Barrel Holdings

What Barrel Holdings Is

We acquire and grow specialized digital agencies. The portfolio spans e-commerce, B2B web, Amazon and retail media, and more, with each agency led by its own entrepreneur running their own business.

We've worked in agencies for close to two decades. We buy to hold, not to flip, and we back our CEOs with the operational and financial discipline that's hard for an agency to build alone. Hiring is part of that, and that's where you come in.

We've never had a dedicated recruiter. We've run on referrals and founder networks, and that works right up until you're operating several agencies at once. We're past that point. You'd be our first recruiting hire, which means you get to build the function rather than inherit someone else's broken version of it.

The Job, Honestly

This is three jobs in one. They pull in different directions, and holding all three at once is most of what makes the role interesting and hard.

1. Build a bench of agency talent for companies we don't own yet.

We buy agencies. When we do, we sometimes need to put a strong operator into a key seat quickly. We want you building real relationships with excellent agency people now, before there's an opening, so that "who do we know for this" is never an empty question.

There's no role to close here and no deadline. That's exactly why most recruiters let this kind of work slide. We need the opposite: someone who treats it as the most important thing precisely because nothing is forcing them to. We want the database you build to be a truly valuable asset.

2. Fill roles inside Barrel Holdings itself.

As our holdco grows, we'll have needs across operations, finance, and M&A. These are key roles for a small team that will require impactful individuals. The two principals make the final call on these hires, but you own the process that gets us to a short list of people genuinely worth meeting.

3. Recruit for our agencies when they ask for it.

Some of our agencies will come to us for help on the roles they're always trying to fill. We provide that support, commission-free. You're not a vendor chasing a placement fee. You're their recruiter, shared across the group. That changes the incentive completely: you optimize for the right hire and an honest "this person isn't it," not for closing a deal.

What We Actually Need From You

Two things, and they don't usually live in the same person, which is part of why this is a real search and not a formality.

1. You find people other recruiters can't. You don't live inside a LinkedIn search box and a job board. You know that the best agency operators aren't applying to anything. You have ways of finding them: communities, content, referrals, lurking where good people gather, reaching out with something they'd actually want to read. If your honest answer to "how would you find a great Shopify-agency ops lead" is "post the role and wait," this isn't your role.
2. You vet before you hand off. Anyone can forward a stack of resumes. We need someone who screens with judgment so that by the time a candidate reaches an agency CEO, or reaches the two of us for an internal hire, they've already cleared a real bar. You should have a point of view on how to assess someone, not just a checklist. We'd rather you send us three people you'd stake your reputation on than thirty you're hoping work out.

You'll Do Well Here If…

• You're a self-starter who doesn't need a queue of reqs to stay busy. The pipeline-building work has no deadline, and you'll protect it anyway.
• You write well. You'll be representing us to candidates and writing the handoff notes that agency CEOs and the principals rely on. Clear, specific writing is most of the job.
• You're comfortable being the only recruiter. You'll make calls, set up systems, and own outcomes without a lot of oversight.
• You like agencies, or you're curious enough about them to get good fast. The talent we want is specific, and generic recruiting instincts won't find it.

You'll Struggle Here If…

• You measure your work in volume of resumes sent.
• You need a manager assigning you tasks each morning.
• You're a commission-driven closer. There are no placement fees here, and the job rewards long-term thinking and a passion for quality.

How To Apply

Fill out the application form below. We don't want a cover letter telling us you're passionate and detail-oriented. Show us your actual work instead.

Send three things:

1. Your real toolkit. Two screenshots from your own sourcing work, lightly redacted: a boolean string or saved search you've genuinely used, and one real outreach message you sent to a passive candidate (with their reply, if you got one). A line of context on each.
2. A find, with details. One hard-to-find person you landed. Give us the specifics: their role and the company they were at (first name is fine, redact the rest), exactly where you found them, the path that surfaced them, roughly when, and the one thing that nearly killed it.
3. A screen-out. A candidate who looked great on paper that you screened out anyway. What was the tell, and how did you catch it before passing them on?

Keep it short. We're reading for how you think, not how much you write. A heads-up so you can put your effort in the right place: the next round is a live call where we'll walk through every screenshot and claim in detail, so everything here should be real and yours to speak to. Generic AI answers will be filtered out, so keep that in mind.