Senior Research Scientist, GTM Leadership

About The Cole GroupThe Cole Group places CROs, CMOs, and go-to-market leaders at high-growth software companies like OpenAI, Cursor, Baseten, Sierra, Lovable, Clay, Replit, Vercel, Stripe, and many of the other most recognizable names in AI and B2B technology.Every search we run produces data about candidates, clients, and outcomes. Beyond our own searches, we track the broader market for GTM leadership. That data lives in Rolodex, our proprietary platform. We want to know, with evidence, what makes a go-to-market leader successful and how we can apply that knowledge to help make better placements for our clients.The RoleYou will be our first research scientist, and you will own the question of what predicts success for go-to-market leaders. You'll design and run original research on our data and the broader market, publish what you find internally and externally, and give our product and data teams the findings, heuristics, and model inputs that make us better at identifying the right leader for each client’s unique situation.This is a research role. While you won’t be involved in search delivery work, you will produce the knowledge that those activities depend on. You will have wide latitude to choose questions and follow what the data shows in service of facilitating better matches between leaders and the companies that hire them.You'll have access to data on GTM leaders across the market that isn't available anywhere else. You'll partner closely with our Data, Product, and Engineering teams who turn research findings into models and product features.What you will work onDefine success. Establish how we measure whether a GTM leader succeeded, using public and proprietary data.Study what predicts it. Identify the traits, experiences, and career patterns associated with success across GTM roles.Know the market. Maintain a current, evidence-based view of the GTM leadership market and where it is going. Publish. Produce a steady cadence of rigorous studies for internal use and external publication that is both credible to researchers and useful to founders and investors.Feed the product roadmap. Translate findings into heuristics, features, and hypotheses our data science and product teams can build into Rolodex.Build the evidence base. Generate first-party data and use it to validate how we evaluate candidates.This is not a people analytics, reporting, or dashboarding role. We are looking for someone who chooses the questions, designs the studies, and defends the conclusions.What you have doneWe're looking for someone who has:A PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology.Run a research program end to end. You chose the question, defined the constructs and criterion, designed the study, analyzed the data, and published or shipped the result. You can explain what you'd do differently.Worked with messy observational data. You’ve worked with messy and incomplete data, and overcame this to generate useful findings.Validated an assessment or selection method against real outcomes. You can describe the criterion you used, what the validity evidence showed, and what changed as a result.Written for non-academic readers. You can point to work that executives read and acted on.Done your own technical work. You write your own analysis code and can be independent of analysts to source data and get answers.Nice to haveResearch on executive leadership, sales, or marketing roles specificallyExperience using LLMs to code or extract structured data from unstructured textFamiliarity with advanced statistical methods for longitudinal or observational dataRole LogisticsThis role is fully remote in the United States.