Hire the Person, Not the Funnel: Adam Ward on Building High-Talent-Density Teams
Lenny's Podcast
Adam Ward is Head of Talent at Cursor. Before that, Ward co-founded the independent recruiting firm Growth by Design, which Cursor acquired outright the previous year. Earlier roles included leading global recruiting at Pinterest as it grew from about 200 to more than 2,000 employees, and running a 65-person recruiting team across 10 offices at Facebook while its tech org scaled from roughly 1,000 to over 10,000. In this conversation with Lenny Rachitsky, Ward argues that most companies recruit in a way that structurally produces average hires. Ward's alternative treats every hire the way a good executive search is run. You define precisely what "great" means, identify the small set of people in the world who fit it, and pursue them with patience and care, even when that takes months or years.
A market that rates "an 11"
Asked how intense today's hiring market is on a ten-point scale, Ward answered "an 11." Ward compared it to the early mobile era, when companies scrambled for iOS engineers before that job category really existed. The difference now is compression. By Ward's account, the mobile moment played out over about two years, with boot camps eventually appearing to fill the gap. Today the changes happen in days and weeks: "there are no months or year measures right now."
Ward also called the market "a tale of two cities." One headline reports NBA-level salary offers to a new-grad PhD, and the next reports a blue-chip company laying off 10% of its workforce. Ward reads this as a "resettlement" of talent, labor, and how work gets done. Ward believes, and says they want to believe, that the two worlds will come back closer together, but thinks the gap between them is currently one of the largest ever.
Which roles are rising and which are fading
The role Ward sees in highest demand is the forward deployed engineer, which goes by many names. This is a technical person who partners with sales and with customers to deploy a product that may feel technical or overwhelming to parts of a customer's organization. Ward added a newer angle: helping companies move "from token maxing to optimizing" as their CFOs start receiving the bills. Ward called it a real supply-and-demand problem because the role requires someone who is deeply technical and knows the product, but who can also walk into a room of executives and help roll the product out across their workforce.
Lenny noted that, as with early mobile, few people have actually held this job. Ward suggested the natural candidates are people who were full-stack engineers three to five years ago. Ward said some of them find the shift energizing, a move "out of the terminal" and into the company and its customers that opens an unexpected new chapter in their careers. Lenny had expected AI researchers to top the list. Ward explained that researchers are a well-defined, countable group. The newer, more nebulous roles can be just as hard to fill as the scarce ones.
On the other side, Ward sees demand fading for the narrowly specialized technical person. Engineering, product, and design are "squeezing together": companies want designers who work more like design engineers, and deep engineers with stronger product sense. Ward put new grads with little experience in a similar position, because tools like Cursor can now do some of that work. For core product, design, and engineering roles, Ward is optimistic that AI is pushing the industry back toward craft. AI can produce plenty of "slop," Ward said, and that makes taste stand out more. Ward framed this as a continuation of the "rise of the power IC" over roughly the past year. Taste, decision-making, problem-solving, and curiosity are "coming back up to the surface."
The "funnel of doom"
Ward first heard the term "funnel of doom" as an intern in 1998 at Trilogy, a company Ward called "somewhat infamous" for its recruiting. Ward's first manager, Jeff Daniel, coined it during a campus tour talking to computer science students.
The critique goes like this. Companies model recruiting on a sales funnel, with stages and pass-through rates. Candidates come from three sources: they apply, they're sourced, or they're referred. Talent-dense companies lean on sourcing and referrals. But the sourcing math undermines itself. A company reaches out to 100 people and, say, 20 reply. "By definition, that is not the top 20%," Ward said. "That is just the 20 people who you caught on a bad day": a good day for the recruiter, a bad day for the candidate. From that already suboptimal pool, the process weeds people out at each stage, and whoever remains gets hired. Ward calls this "remainder hiring."
Ward's point is that even with rigorous interviews and good hygiene, this approach regresses to the mean as volume grows. At best it produces a company that is slightly above average. The alternative is to have confidence up front about who the top people are, and then use the assessment process to validate that thesis. Inside the funnel of doom, Ward said, there is a "pillar of excellence." The idea is to start with that pillar instead of the wide mouth of the funnel.
Asked why recruiting has worked this way for so long, Ward blamed the sales analogy itself. A salesperson sells a product that is relatively static and rational. Recruiting pairs an "irrational unit" (hiring manager and recruiter) with another irrational unit (the candidate). Treating that as linear and transactional is a fallacy. Ward also noted that sales has existed for a very long time, while recruiting as a craft is perhaps 40 or 50 years old. People naturally map a new problem onto one they already understand, and Ward thinks that habit has held companies back from recruiting more strategically.
Step one: scoping what "great" means
Ward's alternative borrows the structure of a well-run senior or leadership search, which Ward breaks into three steps: scoping, mapping, and relentless pursuit.
Scoping is the "cornerstone," and Ward considers it the most underinvested part of hiring. Ward rejects the common line "I'll know it when I see it." According to Ward, you won't, because you haven't done the work of objectively defining what great looks like. Good scoping means listing the skills and experiences the role needs and stack-ranking them before talking to a single candidate. It also means answering why the role matters and what success would look like.
That upfront work shapes everything afterward. It informs the sourcing strategy, the pitch to candidates, the criteria the interviews assess, and eventually the close, where you explain why this specific person will have a big impact in this specific role.
Ward stressed that these criteria should be objective and transferable, and specifically not "what companies are they from?" Relying on logos means borrowing another company's definition of great. And since Ward believes almost every company runs a funnel of doom, there's no reason to trust someone else's process. Your company and product are also different from theirs. Ward did grant that certain "vintages" exist, where a particular team at a particular company at a particular time did remarkable work, and membership can be a reasonable shorthand. Ward's objection is that most companies jump to that shorthand almost immediately.
Step two: mapping the 50 people who could do the job
With the definition in hand, the goal becomes a target list. In a leadership search, Ward said, you might think "there are 50 people in the world who can do this. Let's go find those 50 people." Ward believes this approach can work at scale if the scoping is done well.
The starting point is a set of people whose taste in talent you trust. The key is how you ask them. "Who's the best product engineer you know?" is, in Ward's words, "the worst question you can ask." A better version is: "Of all the product engineers you've worked with, who stands out as the person who's most collaborative with designers? Or who can translate a framework into a product better than anyone you've ever seen?" Specific characteristics, drawn directly from the scoping work, make it much easier for people to think of names. When you ask many trusted people the same targeted questions, the names start to converge. If Lenny mentions someone and so does Sally, that person goes on the list.
Ward described a second technique for building company lists. Take the two or three traits you care about, such as curiosity and systems thinking, and search job postings across a set of companies (with a Boolean or AI query) to find which ones also say those traits matter. Those companies are places where candidates may have developed the skills you want. The resulting list goes beyond the usual suspects, and it's validated against your own criteria.
