Sam Piane: Building the teams for ambitious deep tech businesses

Sam Piane is a Principal Recruitment & People Partner at Sprout. She works alongside founders, boards and leadership teams to solve one of the hardest challenges in deep tech: finding exceptional people to build exceptional businesses.

Sam works with founders, leaders and boards to define critical roles, attract exceptional and highly technical talent, and build the foundations for scaling. As a former founder herself, she understands the realities of growing something from scratch and the pressures that come with it. With a background in recruitment and strategic consulting, she brings both structure and insight to her work, helping leaders make confident decisions about people, capability and growth in complex, fast-moving environments.

She has been recognised nationally for her skills and the impact she has had for the businesses she's worked with. Finalist for NZ RCSA Recruitment Professional of the Year 2025

Sam partners with founders and leadership teams to recruit specialist, leadership and growth-critical roles across:

• Robotics & Automation

• MedTech

• Agritech

• ClimateTech

• Advanced Manufacturing

• Engineering & Product Leadership

• Scientific Research & Commercialisation

• Software & Hardware Engineering

• Executive & Technical Leadership

• Scaling Technology Companies

Why did you become a recruiter or consultant?

I became a recruiter because I like building things. I started out as an architect, then became a founder, and now I get to build the teams that help ambitious businesses do the incredible scientific work they're trying to do.

What do you enjoy most about what you do?

Every hire is its own project, its own puzzle, and I love that every single one is different. What I enjoy most is the hunt. Give me a really tricky search, someone with a niche skill set who's hard to find, and I'm in my element. Digging through LinkedIn, looking under every rock and stone, going down international rabbit holes. I'm basically a professional stalker, but in a nice not-creepy way.

What kind of problems do you love helping leaders solve?

What I love is when we go into a job brief expecting one thing, and then halfway through the conversation we realise the real issue isn't the role at all, it's something in their strategy or org design. The brief turns into a consulting session, and we end up shaping a completely different role than the one we walked in to fill.

What's something people often misunderstand about recruitment or consulting?

There's a lot of stigma around recruitment, and a lot of it's earned. There are bad apples out there. If you haven't worked with us, it's easy to assume all recruiters are transactional, that we've got a database of the same candidates we just recycle and send through with a fee attached.

That's not how we work at all. We're collaborative, and we're focused on what the business actually needs, whether that ends up being recruitment or something else entirely. That's the stigma I hope we can help turn around as a team at Sprout.

What makes Sprout different from other places you've worked?

Sprout is the longest job I've ever had, and there are a few reasons for that.

Number one, the people. Everyone here is smart, capable, and just gets on with it. The clients we work with are incredible too, ambitious, brilliant people doing genuinely interesting things, and the way we work with them means I actually feel like part of their team, not an outside supplier.

The other thing is that Sprout was a startup itself. We've lived through that journey, the changes, the growing pains, the same things a lot of our clients are going through. And I'm just curious what we'll go through next!