target exactly that audience: a roundup of live roles across agencies, eCommerce, SaaS, marketplaces and AI businesses, with salaries, locations, working patterns and channel scope attached (a performance marketing lead at £80–85k plus equity, a senior performance consultant up to £70k, a VP of eCommerce and growth at $200–220k base plus uncapped bonus, among others); a statement of what they screen for after eight years and roughly 40 placements at one eCommerce agency; and two placement case studies — a first SEO manager at Osprey Packs brought in to run search internally alongside the incumbent agency, and two new C-suite roles at MNC separated by different tests of experience.
Their argument that inflated agency job titles cost capable people good moves speaks directly to hiring managers writing job specifications — and gives a recruitment brand a point to build a series around, rather than a one-off post.
The practical reasons to choose them: they explain hiring decisions through the specifics of a job specification, not job-title matching; name the trade-offs rather than smoothing them over (a shallow executive pool, an in-house hire who still needs agency literacy to get more from the existing agency); and write at the level of detail a published job specification requires.
The only audience figure is 28,238 LinkedIn followers observed 7 October 2026; ask for follower or engagement data before committing to claims about senior decision-makers.
No partnership formats, rates or inquiry route are described, so the arrangement would need to be negotiated from scratch rather than selected from a package.
When to choose a specialist
A poor fit: a consumer or mass-market awareness campaign, or any deal that depends on packaged sponsorship inventory — a rate card, defined formats, a media kit, guaranteed reach or verified audience demographics.
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There is no described commercial offer.
Across the five posts, Vervaunt, Osprey Packs and MNC appear as clients or employers in hiring work, not as sponsors, and the posts describe no sponsored format, rate card, media kit or partnership inquiry page.
A buyer cannot choose a format or plan against a package; terms would need to be created from scratch.
Audience information is also too thin for campaigns that need forecasting or targeting: there is one follower count and no engagement, composition or geographic data.
The content is narrowly professional, with every post focused on hiring for search, growth and performance practitioners and nothing consumer-facing.
The five LinkedIn posts also include no video, podcast or longer written work to assess, making them a poor basis for campaigns built around instructional formats.
A worked campaign example
Worked angle for a good-fit campaign: a three-part “brief it properly” series built on the hiring problems James Congdon already writes about, run as an editorial collaboration with the recruitment firm.
Part one — the title is not the job.
Turn the title-inflation argument into a short piece and a one-page checklist for hiring managers to fill in before writing a job specification: how many people did the candidate manage, which clients did they own, what budget did they control, and which decisions were actually theirs.
Part two — what to ask a paid media candidate.
Turn the Vervaunt screening questions into an interview guide covering client complexity, breadth across shopping and feeds, attribution, creative performance, acquisition and retention, and whether the person executed somebody else's strategy or shaped it.
Part three — two roles that look the same.
Use the MNC case to show how the chief strategy officer and chief operating officer job specifications were separated by the decisions each role owns, and be clear about the shallow executive pool and longer timeline that implies.
Distribution: use James Congdon's LinkedIn as the primary channel, with the firm reusing the guide and checklist on its own channels as downloadable resources.
Write each piece to stand alone for readers who arrive directly.
Measure success by job-specification enquiries, not impressions alone; assess reach roughly until follower and engagement data is available.
Before launch, agree the collaboration terms, since there is no existing sponsorship format or rate, and decide how much of the series stays in James Congdon's own voice rather than being rewritten into the firm's.
When the campaign needs to reach the marketing and demand-generation leaders deciding whether to build a paid media function in-house or buy it—the same senior-hiring audience a recruitment campaign targets, at the moment of the build-or-buy decision.
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Koffler writes from inside an agency about that comparison, listing the salary and loaded costs of an in-house function, and what has to happen internally between a form fill and a closed deal. Those posts give a hiring-advice campaign a credible way into the build-versus-buy question before it reaches the job spec.
The cost case comes from someone selling the alternative to hiring, so it is advocacy, not a neutral benchmark, and the numbers are their own.
There is no candidate-side material: ask for salary benchmarks for practitioners, role-scoping or interview guidance, and a view of the talent market.
A recruitment campaign would need to supply the hiring content and borrow only the buyer's framing.
When the campaign should speak to agency owners and founders rather than practitioners: people who hire paid media staff on the agency side and decide whether to commit £5k+ a month to an agency.
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Bottura writes candidly about pricing on gut feel, taking on clients who were wrong for the business, and earning the trust required before a prospect hands over a budget. That gives a recruitment brand a way into the agency-owner audience with problems those readers recognise as their own.
Both posts are about running and selling one eCommerce agency, not hiring or assessing senior search and growth people.
For a hiring angle, ask for a recruiting perspective, candidate market analysis and salary detail; the available evidence covers only a single firm's short history.
The material can complement a hiring angle, but cannot carry one.
When the campaign needs to show what good performance work looks like rather than talk about hiring.
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Chiaravallo argues that B2B buyers are people whose attention sits outside work channels, and that each ad in a campaign should carry one job instead of the whole brand. For a recruitment brand seeking to demonstrate that it understands the discipline it hires into, that material grounds a 'what to look for in the work' element better than another post about job titles.
Neither post touches hiring, pay, role design or assessment; the standpoint is that of a marketer planning media, not a recruiter reading the market.
Any bridge from an ad-planning argument to a hiring decision is ours to build.
The comparison rests on two posts, with no other formats or channels available to check; ask for more material before relying on it as a hiring signal.
James Congdon has five LinkedIn posts and a public LinkedIn profile listing dated 7 October 2026.
The posts cover a first SEO manager hire at Osprey Packs, two new C-suite roles at MNC, what gets checked in paid media candidates after eight years of placements at Vervaunt, a multi-role job roundup with salaries and locations, and job titles in performance agencies.
The posts do not display publication dates, so they do not show when the views were formed, and the placement accounts are Congdon's own descriptions rather than independently confirmed.
No video, podcast or long-form writing appears on the profile, and no engagement, seniority or geographic breakdown of the audience is published; the only audience figure is the follower count on the profile.
Congdon's posts do not state sponsorship formats, rates or an inquiry route.