Lenny mentioned that "systems thinking" had come up on four podcasts in a row, and asked what it actually means. Ward traced the idea back to an early job and a fundamental question: what problem are we trying to solve? Systems thinking, as Ward described it, means identifying that root problem and breaking it into small pieces. Ward said they learned this by watching engineers take something very large and tackle it piece by piece. Ward added that although the term sounds strategic, it is "extremely tactical." The best systems thinkers remove the problem one small tactic at a time.
Tools like LinkedIn play a role, but Ward considers the most valuable method also the most time-intensive: sitting with employees and mining their networks. Some people on Ward's team do this as their entire job. Ward acknowledged it could be automated with an AI-facilitated tool, but said "nothing beats you and I sitting down every other week for 6 weeks." Each session follows up on names from the last one, surfaces new ones, and holds the employee accountable for reaching out. Did they send the note? Did the person reply? Will they send another? The resulting signal goes into a system and database, but Ward sees the extraction as deeply personal work.
Cursor also has a busy Slack channel for hiring ideas. (Lenny had read about it in Brie Wolfson's written account of the company.) Anyone who comes across someone impressive, through a product, a post, or something "overheard at a barbecue," drops in a profile or post. Others chime in with whether they know the person, how to reach them, and what might appeal to them, and a rough engagement strategy forms quickly. Ward stressed that the recruiting team does not drive this. It comes from non-recruiters, and surfacing a great person carries a kind of social credibility inside the company. Not every idea is right, Ward said, but the channel regularly produces great outcomes.
If talent is the top priority, act like it
Lenny raised the obvious objection: this is slow, labor-intensive work, and most hires are ICs, not executives. Ward usually answers by asking founders where talent ranks among their priorities. Founders almost always say it's number one. In that case, Ward argues, time and cost shouldn't be obstacles. A founder can't call talent the most important thing and then outsource it or hand it off entirely to a recruiting organization.
To keep that priority from slipping when everything is on fire, Ward says it's usually the founders who keep the company on track at the best companies. Beyond that, Ward relies on "what gets measured gets done." Companies measure uptime, customer satisfaction, and revenue, and hold teams accountable for them. Hiring deserves the same treatment for hiring managers and leaders, backed by rewards and recognition. Without measurement, Ward says, people will hand the responsibility to someone else.
Ward sees a structural problem in many companies: the recruiting team owns the hiring goal, yet recruiters never make hiring decisions. Hiring managers, leaders, or committees do. Ward described recruiters as "a confidence engine," not "a decision-making engine." Companies lose the thread when they hand "the act of recruiting to a function of recruiting." No one, Ward argued, should care more about a hire than the hiring manager and team who feel the joy or pain of the outcome.
Step three: relentless pursuit
The third step is pursuing the people on the list. Ward frames the slowness as seed-planting. Starting from zero feels like "a slow burn." But seeds planted with many top candidates come to harvest at different rates, some in weeks, some in months, and in some cases Ward has worked on candidates for a year or more. The clock has to start somewhere.
The first milestone is simply a response and a conversation. Most strong candidates will explain why the timing is wrong. Ward's reply is that they're not asking the person to interview or consider a role, only to have a next conversation. If someone says late fall would be better, Ward will still invite them to coffee, show them the office, or introduce them to a teammate who's fascinated by their work, and keep up regular touchpoints in the meantime. Doing nothing until fall, Ward said, only risks losing the person or finding them already taken.
For that first response, Ward's team spends a lot of effort figuring out what would engage the person and, especially, who could make a warm introduction. Ward said almost as much effort goes into choosing the right introducer as into the message itself. Some excellent people have no online presence at all, but there are usually a few "nuggets" to work with. Getting the first touch right matters because once someone ignores one message, the second and third become much easier to ignore.
"Caring is free"
Ward keeps coming back to the phrase "caring is free." Recruiting tactics vary in cost, but caring more about a candidate than any competitor does costs nothing. Ward said that historically, the top theme in candidate satisfaction scores is that the company genuinely wanted the person and made them feel they belonged. Ward calls this "an unfair advantage" available to everyone. Funnel thinking erodes it, because people get absorbed in the numbers: reach out to 100 to get 20, run 10 manager screens to get four on-sites. Ward tells the team: "we're trying to hire one person for this role here, not 10."
That focus changes how interviews are staffed. Ward thinks recruiting often becomes "robotic." At volume, companies pull from a pool of interviewers and let calendar availability decide who a candidate meets. Ward's team is comfortable with "bespoke and ad hoc" hiring. The stages stay broadly consistent, but if a candidate mentions a particular interest, a savvy recruiter or manager finds someone on the team who shares it and arranges that conversation.
Ward considers the hiring manager's first conversation the most underrated moment in the whole process, more important than the on-site that gets most of the attention. That's where the candidate meets the person they'll work for and the person who will make the decision. It's also where the most important motivators should surface. Yet companies often squeeze it into 30 minutes. In Ward's model, a hiring manager might meet a candidate three or four times before that person is formally in process. Lenny quoted Wolfson's description: the atomic unit of a search is the person, not the job spec. Ward agreed, and admitted this makes the process frustrating to explain. It resembles a decision tree that can branch in many directions. But once you stop playing the numbers game, the question shifts from "are they right for this job?" to "how do we get that person here?"
Breaking bread and playing home games
Ward is a big believer in sharing meals: "one of the most human and leveling things that you can do," a disarming and joining act. The team tries to build interactions around food and drink, whether a coffee, a lunch, or something less formal. Since people on the target list often have well-known expertise, Ward's team also invites them to give a talk to the team or work on a fun side project together. These people like to share and learn, Ward said, and the collaboration gives both sides a realistic preview.
Ward prefers to "play home games" at the office when possible, though some people early on prefer a neutral spot like a coffee shop. Ward compared it to visiting a university campus and getting a gut feeling that it feels like home. Ward wants candidates to feel that when they walk into Cursor, and noted it's also useful to learn early if it doesn't click. Lenny recalled Joe Gebbia's early Airbnb motto, "just get them in the elevator," and Ward agreed that was more than half the battle. Ward described Cursor's office as feeling like a warm "Hogwarts library" full of chalkboards, reflecting what Ward calls the company's "Midwest vibes": hardworking and ambitious but understated, letting the work speak for itself. Ward said the Cafe Cursor events, which Lenny said Ben leads, bring a similar feel to cities around the world, though they focus mainly on the product and its users.
Assessment: work samples, work trials, and a two-way on-site
On assessment, Ward cited research showing work samples are the strongest predictor of success at a company. Yet most companies still rely mainly on one-to-one interviews across a table. Cursor is known for long on-site experiences for some roles, where candidates work on a project side by side with the team. Ward says this gives Cursor strong signal and gives the candidate strong signal in return.
