Recruiting 10 Cloud Partner Program Specialists from MSPs & Hyperscalers

The Brief 

A cloud platform company needed insight into how Managed Service Providers engage with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud partner programs, approached from two directions: current MSP professionals working inside those partner ecosystems, and former employees of Microsoft and Google who had managed the partner relationships from the hyperscaler side. The goal was to understand program dynamics and the partner experience from people who had lived inside both sides of the relationship. 

Two Audiences, Two Sourcing Tracks 

For the MSP segment, sourcing focused on companies with employees in the hundreds, holding official partner status with Microsoft or Google, targeting cloud solutions architects, sales engineers, and account managers who had been in their role for at least a year and understood partner program mechanics at depth. North America was the geographic priority, with APAC also in scope. For the ex-hyperscaler segment, candidates needed to have left their role within the past 18 months and to have been directly involved with MSP partner programs during their tenure, rather than simply adjacent to them in a broader cloud sales or solutions function. 

Screening for Program Depth 

Detailed screeners were used to separate genuine program knowledge from surface familiarity, probing candidates on partner tier structures, co-selling arrangements, and how the program operated in practice. Quota management ensured the final sample of 10 reflected both ecosystems without skewing toward the more widely represented side, which required sourcing effort to be deliberately balanced even when candidates from one platform were easier to find. 

• 10 experts sourced across two participant types  
• Dual ecosystem coverage across both major public cloud platforms  
• 18-month recency cap applied to all former hyperscaler participants