How To Find Talent In 2022

While there are plenty of issues that startups need to deal with on a day-to-day basis, there’s one challenge that plagues every company we’ve ever worked with (from B2B to B2C, pre-Seed to Series F): finding good talent.

Given sky high piles of venture dollars flowing into the tech ecosystem, there has never been a time with more startups flush with more cash chasing the same pool of talent. It takes a lot longer for the human capital markets to catch-up to the financial capital markets, and this has led to an increasing dislocation (and increasing competition) for the best people.

Despite this environment, good companies will still find good people. It’s certainly not easy, but talent is out there and looking for roles. It’s all about getting your job spec in front of the right person at the right time.

With that in mind, we surveyed our portfolio and wanted to share some best practices that we’ve seen out-perform to find strong talent in this tricky environment:

1. Write the job spec, even before you’re looking. As soon as you start to think about a new role (even 6–12 months out), write up the job spec and put it on your careers page. First and foremost, this is a useful exercise to help founders concretize their thinking for what the role will entail — in many cases, it might turn out to be more than one role, or some responsibilities could be subsumed by an existing team member. More importantly, however, by posting this job spec on your website, you are opening the door to serendipity. Folks end up in the strangest corners of the web, and like any good conversion funnel, you want your site to be optimally positioned if a dream future employee finds their way to your site. Putting a job spec on your careers page doesn’t mean you need to hire that role immediately, but it helps plant your flag in the market and creates collateral that can be shared — actively when you start looking, or passively through word-of-mouth without you even knowing it’s happening.
2. Expect job boards to sort of suck (but do them anyway). Once you’ve written your job spec and you’re ready to start looking for talent, you should 100% post your role across multiple job boards. The costs are usually minimal and the reach can be substantial (opening the door for serendipity, as noted above). You should expect that the leads that come passively through job boards will be lower intent, particularly for senior roles. However, job boards can be more useful if you’re looking for entry-level roles, such as BDRs, junior ops folks, controllers, etc. Also, a rarely discussed benefit of job board posting is that it is an effective means of passive advertising. Particularly on LinkedIn, most candidates who apply will also follow your page, so regardless of fit, job posts let you increase your company’s organic reach.
3. Not all job boards are created equal. This one will depend on which type of role you’re hiring for, but we’ve seen several times over the past couple of years that certain job boards, e.g., AngelList, consistently outperform “general” job sites like LinkedIn, Indeed, etc. In general, the more specific the job board is, the higher quality of candidate it should attract (by opting into a more niche community, a candidate tends to demonstrate higher intent). This is not to say that you shouldn’t put your job spec on the general job boards as well (see point 2), but you should focus more of your efforts (and screening + interview time) on the narrower job boards that tend to out-perform.
4. Organic networks yield the best (and sometimes random) success. As soon as you commit to hiring for a role, tell everyone you know: your friends, family, investors, random people in the street. When you send out company updates, put your hiring asks at the top, front and center. Every single person you bring into the search begins a new node in your network tree, and massively expands the reach of your search. Of course most people will ignore you, but if you get one or two people who know someone who could be a fit, the dividends can be enormous. You also get the benefit of social (and / or professional) vetting of recommended candidates, which can be an enormous boon during the interview phase.
5. Talent recruiters are expensive, but effective. Particularly when it comes to senior titles (think C- and VP-level), executive talent recruiters can be an effective hiring tool (and an unavoidable expense). Most founders will want to, and try to, avoid paying what can be $100k+ in fees to find the right exec. This is rational, and founders should absolutely leverage their networks, as discussed in point 4, first. However, for critical roles, we generally encourage our founders to “time box” their organic efforts and, if things aren’t working out, pull the pin on an exec recruiter sooner rather than later. The process of onboarding with a recruiter, finding leads, interviewing, and closing always takes longer than you expect, so when a role becomes critical and talent is not coming through organically, recruiters can be the right path to follow. If you find the right person, their ROI should more than offset the recruiting fee. And if not, you’ll want to make sure you negotiate contingencies in your contract so that if the person is a failure, you get some recompense.
6. Sell the vision (and be flexible on the fine print). Against the odds, you’ve found someone you love. Now begins what can be the trickiest task of all: closing the candidate on the role. The difficulty of this task tends to be inversely proportional to the stage of the company, but earlier companies have the benefit of equity upside to compensate for this challenge. Put the candidate in touch with others on the team, investors, and other relevant folks in industry who can talk your book. Spend the time to get to know candidates on a personal level and bring them into strategic discussions early so they feel like an owner (which tends to correlate positively to them signing on). This is also a stage where you might have to be flexible on certain job requirements. For example, the job spec might have insisted the candidate be based in NYC, but offering remote could be the last incentive the candidate needs to sign. Obviously you’ll need to know which aspects of the job spec are non-negotiable, but we’ve seen big picture selling + fine print flexibility move mountains when it comes to getting candidates over the finish line.

Hiring is really hard, but it’s not insurmountable. It might take longer than you’d like, and you might have to be more flexible than you’d hoped, but you’ll find someone great. We hope the above suggestions help a little as you navigate these tricky waters.