One of the most impressive service based businesses established in the last 100 years is CAA, or Creative Artists Agency.
I've been rereading Michael Ovitz' autobiography recently and how he led the company into near total domination of Hollywood during the late 1980s / 1990s.
Since leaving Hollywood, he's done a fair amount of work in tech, most notably, being a heavy influence on a16z.
Every once in a while you'll hear a company talk about bringing a Hollywood style approach to hiring people into startups
Hollywood has a few interesting quirks about it as a talent market though
1: There are only five major buyers for Movies (Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros, Disney, and Sony)
2: This mostly carries over with TV & streaming services (if you start combing through Wikipedia you'll find an absolute maze of various deals made over the years - all in the name of greater distribution)
3: Projects are defined in length & the industry is structured around this. I caught up with a friend the other day who's a production set designer. He's about to start a 6 month contract (a movie). Doing a good job on this will put him on the map (whereas in tech we'd look at this as a major issue).
4: The market for talent is enormously unequal. Adam Sandler made $73m last year. Margot Robie made $59m. But also, 86% of the members in the Screen Actors Guild made less than $26,500 a year.
5: There are 7 major talent agencies in Hollywood, and they represent 25,000 people. The Screen Actors Guild has more than 160,000 members - more than 80% of actors aren't represented by an agent.
To the extent that you can run this model, it's going to be at the executive level, where you can
1: Have a few major buyers (large VC / PE funds)
2: Have projects defined in length (take company from $XXm to $YYYm, take a company public, turnaround a struggling company)
3: Have a small enough pool of talent that so that you can feasibly understand it
Thinking about different ways of structuring sales teams and how you hire people has been bouncing around in my head for a while now.
But most companies are the same - the hire full time reps, who live domestically.
And realistically, if you have the money for it, there's not much upside trying to reinvent the wheel.