Moving into Deep Technology Recruitment

Many recruiters reach out looking for advice on making the move over to deep technology startups, either without technical or scientific backgrounds, or without previous startup experience. We’d like to encourage more recruiters to transition into the deep technology startup ecosystem by using the tips and tricks below.

Step 1: Accept and Commit

Deep technology recruitment is challenging and it always will be. That is the beauty of working in this arena. You will constantly have to learn about emerging innovations, new competitors, unique IP, and engineering methods and find joy in coming up with unique ways to source, relate to, and understand the best of the best in fields that are just starting to be understood and formalized. You’ll have to be able to do more with less due to limits on what you can offer compensation wise when going up against Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and Peter Thiel so your story and the impression you make on candidates has to be a top priority, or you’re doomed before you even begin.

At some point in your career, recruiting will not be that hard anymore. If you are a strong recruiter, you will reach a point where you can compete against almost anyone with a closing rate in the 90th+ percentile. This is when you should make your move into deep tech recruiting. Accept that it will be challenging and intimidating. You will be working on technologies that you have never worked on before. But you will also be working on technologies that very few people have ever worked on and made successful commercially. This tension is what should draw you in if you are already competing at the top of the market.

At this point, you are not yet expected to be an expert in any one topic or innovation, just commit to a few topics that excite you enough that you will want to understand them deeply over the next 36 months. Commit to the challenge and commit to being patient with yourself. The fundamentals that you’ve used to compete at the highest levels still matter greatly, but your willingness to admit what you don’t know or understand is what will help you be one of the most reputable and successful deep technology recruiters in emerging industries for years to come.

Step 2: Dig into the Details

What type of innovations excite you? What technologies are two degrees of separation from your current industry or your current comfort zone?

Start there. Do you work in healthcare recruitment right now? How about working for a startup that develops brain-computer interfaces focused on increasing the informational transmission rate between brains and machines or a vaccine platform innovation company looking to eradicate Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s from the human species in the next 30 years?

Do you work in advertising and production recruitment right now? What about going to a startup using augmented reality to translate brainwave signals directly into communication or an eye-tracking hardware company that is critical for the next phase of mainstream AR/VR adoption? If you are moving into deep tech recruitment for the first time and are at the director level, I would take a look at Series A and Series B companies. If you’ve already worked in startups then I’d look at companies coming out of accelerators or seed-stage, in the process of raising their Series A. The more you can learn about the company’s technology, earlier in the company’s lifecycle, the better.

Next, find the experts in that space. Who dominates here? What elite leaders have moved on from innovative groups within Facebook, Google, AmazonLab126, Tesla, NVIDIA, SpaceX, and/or Apple to become founders of interesting new startups? What companies have high interaction rates with people on LinkedIn posts and what press is being shared there? Who has a solid foundation that you can build on in meaningful ways? Who is doing well in this space but not exceptionally well… yet?

Another route to consider is taking a look at where principals, associates, and venture partners from your favorite venture capital firms went or what they have started since leaving the venture capital side. Some of the most exciting deep tech startups have been started by people who were investing in them and the industry previously.

Step 3: Start Educating Yourself

As with most things in life, no one is going to do this for you. Learn about the industry, technology, key players, main acquirers, and do the work required to be knowledgeable about how some key deep technologies work in verticals you care about and why they matter to the world and to you. Then start looking for companies that either have interesting intellectual property or have started generating revenue. Who are the customers for the deep technologies that excite you most? What are they buying? What will they be buying soon? And from whom? It’s safe to assume that you will constantly be competing for similar talent as Apple, Meta, Amazon, Virgin, Tesla and/or people becoming founders of their own companies if you are working at the level you want to be.

Find a company that you are naturally enthusiastic about, it will help you pitch it in a genuine way if you go work there. Only spend time on technologies and companies you want to work on. The rest is noise. Look for a company with a good story, one that you can help make great. When you are interviewing, after they pitch you the company, ask them if you can pitch it back to help elevate it to target the type of talent you want to bring in. It will resonate with the right leadership and the right company if yours is a unique, well-informed, and compelling story but will also be quite telling on if it will be a good fit for you.

Step 4: Your Competitive Edge

Once you’ve committed to a vertical or a startup working in a particular technology, the fundamentals of how to recruit the best people to your company don’t change but your competitive edge strategy may have to shift. How do you create a great experience for candidates going through your process? What are the industry norms for that specific space? What about compensation and equity for a startup that size? What kind of recruiting process do you need to create and take candidates through for that specific deep technology?

We’ve highlighted the importance of meeting talent where they are in previous posts but part of your competitive edge needs to be spending time around the most influential candidates for the vertical you’ve chosen. It will be important that you not only understand the technology, why the IP matters, and/or who it competes and collaborates with, but you will also need to be able to assess talent for this particular domain and have meaningful relationships with people in the arena which will take extra time and effort than in other industries. The smaller and more intimate nature of the deep technology ecosystem means that it is harder to break into but once you are in, it is easier to expand those meaningful relationships through tight-knit circles. Spending time in the deep technology community because you genuinely enjoy it is critical to competing in this space and meeting with talent where they are will only increase your odds of closing great people.

Step 5: Engage and Mobilize Engineering and Leadership Networks

As soon as you join a deep tech startup, begin building your strategy for engaging and mobilizing the network of the leadership team and the technical team. Sit down with the chief technology officer and/or chief scientific officer bi-monthly to go through existing networks to surface leads together. Same with your heads of product and your engineering managers. When those leads are tapped, go to second degrees of separation and begin asking for introductions to relevant targets. When you are working in deep technology, spend just as much time mobilizing the team’s existing network and who they can introduce you to as you do bringing new people into it. Personal introductions and referrals in deep technology go further than in other industries and it will help you reach the people you want to faster.

Step 6: Get Comfortable Admitting What You Don’t Know, and Do It Regularly

Competing in deep technology recruitment requires you to constantly stay on top of innovations in and around your space. It means you need to understand how your own innovation is progressing and what you can and cannot say to candidates about it. Get comfortable admitting what you don’t know and taking note of questions candidates ask you that you need to circle back on. What common themes are you seeing in the types of questions you are getting from sales vs. engineering? What about hardware engineers vs. systems engineers? What can you say about how your technology works and what is off-limits? What about upcoming releases, contracts or features? The details matter every step of the way and it is impossible to know every little detail at every moment, so get comfortable admitting what you don’t know and what you don’t understand, it will only help you become more informed and more prepared for all the exciting unknowns ahead.

Building teams and companies working in desalination, carbon sequestration, soil regeneration, plant-based leather replacements, and supersonic flight with renewable fuel is deeply rewarding. If you are interested in learning more about making the move into deep technology recruitment, please get in touch with me.

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation and agriculture.

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