Hiring & Recruitment

Your LinkedIn profile almost certainly does not say what you think it says — and you can find out exactly what it does say in about five minutes, for free, by pasting your own profile URL into Claude or ChatGPT and asking it to summarize you in five seconds. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment. Since March 2020 my team has built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US, and I have read more profiles than I can count. The gap between what a candidate believe

You know your onboarding is working when your new hire goes home after day one, gets asked "how was your first day?", and answers "I'm so lucky I joined this company." That sentence is the whole scoreboard. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and after building teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US since March 2020, I've watched more good hires get lost in the first thirty days than in the search that found them. Hiring ends at the offer. Onboarding is

You know a hire was successful when that person is still in the role years later, doing the best work of their life — not on the day they sign the offer. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and after building teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US since 2020, I can tell you the offer letter is the least reliable signal in the whole process. The real scoreboard shows up at month twelve, year two, year three. Most business owners never look at it. That is

If you'd hesitate to re-hire someone already on your team, your hiring standards are too low. The difference between a company that thrives and one that quietly falls apart isn't the product or the market — it's the people, and people are the one input most owners are least rigorous about. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and having built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US since 2020, I've watched two businesses in the same market with the same of

You run a Recruitment Launch Meeting by getting every person with a yes or no in one room before the job is posted, and not leaving until you've agreed in writing on who you're looking for, what they own, and how the process will run. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and this one meeting is the single highest-leverage ninety minutes in any search. It's a large part of why we cut average time-to-fill from 68 days to 37 across the 25+ industries we serve. What is

You keep hiring the wrong person because you haven't defined the right one. It isn't the position. It isn't that the market's tough right now. It's that going into a hire without total clarity guarantees you'll evaluate candidates against a standard that only exists in your head — and changes every time someone walks through the door. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and after building teams across 25+ industries since 2020 I can tell you the repeat-offender hi

The number one hiring mistake business owners make is starting interviews before everyone with a yes or no has agreed on who they're looking for. Hiring without alignment equals wasted interviews — you'll find a genuinely good candidate and still get a no from someone who was never on the same page. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and after building teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US since 2020, this is the failure I see more than any other. It's

There are three steps to hiring the right person, and they only work in this order: Build an Ideal Candidate Profile. Get every decision-maker aligned on it before you post anything. Run one consistent process against that profile. I'm Christian Saab, founder of CPG Recruitment, and since 2020 we've built teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US using exactly these three steps. They're the reason we cut average time-to-fill from 68 days to 37. Most hiring problems peo

It depends on one calculation: what does it cost you when the seat stays empty or gets filled wrong? If the role is critical, hard to fill, or you've been burned before, a recruitment agency usually pays for itself. If the role is simple and you have a real hiring process, doing it yourself can absolutely work. As the founder of CPG Recruitment, you'd expect me to push you toward the agency answer — so instead, here's the honest version of both sides, including exactly when y

Hiring the right people comes down to one shift: treat hiring as a defined process, not a reaction. At CPG Recruitment we've filled roles across 25+ industries in Canada and the US since 2020 — welders, controllers, sales reps, general managers — and the businesses that consistently hire well all do the same things, regardless of industry. This article walks through that process stage by stage: What happens before the job posting. How to screen without losing weeks. How to in

Most small businesses struggle to grow for a reason that has nothing to do with their product: they don't have a reliable system for bringing in customers, or they can't hire the right people to handle the customers they get. Usually it's both. I've lived both sides of this — as a founder who quit a six-figure engineering job at 24 to build companies, and as someone who has since helped businesses across 25+ industries fix these exact problems through CPG Recruitment and Book

Every business runs on two engines: a sales engine that brings customers in, and a talent engine that puts the right people in place to serve those customers. Most businesses don't fail because of a bad product. They fail because one of these two engines is broken, and the owner is too deep in the day-to-day to see which one. I'm Christian Saab. I've spent my career mastering both sides of this equation: I 3x'd my own company's revenue through relationship-based B2B selling,

A bad hire can cost a growing business six figures once you add up the salary, lost productivity, damaged client relationships, and the cost of replacing them — and the smaller your team, the harder it hits. After building teams across 25+ industries in Canada and the US with CPG Recruitment, I can tell you the most expensive mistake I see business owners make isn't a failed marketing campaign or a bad equipment purchase. It's a bad hire. This article breaks down where the co