Founder-led recruiting is scaling your taste.

First-time founders are first-time recruiters.

Recruiting is one of the top problems every founder complains about. There are so many talented people, but also many not-so-talented ones. The risk is spending too much time with the bad fits and not enough time with the good fits.

There are three reasons why recruiting as a founder is more challenging than it should be.

1. 70% of founders are first-time founders who did not previously manage or hire people.

2. Founders lean heavily on credentials as shortcuts to sourcing candidates.

3. Tech is unique in how we delegate recruiting technical roles to non-technical people (i.e., tech sourcers, HR, recruiters, etc)

Recruiting for their startup is often their first time being a manager. With VC-backed startups, these founders rely on VCs for recruiting advice. VCs don't hire that often (unless they were previous operators); they keep small teams.

So you get a lot of surface-level advice (hire the top 1%, recruit from these five companies, etc.) that can be ineffective, inefficient, or worse, correct but impossible to implement for an early-stage startup. Most early-stage startups do not have the cash and/or brand to attract the most in-demand talent. Thus, 80% of startups compete for the same 20% of talent.

Using credentials themselves is not intrinsically effective or ineffective. It depends on what you are screening for and what matters to the role. For example, sourcing candidates from companies you admire is more effective than graduates from a specific set of universities.

Founders skim LinkedIn and resumes in seconds to pattern match against what they think is quality. We proxy aptitude and ability via names, such as the name of a hot startup or a well-known school. Slightly more experienced founders will focus on more specific criteria. Personal projects within a domain, promotions within the company, writing content or talks in the domain, specific work experiences at domain-relevant companies

Candidate A

Candidate B

Candidate C

Which of these profiles is a good fit for a senior software engineer?

Recruiting = Sourcing Criteria * Pitch * Outbound

Founders who are great recruiters adopt a founder-led recruiting approach. Similar to how founder-led sales is a model for getting your company to its first ~$1M ARR, founder-led recruiting is a model for getting your company to its first 100 hires.

Founders should not delegate defining the initial candidate profile and qualification process for their first and key hires. You have to make those decisions yourself. Like founder-led sales, it's not about doing every part of the process yourself. It's not delegating the key parts too early. For example, hiring a head of sales too early and hiring a head of recruiting too early can drag the process.

First-time founders often think the interview process is their biggest constraint, but the biggest bottleneck is that there will be enough suitable candidates. You have to optimize the candidate's time along with yours. You will want to spend more time with the best candidates and less time with everyone else.

Model for building a recruiting engine

There are three key insights in implementing founder-led recruiting.

1. Structured sourcing unlocks candidate alpha.

2. Writing a polarizing candidate pitch.

3. Effective outbound is your biggest lever in recruiting.

Structured sourcing unlocks candidate alpha.

Being an effective sourcer is a trainable skill like being an effective interviewer.

ATS systems like Greenhouse have taught a generation of founders structured interviewing: Ask every candidate the same questions and have an objective scorecard. However, hiring managers and founders are very unstructured regarding sourcing.

Sourcing criteria are not the same as your job description. Job descriptions are to discourage or filter people out, while sourcing criteria are objective, true/false statements about a candidate.

Candidate green & red flags

Traditional job description

Recruiting involves efficiently finding green flags. In dating, there are concepts of red flags and green flags. Green flags are qualities that excite you about someone and make you want to spend more time with them. Red flags are warning signs or straight-up blockers to work with someone.

Writing a polarizing candidate pitch.

A strong candidate pitch both attracts and repels candidates.

Founders often raise capital before paying customers or a team, so they are experienced in pitching investors before customers or candidates. Founders frequently reuse the customer pitch when pitching candidates. There is overlap, but they are different. Candidates can not always use the product or have experienced the problem.

Founders have leverage in how they want to pitch working at their startup. They often fall into three common categories.

1. Logos: Are you working on new or cutting-edge tech? (new LLMs, rockets, etc.)

2. Pathos: Do you have a compelling mission? (i.e., mental health for X)

3. Ethos: Are the founding team and/or investors credible? (i.e., exited founders, tier 1 investors, etc.)?

Example of a logos pitch

[COMPANY] is tackling a fascinating challenge: the trucking industry hasn’t changed in the past 50+ years - it’s still all pen, paper, and phone calls.

They just raised $16.6M across Seed and Series A funding to bring the trucking industry into the present day. They're building AI agents that can understand logistics-specific knowledge and execute multi-step workflows across different channels while keeping important decisions to experienced experts.

Every engineering problem you solve here directly impacts how physical goods like food, water, medicine, and construction supplies move around the country on the good days. Even more so on the bad days, when efficiency and effectiveness determine outcomes.

Example of an ethos pitch

[COMPANY] is building something different in the AI art space - a platform where artists actively choose to participate and get fairly compensated when their styles are used.

They’re looking for a full-stack engineer in New York City who cares about technical excellence and creator rights. You'll help build the infrastructure that ensures artists maintain control of their creative identity and assets while earning from their art.

Would you like to learn more about how we're reshaping AI art creation? I'd love to discuss your experience and share more details about our mission.

Example of a pathos pitch

[COMPANY] is based in New York City and they’re tackling one of today's most pressing challenges: accelerating the adoption of clean, affordable energy.

Only 1 in 5 US homes are using clean energy, even though millions more could be saving money AND the environment.

Our robo advisor is here to accelerate the adoption of greener energy. Their technology makes it incredibly easy for 50M+ homes to switch to cheaper, greener energy. This is just the start, we are also working to expand virtual-power-plant networks, strengthening energy resilience and building a sustainable future for everyone.

You should decide what pitch will be most successful and attract the right candidates for your startup. It's better to get the ideal candidate excited and repel weaker candidates than to make most candidates mildly interested. Look at 20 startup company pages and job descriptions, and note what stands out. How would you stand out compared to them? There are 20K Seed-stage startups and 100K engineers. You have to pick an angle to stand out and win candidates.

Effective outbound is your biggest lever in recruiting.

Founders need to master recruiting. They constantly create processes and departments and then delegate them to talented people. Every executive you hire must be an effective recruiter. They will soon manage and hire teams if they succeed in their role.

There are three ways to generate candidate flow.

1. Referrals: A high conversion, limited volume strategy. Ask people you know, your co-workers, investors, and others, to recommend good candidates. This becomes a network effect as your company scales, but at the start, it's a 0-1 move.

2. Inbound: Low conversion, medium to high volume. Posting your job on LinkedIn, job boards, and ATS systems. This volume increases as your company becomes more popular or when the labor market becomes tighter.

3. Outbound: Medium to high conversion, unlimited volume. Reaching out directly to candidates via email, DMs, text, etc.

Early-stage startup founders will eventually have to build an outbound engine. The earlier you get good at this, the better you can become at recruiting. Candidate referrals will be limited in the early days, and inbound will be hit or miss.

If you want to improve your recruiting skills as a founder, please subscribe to our newsletter. We'll publish detailed playbooks every week, covering topics like designing sourcing criteria for a role, writing your candidate pitch, building outbound candidate campaigns, and more.

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