Ward thinks most companies get the on-site wrong by treating it purely as extraction. Ward is a fan of "the power of self-selection," which depends on good information flowing both ways. So the team curates who greets the candidate, who they interview with, and who sits next to them at a meal. The recruiter acts as quarterback. Hiring managers supply insight on which people to involve, and recruiting coordinators handle both scheduling and "candidate shepherding" across a day or two: moving the candidate between workstations and lunch, and helping set up their environment. Ward described a flywheel: employees who had this experience themselves are glad to deliver it to the next group. And since everyone on the target list is strong by definition, even those who don't join (by their choice or Cursor's) should leave as net promoters. Their word carries more weight because they're influential, and over time that makes outreach easier.
Lenny mentioned that Cursor CEO Michael Truell had described trying to drop the work trial. Ward confirmed it. The trial is expensive in time and a big ask of candidates, but without it the team "really struggled to have confidence" in its decisions, so they're bringing it back. Ward said there are few absolutes in recruiting, but for many companies it's hard to beat side-by-side real work. Beyond technical skill, a trial reveals values and collaboration over an extended stretch, and those signals can be "arguably more important." Other functions have their own versions. Go-to-market candidates work through a challenge, such as a difficult customer scenario, often one-on-one with the hiring manager. Product candidates do a project-style exercise. Each is tailored to the function and the role.
On the criticism that trials amount to free work, Ward said candidates choose from a set of problems. The team is willing to "right-size" the trial to a candidate's availability and will schedule it on Saturdays for people who can't take time off during the week. Ward acknowledged the tension: the lead-up can be slow, but once a candidate is ready, Cursor moves very fast. If a candidate says they can talk in two hours, Ward will open the hiring manager's calendar and book it for an hour from now, leaving no gap for second-guessing. Debriefs happen the same day or the next. There are no hiring committees. Decisions are led by the hiring manager with input from the team, "it's not a democracy," and then go to the founders for final sign-off.
Offers, compensation, and competing bids
When a finalist also has an enormous offer from a company like Anthropic, Ward said it can be both frustrating and a sign the person is great. The main principle is "to not be selling at the close." Recruiting as a craft means learning the candidate's motivations early and making sure every part of the experience addresses them. The offer should then feel like a culmination, almost a presumptive next step, and not the start of a sales push. Ward's team tries to differentiate on intrinsic factors such as the role, the team, and the people, not extrinsic ones. Ward admitted that's hard when candidates are getting NBA-player-level offers "and sometimes greater than that." Sometimes the process shows the fit is wrong, and Ward says they feel good about walking away in that case.
Asked how often people accept offers that aren't the highest, Ward said the goal is to take compensation off the table as a deciding factor, which often means Cursor isn't the top bid. Ward has seen people chase the biggest number, only to find six months later that it has become their new baseline while they don't enjoy the work or the people. Ward also said Cursor has lost people despite offering the most, and considers that the right outcome if the other company was a better fit. Ward admitted this might sound "a little Pollyannaish," but believes in the right people for the right companies at the right time. And practically, a bad fit means redoing the search in six months.
Ward has thought about the no-negotiation policy Lenny described at Anthropic and Tesla. Ward respects the commitment behind it but doesn't think it's necessarily right for Cursor. For candidates who do negotiate, Ward's advice is that requests should "fit a line of logic." State clearly and consistently, from as early as possible, the handful of things that matter to you, so the recruiter can understand the reasoning and pass it on to other decision-makers. Ward contrasted this with candidates whose asks keep shifting or piling up.
On how extreme compensation has become, Ward said the stories are true "and worse, or higher," and that no one knows how it ends. In Ward's view, the unit that matters most is the most fixed one: time. It's a race against the clock for models and talent. Ward also recalled helping build Facebook's research group around 2010, when the company barely hired PhDs, and meeting academics frustrated that their work never left academia. Ward said researchers, who have arguably underpinned technical innovation for decades, deserve their current moment.
Closing as a team sport
A candidate had told Lenny that Ward's team is extraordinary at converting offers. Ward gave three reasons. First, closing happens throughout the process, as the team learns motivations and removes objections along the way. Second, closing is a team sport. For high-profile candidates, there are often daily stand-ups, sometimes just 10 minutes, focused on what everyone is doing to get to yes. The group can include the hiring manager, the recruiter, and even the candidate's former peers. Each candidate also gets a dedicated Slack channel for strategy and updates.
Third, the team tries to make it personal, and shares these stories internally to reinforce the recruiting culture. Ward described a recent example. The team learned that a New York candidate had attended a performing-arts high school and was a classically trained violinist who loved stringed instruments. Someone found a specialty instrument shop in New York and bought a distinctive Turkish instrument, which Ward described as somewhere between a guitar and a violin, and gave it to the candidate at the dinner where the offer was presented. It cost maybe a couple hundred dollars, small next to the offer, but Ward said the thoughtfulness is what stands out. Candidates who describe their best experiences often say it felt tailored to them.
Ward acknowledged this doesn't scale if you're juggling a hundred candidates per role. The argument is that with a smaller, pre-cultivated set of people moving faster through fewer steps, the total effort is redistributed, not increased.
Near the end, Ward raised a trend they're seeing more of: candidates reneging on accepted offers. For senior hires the gap between acceptance and start date can run past a couple of weeks, and Ward called recruiting a "butts-in-seats business" that often moves on too soon. Cursor now runs a second motion after acceptance with two goals: making sure the person shows up, and pre-boarding them for a faster ramp. The team hosts dinners with other incoming hires to build community, and sends a Cursor laptop so joining feels settled.
Why Growth by Design joined Cursor, and working with founders who recruit
Ward explained that Growth by Design was built on a thesis. The AI labs and companies the firm worked with were at the edge of "probably the most exciting" technical revolution in millennia, yet were "recruiting in a web browser way." A company willing to commit this kind of collective effort could gain an unfair advantage in talent. Ward argued that companies that become iconic usually win through execution, not by being first, and execution comes down to having the right talent at the right time. When the firm met Cursor, the reaction was, "This could be fun." Ward pointed to how quickly Cursor has evolved, from tab autocomplete to fully cloud-based agents, as an example of the compressed timelines.
Working with an executive team that sees recruiting as the most important thing is "a gift," Ward said, "and at times incredibly frustrating." Ward never has to persuade founders to take a call. Ward said the founders hired roughly the first 80 people themselves, so they know how hard it is and still love doing it. The downside is ambiguity about who's doing what, and sometimes learning about something only after it happened. Ward said they'll take that trade "every day."
Ward also holds that recruiters should be among the highest-paid teams in a company, if not the highest. Ward's reasoning is supply and demand. Because recruiting has become so transactional, very few recruiters can work at this strategic level, and their impact is large.
