Do new sales and marketing leaders bring their old team?

When a new VP of Sales, Head of Marketing, CRO or CMO starts, 1.39% of the people their function hires in the next 12 months come from the leader's previous employer. The same companies were already hiring from that employer at 0.78% in the two years before the leader arrived. So a new leader lifts hiring from their old company to 1.65 times the company's own earlier rate (95% interval 1.56 to 1.74), and most of the extra arrives in the first three months.

That comes from 452,932 sales and marketing leader joins at 222,376 companies between 2016 and 2025, and the 8,672,527 hires that followed them, in the work histories in Kenso internal data. We expected a bigger effect: about 4% of hires, and at least three times the company's earlier rate. The data did not bear that out.

How we measured it

For each new leader we took the external hires into the leader's function (sales or marketing) at the same company in the leader's first 12 months, and checked each hire's previous employer. A hire counts as coming from the leader's old company when their last employer before joining is the company the leader just left.

Big employers are everyone's previous employer, so a raw share means little on its own. We compared it with three base rates:

• Same company, earlier. How often the company hired from the leader's old employer in the 24 months before the leader started: 0.78%, against 1.29% after, on the 293,340 joins where the company hired in both periods.
• Same-size companies, same months. How often companies with a team of the same size hired from that employer in the same 12 months: 0.01%. Against that bar the new leader's company looks 100 times more likely to hire from the old employer. The bar is too low, because most companies have no tie at all to a given employer. We registered it as the headline comparison before seeing any data, and it overstates the effect.
• Companies with the same pipeline. Added after the first results: same-size companies that had also hired from the leader's old employer in the two years before. Their hiring from that employer fell over the next year, while the new leader's company rose. Measured as a change against a change, the new leader's company hired 4.77 times what we would expect (2.47% against 0.52%, on 18,883 joins).

The honest reading sits between the first and the third: a real effect, concentrated early, often on top of a pipeline that already existed.

The bump comes in the first quarter

In the first three months after the leader starts, 2.44% of the function's hires come from the leader's old company. By months 9 to 11 it is 0.81%, back near the company's earlier rate of 0.78%. Leaders who bring people bring them right away.

Part of that first-quarter bump is people who started in the same month as the leader, likely moves agreed together. Dropping them cuts the lift from 1.65 to 1.37.

Small teams are where it shows

Most new leaders do not run big organizations. In 330,455 of the 452,932 joins, the function had fewer than 20 people when the leader started. There, 5.01% of the next year's hires came from the leader's old company, against 1.89% in the two years before: 2.65 times the earlier rate. In teams of 100 or more, a new VP is one of many, and the share was 0.84% against 0.62%.

How often a new leader brings anyone

Across all joins, 11.28% of new leaders had at least one hire from their old company within a year (51,105 of 452,932). From the company's earlier hiring we would expect 6.53%. Per 100 new leaders, that comes to 14.89 extra hires from their old company over the company's earlier rate. Lift-outs of whole teams are rare.

Leaders from big employers change hiring least

Leaders from the 100 largest employers in the data (Salesforce, Oracle, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon and similar) show the highest raw share: 2.02% of their new team's hires come from their old company. But their new companies were already hiring from those employers at 1.72% before they arrived, so the lift is only 1.16. For leaders from every other company it is 1.88. A leader from a smaller company changes hiring more, because without them that pipeline barely exists.

C-level leaders show the largest lift (2.76), against 1.70 for VPs and 1.41 for leaders with a Head of title. Marketing leaders (1.89) move hiring a little more than sales leaders (1.60). Every join year from 2016 to 2025 shows a lift between 1.42 and 2.28.

What this data cannot show

• Who moved whom. This is an observational comparison, not an experiment. Some hires may have come for the same reason the leader did, or brought the leader with them. The design cannot tell, so the leader's arrival is linked with the hiring, not shown to cause it.
• Time trends. The same-company comparison has no time trend. The pipeline comparison corrects for it, but covers only 18,883 joins.
• Previous employer. The rule picks the most recent earlier job at another company, which can be a board seat or a membership community. Using the job that ended 0 to 12 months before gives the same lift of 1.65.
• Self-reported profiles. People leave short jobs off and add new ones late, and the data covers people whose current profile is in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland or New Zealand.

What it means for outbound

• A champion who becomes a leader opens two doors, briefly. Hiring from the old company peaks in the first quarter. If you track job changes, reach the new leader's team and the old team in the first 90 days, not after a year.
• Expect one or two people, not a team. About 15 extra hires per 100 new leaders is a modest pull.
• Small teams move most. Where the function has fewer than 20 people, the leader's old company supplies 5.01% of first-year hires.
• A leader from a smaller company is the stronger signal. Leaders from the biggest employers barely change where their new company hires from.