One role, three markets: how to choose where a European commercial hire should sit
A specialised commercial role rarely has one obvious home in Europe. The market you choose decides your pool, your cost and how long the search takes, and those three rarely point the same way.
We ran a search this year for a Sales Director in a specialised segment where the client had legal entities in the UK, Spain and Germany. Any of the three could have held the role. That sounds like flexibility. In practice it is a decision with real consequences that most companies make on the basis of where they already have legal entities.
Each market offered something the others did not, and each cost something in return.
The UK had the corporate team, including the Head of Sales this person would report to. Working language was English, and the networks reached comfortably into northern Europe. Proximity to the leadership was worth something real.
Germany brought the language and access to DACH and central European networks, which the client wanted to build on rather than simply cover. It also carried the highest salaries by a distance and the smallest pool of the three. There was a further complication that had nothing to do with the client. Most of their competitors had arrived in the region recently, so candidates with genuinely long tenure in comparable roles did not exist in any number. The evidence of sustained success was not there to be found, because the market itself was too young to have produced it.
Spain had the deepest pool of the three. A number of businesses in the segment had been established there long enough to have produced people with real tenure and real results behind them. Salaries were materially lower and the networks reached into southern Europe. The trade-off sat underneath that. Deal values in the market were lower too, so the people we were looking at had built their track records on smaller numbers. The lower cost was not a discount on the same person. It was a different commercial background, and whether that mattered depended entirely on the size of deal the role would be running.
The same title costs very different things
Titles matched across the three markets. Almost nothing else did.
On this search, we saw candidates at the same level, carrying comparable targets, where the German base was around half again what the Spanish base was. That is one mandate rather than a benchmark, and I would not present it as a European rule. It was large enough to change what the client could buy with the budget they had, which is the point. The same money bought a different calibre of person depending on where the role sat, and not in the direction the org chart would have suggested.
Return on that spend diverged as well, and not only on price. A more expensive hire in DACH came with access to a network the business wanted and could not otherwise reach, and with a track record built on larger deals. A less expensive hire in Iberia came with a deeper pool, a stronger evidence base and southern European relationships, built on smaller ones. That is the trade-off in its plainest form. You are not choosing between the same person at two prices. You are choosing between two different commercial backgrounds, and the cheaper one is only cheaper if the deal size it was built on is the deal size you are hiring for.
You are not choosing between the same person at two prices.
Markets differ in how hard they are to hire in
The other difference showed up before anyone discussed money, and it is the one companies tend not to plan for.
Candidates in Spain were markedly more willing to have a conversation. In Germany and the UK, senior people were more guarded and took considerably more effort to engage at all. That is a real cost in a search. It shows up as time, as a smaller number of genuine conversations, and as a longer run to a shortlist that any timeline built on Iberian responsiveness will miss.
Once engaged, the German candidates were the most risk-averse of the three. They read the opportunity as a new company entering their market, and they priced that risk into their thinking accordingly. It made little difference that the business was well established elsewhere. In that market, at that moment, it was not yet known, and senior candidates were assessing it on what was in front of them rather than on a global reputation they had no local evidence for.
Understanding that changes how a role is positioned rather than whether it can be filled. A business that knows it will be read as an unknown quantity in DACH can address it directly, with the leadership commitment, the investment case and the reasons the region matters. A business that does not know goes into those conversations expecting its name to do work that its name is not doing.
What a single view across the markets actually gives you
The client here could compare. They could see what the same role cost in each market, what the realistic pool was in each, how long each was likely to take, and which networks each would open. They could weigh a higher German cost against central European access, and a deeper Spanish pool against a different set of relationships, and make a decision on the balance rather than on the first credible CV to arrive.
That comparison only exists if one standard is applied across all three markets at once. Level assessed the same way. Compensation understood in local terms and then set against one another. Candidate quality judged against the same bar rather than against what each local market considers strong. It is difficult to assemble that view from three separate conversations with three separate parties, each of whom is describing their own market as the answer.
Without it, the default is predictable enough. The role goes where the company already has people, or to whichever market produces the first decent candidate, and nobody ever finds out what the other two would have offered. That is not a failure. It is simply a decision made without the information that would have made it a decision.
Before you fix the location
If a specialised commercial role could credibly sit in more than one European market, three questions are worth answering before it is written into the brief.
What is the pool in each market, in reality rather than in principle. Not whether the profile exists somewhere in Europe, but how many people in each specific market meet the bar and are actually reachable.
What does the same level cost in each, and what do you get for the difference. Not just base against base, but what the more expensive market opens that the cheaper one does not, what size of deal the people in each market have actually run, and whether your business needs either of those in the next two years.
And how will you be read in each market. Established elsewhere is not established here. If you are entering a region where your competitors are also relatively new, the candidates you want will be weighing a risk you may not have factored in.
Settling those before the search rather than during it is a large part of what the Pre-Search Diagnostic at Animate Europe is for. We work across European markets from Barcelona and London, which means these comparisons are the ordinary shape of the work rather than an exception to it.