Talent density is a team property
Asked whether talent density is about individuals or the team around them, Ward said companies over-focus on individuals. Talent density is a ratio, one over the number of people on the team, unless the team is literally one person. Great managers are "puzzle builders" who assemble complementary people and help them excel. Because recruiting happens one person at a time, companies fixate on finding a "10Xer." Ward prefers to think about a 10X team: "I don't think you can have a 10X person on a bad team." Ward compared it to running Growth by Design, where the firm couldn't deliver great service without a great client. Similarly, an excellent person will be held back without a strong, supportive team.
The first recruiting hire, and the team Ward built
The most common early mistake Ward sees is the "silver bullet hire": a first head of talent expected to handle two competing jobs. By the time a founder hires a first recruiter, the company is usually behind, with perhaps 5, 10, or 15 roles waiting. The founder also wants that person to build a lasting system. Those goals conflict. A new hire may make placements without building the system, or build the system without making hires. Ward recommends separating the two. For example, hire the system-builder and pair them with a contingent recruiter for short-term hiring, or bring in outside help for the foundation (as Growth by Design did) while hiring a strong IC recruiter to execute.
For a first recruiter, Ward looks first for curiosity and business sense: someone who understands how the business works and how each hire changes its trajectory. Second is a "high motor," a person who likes working "at this edge of overwhelmness." Ward said this has nothing to do with age. Ward's view is that "recruiters are excellent at 90 to 110% capacity and are terrible outside of that." With half a normal requisition load they drift, and when badly overloaded they're swamped. The sweet spot is being busy enough to feel the adrenaline.
Lenny noted that several former heads of talent joined Ward's team as ICs. Ward said the team has looked different at each company. The Cursor version needed recruiters comfortable with the leadership-search approach, confident enough to avoid the numbers game, and with their own networks. Ward pointed out that experienced recruiters' networks can be as valuable as a technical leader's. Ward looks for three things: excellent humans who are also excellent at the work (since the team spends most of its waking hours together), people with "a chip on their shoulder" and a love of the craft, and people who put the team ahead of themselves. According to Ward, many of these recruiters could lead recruiting elsewhere, but "no one really aspires to get to middle management." They chose the craft, the challenge, and great colleagues. Ward tries to balance inspiration with operations, since recruiting is "a deeply operational function," and to stay in the details while also painting the bigger picture.
The recruiter as "talent engineer"
The other trend Ward highlighted is the rise of the "talent engineer," someone on a recruiting team, possibly a former engineer, who builds tools. Ward's "warm take, not a hot take" is that every recruiter should become one. At earlier companies Ward had to beg for engineering time to get tools built. Now recruiters can build their own in Cursor or similar tools, and Ward wants the team to work that way instead of relying on others. Lenny compared it to go-to-market engineers and suggested every function will eventually have its own version of the engineer.
Lightning round
Ward recommended Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, first read in college, saying EQ matters more than ever in the AI era. Ward also recommended Elad Gil's High Growth Handbook, valued as a reference you can jump into by chapter and whose core principles Ward thinks still hold. Ward said they also love Claire Hughes Johnson, author of Scaling People. Ward hasn't seen a movie in years but watches The Pitt. As someone from Western Pennsylvania, Ward appreciates how it captures the region's blue-collar, grinding ethos. Ward also said an hour in an ER makes their own life feel less frantic, a reminder for the team that, unlike in the show, no one lives or dies by their decisions. Ward's favorite products are Granola, an early favorite that Ward praised for continued innovation and responsiveness to feedback, and Wispr Flow for sending quick voice notes to the team.
Ward's personal motto has three parts, which Ward also tries to teach their kids: work hard, do great work (and don't confuse the two), and be helpful. Ward says they'll answer any founder's email or take a 10-minute call, and credits that habit with helping attract people to the team. On parenting, Ward called it humbling, a "mini mirror" and feedback mechanism, and their greatest joy. Ward connected it to careers: the most rewarding periods tend to be when you were "a little bit over your skis" and figured it out anyway. Lenny linked that to Molly Graham's "J curve."
Asked what to plug, Ward pointed to Cursor, mentioned its model flexibility, and noted that cost has become a legitimate factor in choosing a model for each task. Ward also said training on what Ward called the world's largest data center, through SpaceX, has "unlocked" Cursor's models. Ward closed by saying they aren't very active online, prefer to let the team's work speak for itself, and remain "always down to be helpful."
You have built and are known as someone that can build the most elite high talent density teams. Let's start with how people do it wrong, something you call the funnel of doom.
Companies think about recruiting like a funnel. I'm going to reach out to 100 people. 20% of those will apply. By definition, that is not the top 20%. That is just the 20 people who you caught on a bad day. The way we all recruit is we kind of weed people out at each stage and we hire the remainder. In your mind, they're okay, there are 50 people in the world who can do this. Let's go find those 50 people and you relentlessly pursue and you focus your energy on activating those people, not trying to find them out of the funnel of doom.
The mistake that most companies make is they'll say, "Hey Lenny, who's the best product engineer you know?" That is the worst question you can ask. The better question to ask is, "Hey Lenny, of all the product engineers you've worked with, who stands out to you as the person who's most collaborative with designers? Or who can translate a framework into a product better than anyone you've ever seen?"
When you're looking for that first recruiting hire, is there anything you think is important to look for?
Recruiters are excellent at 90 to 110% capacity and are terrible outside of that. If they only have half a req load, they kind of are useless. But they're kind of great at this edge of adrenaline rush busy. You want to find those people.
What are some things you've learned about building incredible teams, keeping people working for you over the long term?
When you look at candidate satisfaction scores, the number one thing that's always there
Today my guest is Adam Ward. Adam is known in the Valley as the most effective recruiting leader at building elite high talent density teams. He co-founded an independent recruiting firm called Growth by Design, which Cursor acquired fully last year, which is not something that you often hear and is a testament to how good he and his team are and how important talent is right now in today's market. Adam is now head of talent at Cursor, helping them scale and build one of the most talent dense teams in the world. Prior to starting his own firm, Adam led global recruiting at Pinterest, growing the company from 200 to over 2,000 employees. And before that, he led a global team of 65 recruiters across 10 offices at Facebook, helping them scale Facebook's tech org from 1,000 to over 10,000 employees. If hiring the best people is your number one priority, as it should be, this conversation will open your mind up to what it takes to do that. Adam gets super tactical and extremely specific, and you're going to thank me for inviting Adam on this podcast to share all of this incredible advice. A huge thank you to Brie Wolfson, Janet Fishberg, Jill Macre, Mike Joiner, and Tim Kendall for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation.
Before we get into it, don't forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for a free year of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI products in the world, available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Adam Ward.
Adam, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.
Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure.
You've been doing this for 20 years now, hiring, recruiting, building teams. How different is the market we're in today? How crazy is the hiring market we're in today?
