Most experienced recruiters will tell you the same thing quietly: when a candidate names compensation as their only reason for moving, it's a red flag, not a green light. Shawn Santos has spent almost 28 years placing CFOs, controllers, and VPs across accounting and finance, and the patterns are hard to argue with.

Shawn is VP of Accounting and Finance Search at Stephen Douglas, where he's building out the New York and New Jersey market. He joins this episode of GoToMasters Finance Fireside for a conversation about what really moves senior finance leaders into new roles.

He gets into where compensation actually sits in a job search (his framing: it's the ante in a card game), why the loudest, most extroverted recruiters tend to burn out at year three, and what separates the ones who stay 15 and 20 years. He's equally direct on tools — Bullhorn as the system of record, LinkedIn Recruiter and ZoomInfo as the discovery layer, MetaView as the AI note-taker that lets him stop transcribing and start listening — and on why bolting salespeople onto an existing CRM is one of the quietest ways to lose data integrity.

He closes on the line that has guided his career: the next phone call you make can be the best phone call you make.

If you're hiring senior finance talent, advising candidates through career moves, or trying to build a recruiting practice that survives past year three, this one's worth your time.

Colin Brown is VP of Revenue Operations at DDN, a company that powers AI infrastructure at scale for clients like XAI's Colossus data center. He came to RevOps from the front lines, having carried a sales quota, run marketing teams, and led post-sales. In this episode, he breaks down why most teams are sprinkling AI into existing processes for 15-minute wins instead of re-engineering those processes to get 1-3 days back per week. He also has a sharp take on the strategic RevOps seat: it's earned, not a right, and having access to a wide view doesn't mean you automatically get invited to the strategy room. Plus: why product roadmap changes are about to become the biggest comp planning blind spot, and why RevOps professionals need a clear value proposition instead of trying to do a little bit of everything.

Scott Johnson is Head of Revenue Operations at Zeitview, a visual AI company serving renewable energy and infrastructure operators at scale. He started his career carrying a bag at Black and Decker, and his CRO once introduced him to a sales team as "a guy that's carried a bag." In this episode, he breaks down why he builds individualized pipeline targets at the rep level instead of applying a blanket 3X coverage ratio, why he hires great people to extract their ideas into the process rather than to depend on them, and how he got to 95% forecast accuracy by combining transactional run-rate data with new business pipeline in Salesforce.