Sourcing talent

“We hire the best, just like everyone else.”

Jeff AtwoodStack Overflow

Sourcing sets the upper limit for hiring

The quality of the hires you make starts with sourcing. You can only hire talent from the pool of candidates you have. Hiring the least bad candidate from a shitty pool is not the way to build talent density.

Recruitment is sales and marketing applied to employment at your company. As you would with customer acquisition, find channels with high-quality candidates and low competition so that you spend less time and effort per hire.

Where to search for your early hires

In the early days you should make most hires through your personal network. You have several unique advantages when hiring within your network:

• You’re able to spot undiscovered talent that others would not.
• You have built-in credibility with everyone you’re interviewing.
• It’s easy to get in-depth references.
• Culture fit is usually known upfront.

Hiring through your personal network requires a do things that don’t scale approach. You’ll need to hustle your ass off and call in a lot of favours. But it’s 100% worth it.

Besides your personal network, consider talent marketplaces (e.g. OfferZen), LinkedIn, GitHub, job boards and meetups.

Sourcing involves mountains of repetitive work

It takes a long time to find good people and convince them to join your company. There are lots of messages, phone calls and interviews, most of which end in dead ends. When you hear advice that founders should spend a third of their time recruiting, it usually means spending time sourcing.

Make your job ads stand out

Your job ad will exist in a vast ocean of competing jobs. If you want to attract the best talent, you must figure out how to stand out.

Early-stage employees are usually on the lookout for their tribe. Make it known what your tribe stands for, even if it would offend others. In fact, the most effective job ads talk about things that the right people would love but everyone else would hate.

Your job ad should hit hard: be bold, true to your core and unapologetic. The goal is to make the right people feel like they’ve finally found their place.

Reflexive Principle of Employee Raiding

If you would be shocked and horrified if Company X hired several of your employees, then you should not hire any of theirs. The number of such companies should be small.

Friends don’t poach from friends.

Telling your story

To attract the best talent, they need to know about you. So be loud and tell your story.

• Articulate a crystal clear and ambitious vision so that it’s easy for candidates to visualize what they’d be building towards for the next five years. Get feedback on your vision from people who will be brutally honest with you.
• The degree of ambition matters. Counter-intuitively, it’s easier to recruit people for an audacious goal that is incredibly difficult than it is to recruit someone for an easy mission that doesn’t really matter.
• A strong vision will push some people away. Many would never join a company whose mission is to “reboot the arsenal of democracy”, like Anduril, but for the right people it’s their life’s purpose.

Missions that attract top people are both highly differentiated and ambitious:

• Tesla: Accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy
• SpaceX: Making humanity multiplanetary
• Stripe: Increase the GDP of the internet
• Comma: Make driving chill

It’s better to be bacon than bread

Strong cultures don’t appeal to everyone. Create a culture that deeply appeals to the type of people you want, even if it offends others. Be the Navy SEALs, not Bank of America.

“If you’re at Tesla, you’re choosing to be at the equivalent of Special Forces. There’s the regular Army, and that’s fine, but if you are working at Tesla, you’re choosing to step up your game. And that has pluses and minuses. It’s cool to be Special Forces, but it’s not for everyone.”

Elon MuskSpaceX & Tesla

Talent density is the best pitch

The best talent wants to work with the best talent. It’s exceptionally rare to find a team that is insanely talent dense. It can be a massive draw card, if you are willing to do what it takes to build such a team. Keep in mind the bar is ridiculously high: the people you hire must not just be good, they need to be great.

This approach works for many reasons:

1. Social proof: If great people are joining, it must be great.
2. Referral network: Great people know other great people.
3. Flywheel: A+ people join to work with other A+ people.