If there's a scale, it's an 11. But, you know, I do think there are similarities to some other markets we've been in over time. You know, you mentioned the years, like there was a moment in time where a lot of companies were moving to mobile. And there literally was not a mobile engineer, like an iOS engineer was not a thing. You know, and so there was a scramble for talent to, you know, build your mobile app and things like that. There was this moment that that was a thing and it has some similarities to that market and moment. I think that really the difference here is everything here is just so compressed.
So, that mobile moment was two years, maybe. You know, where there were no mobile engineers and then there were mobile engineer boot camps, all these things. You know, now we're in days. We're in weeks, you know, there are no months or year measures right now. And so that's what makes this feel very different.
The other thing that feels very different about this market is there's many people doing extremely well. It's the most competitive, as you said, 11 out of 10 for specific roles. A lot of other people are just really struggling, having a really hard time finding jobs.
Yeah, it's a tale of two cities, really. You can read back-to-back headlines of, you know, NBA salary offers to a new grad PhD and the next line being a blue-chip company laying off 10% of workforce. You know, how can both of these things be true? And you see this shift of how companies are doing work and getting work done. And I really believe we're in this moment where there's this resettlement of talent and labor and how work gets done. And I really believe that there will be a resettlement and there will be a shift and this will come back, but I feel like we're in one of the largest gaps of those worlds right now that I believe will, and I want to believe will, come back closer together.
This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor WorkOS. What do OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, Replit, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on, SCIM, RBAC, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS. And that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seed-stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or a unicorn expanding globally, WorkOS is the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready and unblocking growth.
It's essentially Stripe for enterprise features. Visit workos.com to get started or just hit up their Slack where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise ready today.
What are roles that are kind of trending up, the most in demand right now? And what are maybe less and less in demand? And you have a really unique perspective because not only are you at Cursor now, but before that you had your own independent agency working with a ton of different companies. So, you got to see across a lot of different places. What's kind of trending up? What's most in demand and what's maybe softer now?
Yeah, I think one thing that is really in demand is this, and there's lots of different names for it, but this forward deployed engineer, this technical person who can partner with a sales team and partner with a customer to deploy what can be, for some audiences in a company, a very technical and maybe overwhelming product, or helping companies think about moving from token maxing to optimizing. And so, that's I think a new skill as CFOs start to get the bill coming in. You know, the companies are able to help partner with them to think about what's the best solution for them. So, that's a really unique skill because you're deeply technical yourself. You understand the product, but you can also walk into a room with executives and leaders and help conjugate some of that and then even help them deploy that into their workforce. I think that's a real supply demand issue right now.
I think maybe the thing that is waning, I would say, is the specialized technical person. You know, it's because I think you almost see this squeezing together of engineer, product, design in some ways, where we would love a designer who can actually be more of a design engineer, right? And we want that super deep technical engineer that has a little bit stronger product sense. And so you kind of see that. So I think the people who are maybe very narrow, very deep, and overly specialized in a way are waning. In the same way, along that vein, might also be the new grad who just hasn't had enough experience to be able to do that, where a product like Cursor or others can do some of that work right now.
This is extremely interesting. I haven't heard it put this way before. Interestingly, with the FDE role, it feels similar to the mobile example you shared, where very few people have actually been forward deployed engineers. So what's kind of the, I don't know, the look of a person that can become an FDE?
Yeah, I actually think it is that engineer, it is that person who maybe was a full stack engineer three to five years ago, is now maybe actually that forward deployed engineer, right? And so you talk to some of these folks and they actually like it, it kind of unlocks something in them. They're kind of moving out of the terminal and moving into the company, you know, and into the customers and clients. And for the right person that's super energizing, kind of unlocks another chapter, or maybe an unexpected chapter in their career.
That is interesting. I was expecting you to say AI researchers. This is interesting. And I imagine 'cause there's not as many of those roles.
I think so. I think it's just that's a very defined set. And so it's a very clear bracket of what that is and how many there are and where they are. And I think that sometimes the bigger challenges are the nebulous things or the very new things that I think are sometimes just as challenging as the scarcity ones of an AI or ML engineer.
Just as a final question along these lines, what about just the core product, design, engineering roles? Are those kind of steady as they've been? Is one increasing, decreasing? How's that looking?
I think they're high, but I think you probably see a lot of conversation out there around this, you know, where I think we're getting a little bit back, in a good way, to the craft of things. And so if you think about what AI can do in the design world, it can also create a lot of slop in its own way. And so I'm an optimist. You'll probably hear that throughout. And I think it's just a better way to live. But I think what AI will hopefully help us get back to is the craft of what we do. You know, and maybe an appreciation for it. And I see that in the design world too.
And is that kind of saying ICs are more in demand, and especially ICs that have good taste, good judgment? Is that kind of the core?
Yeah, I think, you know, we've seen this for maybe the last 12, the rise of the power IC. And the recognition and appreciation for that work I think has come almost in a full circle moment for them. But I think taste, decision-making, problem-solving, these characteristics, curiosity, in all the good ways I think are coming back up to the surface.
Awesome. Okay. So let me kind of zoom out and frame the conversation that I'm hoping we have broadly. You have built and are known as someone that can build the most elite high talent density teams. So many people kept telling me you were the person that does this better than anyone else. This is every company's and founder's dream: build the highest talent density team. So I'm going to go through this in a sequence. Let's start with something you call the funnel of doom hiring. Talk about the funnel of doom. What is the funnel of doom?
Yeah. And this is a concept I got to recognize my very first, as an intern actually, in 1998 at a company called Trilogy, which is a somewhat infamous company around recruiting and it's kind of where I learned the trade. My very first manager, Jeff Daniel, we did this campus tour around the country talking to CS students and that's where I first heard the term. He coined that term so I had to acknowledge that. But I think the funnel, forever, almost forever as you think about the recruiting history, companies think about recruiting like a funnel. You know, maybe akin to a sales funnel. Right? Where they think about different stages, pass-through rates and things like that.
And when you think about how most companies have recruited over these last several decades, it's really been candidates come from kind of three buckets. They apply, they are activated or sourced, or they're referred. But if you kind of think about it, for a lot of companies who think about talent density, typically referrals and sourcing or activation of passive talent is really the focus. And when you kind of even narrow further on this source talent, this is how most companies think about it. I am going to reach out to 100 people. 20 people will reply, just for round numbers. So 20% of those will reply. By definition, that is not the top 20%, that is just the 20 people who you caught on a bad day for them. Good day for you, bad day for them. And so, you're starting with a sub-optimal set. You're not starting with the top 20%. And then the way we all recruit is we kind of weed people out at each stage and we hire the remainder. So, this remainder hiring is the output of the funnel of doom.
And when you say that out loud, you're like, that's kind of messed up. If I think about building a talent-dense company over time, is that really the best approach? Or does that kind of get me just above average over time, assuming I have really good interview process and hygiene and all these things? You kind of regress to the mean over time as you get to volume.
