Everyone who’s running a startup has heard the advice, “to succeed, hire the best talent you can."

You’ve heard it… but are you doing it?

I’ve coached a wide variety of early-stage startups on the subject – I teach founders the finer points of hiring – and I can assure you; the vast majority of startups don’t hire the best talent available to them.

Why? Because they don’t source well.

Sourcing well is hard and time-consuming, but worth it so long as you are hiring an important person (aka someone who would meaningfully improve your trajectory).

What is it about sourcing well that makes it so valuable?

Feedback Loop

A few years ago I had a new client that was failing to hire a senior engineer. The founders had great backgrounds and business was booming, but when I asked about outbound sourcing in our first meeting, the CEO said, “We stopped because no one we’re interested in responds.”

I looked at their sourcing messages and saw the generic, “Hey, we love your background. Would you be interested in a call?”

“Do you think the people you’re emailing have heard of your company?” I asked. “Unlikely,” he replied.

My follow-up question hung in the air after I asked it: “If you received this email, and hadn’t heard of the ‘we’ referenced in the message, would you take the time to research the company?”

“No,” the CEO responded, “I’d delete the email.”

We invested in a landing page that highlighted the company and value proposition for candidates and sent the page in new sourcing messages. Responses trickled in. We listened to the questions candidates asked us after seeing the landing page and used those to drive our iterations. The trickle became a flood.

Sourcing showed us something was wrong, helped us validate our assumptions, and rewarded our efforts.

You’re Your Best Champion

Consider a candidate who is exceptional for your open position — someone in demand who you would be lucky to hire.

Who is more likely to get a response from them in an outbound message: someone with “gatekeeper” energy or the one person who can answer any conceivable question about the business?

Especially at the early stage, top talent wants to work with committed founders. Show your commitment early by being the person who does the reachout. A small increase in responses may well include the best candidates; the ones who would have passed if anyone else had sent the message. Make your commitment the tip of your arrow.

Recruiting Is A Team Sport

If you distribute equity to your team, they’re incentivized to recruit.

How can your team best contribute? It’s your job to lead from the front. Good hires start with high quality top-of-the-funnel activity. Show them what it looks like to bring new people into the company orbit, connect with them, guide them, and close them.

Perfect Practice Makes Perfect

Sales, fundraising, and recruiting follow the same basic process:

Prospecting ➜ Qualification ➜ Presentation ➜ Evaluation ➜ Proposal ➜ Close

The recruiting version of this process tends to be the hardest.

Candidates have the most skin in the game. They’re investors with only one major investment, and their technical and industry knowledge make for great bullshit detectors. The best candidates teach you things about your own business.

Unfortunately, the best candidates tend to not be in your applicant pool. You have to chase them. Attempting to hire the best candidates is the trial by fire that forges great founders.

Questions Founders Ask Me

“Can I hire someone to send candidate outreach messages from my account?”

You can, but being hands-on drives home the learnings. The magic moment happens when you’re considering a particular individual and you ask yourself, “why would this person be interested in my company?”

“Our inbound applicant pool is strong; do I still need to source?”

Strong in comparison to what? I’m not suggesting that your applicants aren’t the best candidates. But if you don’t prove it (by trying to make and entice a list of dream candidates), aren’t you leaving your business up to chance?

“What about contingency recruiters? They send me good candidates!”

If you have a relationship with a good contingency recruiter and are happy to pay for their services, that’s not something you should throw away. But beware of the tradeoffs:

Any candidate you hire through a contingency recruiter you could have hired more quickly and cheaply by reaching out to them directly on your own first, and you would have learned more along the way as well.

The only way this isn’t true is if said recruiter is actually better at pitching your company than you are (and therefore gets more bites). If that’s the case, you’d better practice your pitch — start sourcing!

Closing

Most early-stage technology companies go from 0-40 people with a combination of founder-led sourcing, referrals, and a few applicants. Bringing on a full-time internal recruiter is best once you’ve established a culture of recruiting that person can accelerate.

Lightwork (https://www.lightwork.ai), teaches early-stage founders how to navigate these recruiting challenges. If hiring is your top priority and you want to learn how to make recruiting a strength, get in touch: hello [at] lightwork.ai.