And so, we just think about this in a different way: what if you had confidence up front of who the top 20% was and then you use your assessment process to validate that thesis of who those are? That seems like a better, you know, so there's this funnel of doom, but within a funnel of doom there's this pillar of excellence. What if you started with the pillar of excellence and went from there versus having this wide funnel? 'Cause imagine how expensive that is to do remainder-based hiring and you kind of hire the person who drops to the bottom.
I love this, especially hearing this. This is how hiring has been forever and just hearing you describe it, it's clear this is not optimal. Why hasn't this changed ever?
There is something detrimental about comparing it to a sales funnel. Because in a sales funnel, you know, as a salesperson you're typically selling a widget, a piece of software, an item. Those things are relatively static and rational. In recruiting, you have an irrational unit of a hiring manager and recruiter and another irrational unit of a candidate. And so, to believe that things are transactional and linear and pass through in the same ways, I think is a bit of a fallacy. But sales has been around for hundreds of years? You know, a long time. Recruiting as a craft, in this kind of way, is like 50 years? 40 years? You know, so we're behind on it, but as humans, we often try to relate a problem to another problem that we know. And so, I think this connectedness to sales has been somewhat detrimental to companies as they think about doing this in a more strategic way.
So, let's follow this thread and help
make it very clear what you're describing here. The way I've heard you describe this is you treat every hire as an executive recruiting sort of hire and the goal is to go for the top 1% of people out in the world versus kind of who you kind of drops in the funnel. Talk more about just that kind of way of thinking about it.
So, if you've ever worked on like a senior specialist hire or leadership role done well, there's roughly like three main steps. One is scoping. And so, if you think about going after the 1%, the most important step is getting really clear on what 1% means to you. And so, if you've ever heard that phrase like I'll know it when I see it, I'll know what great looks like, you actually won't. You won't know cuz you haven't spent like the time objectively identifying what great looks like.
And so, when you think about scoping, if we can just dive into that, the cornerstone piece, really good scoping is thinking about what are like the skills and experiences you're looking for. You stack rank these things, you get really clear objectively before you talk to any candidate, but it sets up your entire process. It sets up your sourcing strategy. It sets up your pitch for them cuz you're asking questions like why is this role important? What would success look like? It really helps you craft those things. It also helps you set up your assessment process of like what you're going to be assessing against. It helps you think about kind of that close of like, "Why this person and why this role is going to have big impact here?" So, I think that piece of the hiring process is under invested in. But in a leadership search, that is often like known to be a really strong cornerstone.
So, let's say you take like this really good scoping and then you pair it with really good market mapping, intelligence, and signals to give you confidence of who the very best people are. So, when you're doing a leadership search, for example, you're like, "Okay, there's really in your mind like, hey, there are 50 people in the world who can do this. Let's go find those 50 people." Right? And so, that approach, I think you can do at scale if you do that really good scoping and get really clear on what that looks like. And then you take that list of 50 people, those targets, and you relentlessly pursue and you focus your energy on activating those people, not trying to find them out of the funnel of doom, you know, large population.
Amazing. I imagine everyone listening to this is going to be like, "We need Adam on our team ASAP." Unfortunately, you're locked in at a company and so we're going to do our best to try to extract as much wisdom as we can in this conversation because you have a job. So, this is great. So, kind of the three steps here that you walked through of how to approach hiring from this perspective, the way that executives are hired. This idea of going after top 1%. So, step one was be very clear on what top percent looks like. So, just to kind of mirror back what you just shared, be clear on the skills you need and kind of stack rank, here's the skills we need from them. This person, what experiences we're looking for and stack rank that. Talk about why this role is impactful and just why this is so important. Is there anything else there just to flesh that up?
Those are the general buckets. Like every company will have other specific things that really matter. But, yeah, those would be the things. And remember, these are things you're not asking are what companies are they from? These are objective, somewhat transferable things. Versus trying to piggyback off of someone else's process or definition of great. Cuz we just said almost every company's doing this wrong or has company doing funnel of doom. So, why would we mirror or map someone else's process that we feel like maybe wasn't perfect? And your company is different, your product is different. And so, you owe it to yourself to kind of identify what does great look like for you and who's going to be successful in this role in this product versus what was successful for someone else in a process that maybe you don't have full confidence in anyway.
So, you're saying specifically don't focus on and it's a trap to focus on the logos on the resume.
I think so. Yeah. There are clearly vintages of companies when you're like, "Hey, you know, this team at this company at this time did fantastic things. And possibly because that person was on that team at that company at that time, they are great." Possibly. That can be like shorthand. But most companies jump to that almost immediately.
Awesome. Okay. Step two is mapping out and finding basically the top 50. What are tools that help you do that? Is it like LinkedIn? Is it something else?
I think it's a combination of things. But where we typically start is a set of people who we trust in terms of having high taste in talent. And so, but I think the mistake though, and that's an obvious point, but the mistake that most companies make is they'll say, "Hey Lenny, who's the best product engineer you know?" That is the worst question you can ask. The better question to ask is, "Hey, Lenny, of all the product engineers you worked with, who stands out to you as the person who's most collaborative with designers? Or who can translate a framework into a product better than anyone you've ever seen?" You have to put these very specific characteristics or skills or needs for your team, and then that's way easier for you to conjure up people that way than like this broad question of who's the best person.
And I imagine that maps to the step one, which is where you map the skills, experience, and all that.
you're asking are mapping back to that cornerstone work that you did in step one. So, when you ask the right targeted questions to a set of people, you actually start to triangulate around the same names. Like, "Ah, Lenny mentioned them, but so did Sally. Let's put this person on the list, on the target list."
Okay, so part of the strategy here is you talk to people you trust who are awesome, whose taste you trust, ask them these questions. What else helps you find these people in the world?
So, if you think about, let's pull out like the set of characteristics. Like, "Okay, the characteristics of someone we want is like really curious, systems thinker, whatever they might be." Maybe two or three things. Then you're like thinking about, "What companies also share that approach to how they hire?" And you could literally probably do a quick Boolean or AI string and be like, "Hey, look at all the job openings in the world among these 100 companies, which ones also say these characteristics matter?" Right? So, you kind of think about, "Ooh, where could they maybe have picked up some of these skills for a company who also said that that matters as well." And so, then you start to kind of build like company lists that aren't the normal list you have, but they might show up there, too, but let's validate it through the things that we objectively said we wanted for us.
It's so interesting. Systems thinking has come up on the last four podcasts I've done. Such a trending up attribute people are looking for these days.
Yeah, I think it's always been there a little bit, but I think it's just become really accentuated now in this era.
When you hear the term systems thinking, what's kind of a way you describe what that actually means when people hear that term?
I learned this pretty early, maybe in the second company I worked for. And it comes around to a fundamental question of what problem are we trying to solve? Right? And so when I think about systems thinking or when I'm sitting around like, what is like the fundamental root question problem that we're trying to solve? And then how do we take this like larger problem and break it into really small pieces? And I've fortunately been working with engineers most of my life and I just really have learned and I admired how they can take something that's really big and break it into, kind of start to tackle that problem. As long as you're anchored into like what is the overall thing that we're trying to solve here.
Awesome, very helpful. People always hear these terms and they're like, yeah, yeah, I'm a great systems thinker. And so it's always helpful to just hear from different people what that actually means.
You know, I think systems thinking sounds very strategic, but actually I think it's extremely tactical. The very best systems thinkers take these things and put them into like very small tactics and start to remove, you know, tactic by tactic, kind of remove the problem, remove the blocker.
So to close the thread on this step of finding these incredible people, what I'm hearing is mostly it's kind of sit around, talk to people, and just jam in a doc probably of here's people that people recommend, here's companies to look at.
Yeah, and there are tools and there's LinkedIn, there's all these things too. But I think the most valuable one is the most time-intensive one. Which is you spending time digging into people's networks. You know, we've shared this before, but people on my team whose entire job is to dig into our current employees' networks.
You could automate that. You could use an AI tool and have it walk them through a facilitation of it, but nothing beats you and I sitting down every other week for 6 weeks and diving into people. You're like, "Hey, last session you gave me these three names. I checked out like, and then, but what about this person?" You're like, "Oh, yeah. They were great, too." Like, "Oh, well, what's going to happen?" So, you kind of go back to back. And by the way, I'm also holding you accountable for you sending out notes. And what did they say? Oh, they replied? You're going to send another note? And so, kind of this like one-to-one, hand-to-hand cultivating of signal, I think it's really important. Of course, those signals go into like a system and a database, but the extraction I think is a hugely personal and effective approach.
This all sounds very time-intensive and slow and lots of work. You know, there's a reason companies don't hire this way, treat everyone as an exec cuz they're not execs. They're, you know, IC engineers, PMs. How do you talk about that trade-off of taking this approach knowing that it's going to take a lot more time and effort?
Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I usually will ask a question, so founder, like, you know, in all the things that are important to you, where does talent fall into that list? And like, ah, it's number one. Like, talent is the most important thing. Okay. So, if talent is the number one thing, it's not about time or cost, like this is where the focus should be. And so, if talent is number one, then there should be no obstacles in terms of effort or resourcing or time put in to get there cuz that is paramount to your success. You just said that objectively. And so, you know, both can't be true, you know, you can't say, "Hey, it's the most important thing and I'm going to outsource it or I'm going to hand it over to a recruiting organization to do." If it's the number one thing, that is your focus.
Like hearing that, obviously correct. Why would you not do that? And then there's like, holy, everything's on fire all the time. I have to make time for all this stuff, all these meetings and it's just like, is there anything you do to help keep a founder and a team on track and just sticking to this plan knowing it's so much work and time?
Yeah, I mean typically the founders are keeping the company on track around that at the very best companies. And part of keeping on track means like keeping top of mind. You know, there's also the adage of like what gets measured gets done. So if it's an important thing, we measure it just like we might measure uptime or we might measure customer satisfaction or we might measure revenue and we hold those teams accountable. We also hold hiring managers and leaders and organizations accountable to hiring. And so keeping it top of mind but putting in the right systems around rewards and recognition and all those things around it will help people keep it as a priority. But if you aren't measuring it, they will hand that over or they will shirk that responsibility to somewhere else.
Yeah, one of your big pet peeves is basically empowering the recruiters and hiring managers not being deeply involved in the process.
Yeah, I think at a lot of companies the recruiting owns the hiring goal. And I've yet to be in a company where recruiters are making hiring decisions. So these things are in conflict. Hiring managers or leaders or committees are making hiring decisions. And I feel like the recruiter's goal is really about helping provide confidence to that hiring manager to make the right decision. They're a confidence engine. They're not a decision-making engine.
And so I see a lot of companies where they lose the thread is when they essentially hand over the act of recruiting to a function of recruiting. Right? And so no one should care more about a hire, no one gets the joy or the pain of a good and bad hire than that hiring manager and that team. So why then is a recruiter or recruiting organization holding that accountability when they don't have the decision-making, let alone the benefits or pain or cost of a good or bad hire.
I want to come back to this, it's like a different funnel but I'll call it a funnel. Would you still describe it as a funnel but the funnel of non-doom or another term cuz it's still kind of a funnel?
Yeah. Yeah, there could be, not all funnels are bad so yeah, they're all good.
talent density.
Yeah.
So coming back to how to discover the best people, luckily there's this incredible post out there about how Cursor approaches hiring by Brie Wolfson that was very helpful in helping me prep for this talk and another tactic that she shared of how Cursor finds the best people is there's a Slack channel called hiring ideas and people on the team just share here's someone we might want to hire.
It's super active. You know, we could pull it up right now. There's someone we want to, let's see what people [laughter] are. Yeah, maybe we can get some audience input on it.
So the general gist is someone will come across something impressive, a product, a post, what they overheard at a barbecue and they'll drop that person's profile or that X post into the hiring channel and it becomes a rallying effect around, ooh, I've heard of them. I know, here's how we get to, here's what I think is compelling to them. You almost like create this quick strategy of how we might engage this person.
And imagine working at a place where the company just is wired that way, where people are excited and enthusiastic and love the thrill of the hunt and want to work with great people. And so we're just very fortunate to have that as an ongoing tailwind.
But that was like an early expectation, if you will. An early, almost like, I'm going to say it's almost like social credibility in the company to be able to surface someone who is great and then people come in and help out and try to get them into the process. So that's such a good, like, we are not initiating that. We're not dropping in a profile, does anyone know this person? This is non-recruiting folks in the company dropping in ideas and then the company rallying behind it.
Amazing. So this is just a really good way to just, if we zoom out again, the
way most companies hire, there's this funnel: people apply, people refer and they kind of work through, and then you try to reach out and kind of work through and pick a few people at the bottom. And your point there is this is not the top people, because they're not going to apply to you, they're not going to make it through the funnel. You don't even know what you're hiring for a lot of times.
Right. Correct. Correct. And, by the way, all the hiring ideas aren't always great ideas. They aren't always right for us, but it becomes this almost tangential injection into the hiring process that is often a great outcome.
And so just to maybe make very clear how different this approach is, it's the opposite. It's figure out who are the best top 50 people for this role in the world and then relentlessly pursue them.
Mhm. Yeah.
So let's talk about that part of it. How to actually relentlessly pursue people. What are some tactics and stories there of just how you convince these top people to actually talk to you and then join?
Yeah. Yeah, and I think one of the things you said a few minutes ago is, well, hey, this can be a very slow process. Right? And if you're at a zero point, your day zero, that can feel like a slow burn. But imagine over multiple days, you're actually planting all of these seeds with potential top 50 people. They're going to come to harvest at different rates. But you've got to plant the seeds. You've got to start. Because it will take weeks for some, months for others. I have stories of years, a year that we've worked on candidates. But you have to start the clock on that. And so how we think about this relentless pursuit is you'll often reach, you know, one step is just getting them into a conversation, getting a response, getting some kind of engagement.
But most people will tell you, if you get them, it's not good timing. Here's all the reasons I can't do it. And you're like, "Hey, I'm not asking you to interview. I'm not asking you to consider a role. I'm asking for a next conversation." And so when they say, "Hey, it's not really a good timing for me right now, maybe in the late fall," you're like, "Hey, totally, that's great. But also, do you want to come by for a coffee and see the office? Can I introduce you to this other person on the team who's really fascinated by your work? Can you go chat?" And so let's say it is true they can't join till late fall. That doesn't mean you're not connecting them and having conversations on a weekly basis and working that piece. And it can only move it forward. By doing nothing and actually talking to them in the late fall, at best you get them, if they're still interested then, or someone else has grabbed them.
So we think about this continual touchpoint approach to getting them into process. But again, we're willing to do that over days, weeks, months, and sometimes years.
When you reach out to someone and mention working at Cursor, now it's part of SpaceX, it's like, oh, this is interesting and cool. And you know, you never know, maybe it'll work out someday. A lot of companies, and you've worked with other companies, are not as interesting of a brand and as successful. Is there any advice for folks to get someone over the line to even talk that works? And I imagine it's all very particular, but just any advice there.
Yeah, I think it's really spending a lot of time up front to get a sense of what could be engaging for them. So, who might that be and what might that topic be? There are a number of excellent people in the world who aren't on any platform. There's no information about them. But for most, you can get a couple nuggets. We spend a lot of time here thinking about who can create a warm intro to that person. Almost as much effort goes into that as it does into the actual messaging, because if you get the right person, that accelerates it. Right? And once someone's ignored one thing, it's much easier for them to ignore the second and third. But if you get the first one right, you condense that activation timeline and effort.
I've heard that you often say caring is free.
Yeah.
Talk about that, because it feels like that connects throughout this entire process.
Yeah, I think there's all kinds of tactics out there that are of varying degrees of cost. But out-caring other companies, when I've built recruiting teams, that's something that we've always talked about. We can care more about that candidate than anyone else. That's in us. That's within us. We can do that. And I think over the history of time, when you look at candidate satisfaction scores, the number one thing that's always there is the company genuinely wanted me. They genuinely made it feel like I belonged there. And so the more that we can care for our candidates and demonstrate that, I think it's an unfair advantage, and it's in all of us.
And so that is an effort and that is an extra-step type of thing. It's the extra intentionality that you take. In a somewhat transactional-feeling business like recruiting, if you're doing this step-by-step funnel of doom, you kind of get caught up in the steps. You get caught up in the numbers game. I need to reach out to 100 to get to 20. I need to have 10 hiring manager screens to get four on-sites. You get caught up in the numbers and you lose the human element. You're looking for the one. So I remind my team, we're trying to hire one person for this role here, not 10. So don't get caught up in the 10. Focus on the one.
That is such a big reframe in this way of thinking. As you said, instead of this funnel of we need 200 people at the top to get one at the bottom, you're just like, here's the 50 people that would be the best 50 in the world for this. We just need one of these 50. It feels a lot more doable.
And hopefully we're building relationships with dozens of others that could be. So when you talk about this being slow, we're planting seeds. Planting seeds, we're planting seeds. And I think the other thing that often happens when you get into this funnel of doom mentality is you become overly consistent in your hiring approach. And we are very comfortable with bespoke and ad hoc hiring. That doesn't mean we don't have similar stages for consistency, but who that next conversation is, what they might focus on, I think we get a little robotic sometimes in recruiting with that. So a lot of companies, as they get into higher volume hiring, might say, "Hey, we have a pool of these interviewers who can do this type of interview."
And they just let fate decide. They let availability decide who has that next conversation. But the savvy recruiter or the savvy hiring manager is like, "Ooh, they mentioned this thing. Who on our team has that shared interest in that pool?" Right? Can we be a little bit more prescriptive, and can we orchestrate a much better candidate experience by taking the extra thoughtful step of who might have a better conversation together?
It's so interesting hearing just how important that initial contact is for the rest of the process, and how much of this is for future seed planting versus even immediately.
Yeah, I feel like we put so much energy into the onsite interview, which I totally get, but honestly the most important one is that hiring manager first conversation. And so it kind of feels like this 50/50, like, hey, half the people you talk to as hiring manager should come on. I think we underestimate the importance of it, because this is who you're going to work with. This is the person who's going to make the hiring decision, and so they should be asking the most important questions. They should be pulling out the most important motivators from that candidate. And I feel like sometimes we put it into a 30-minute thing. Often it's like 30 minutes, and it feels so important to the rest of that process.
Especially if, instead of we just need this funnel and work through a bunch of people, it's this is one of the 50 in the world that could be the best for this.
You might meet three times, right? You might meet four times as a hiring manager before that person is actually fully in process.
The way Brie described this in her piece is that the atomic unit of hiring is the person, not the job spec and not the role.
Correct. And so that makes it incredibly frustrating, I imagine, for my team, because you're like, oh, what's the process? And you're like, well, it's almost like a decision tree. It could go many different ways based off of this conversation. But when you are not caught in the numbers game, it feels a little bit less scary, when you're really focused on how do we get that person here versus are they the right person for that job?
And because they're on this list, they're innately very popular and in demand. Is there anything else that works for getting them excited to talk and interested, other than the warm intro things you shared?
Yeah, I mean, we've done lots of tactics to get them involved. One thing I just love is breaking bread. Having a meal with someone is one of the most human and leveling things that you can do. Sharing a meal across the table is just a disarming act and a joining act. That I think is just so important. So that could be a coffee, it could be a lunch, it doesn't have to be super formal, but I just think it is this humanizing activity that is really important. So we try to center around food and drink as much as possible.
We've done other things I think are very useful, which is, if they are one of these 50 people, they might be somewhat famous or well-respected, they probably have an expertise: having them come in and give a talk to the team, having them come in and do a fun side project. These people love to share and learn and they're curious. But also it demonstrates increased interactivity between the two teams around quality and kind of gives them this realistic preview of being there. We try to play home games as much as we can, bringing them into the office. But we also understand some of the folks early on might want to go to a neutral site, a coffee shop or something, too. But we try to play home games when we can, because you have the power of the team. And so, you know,
one analogy I think about is, when some people are considering university early in their lives, you kind of walk onto a campus and you get that feel in your gut. You can't really describe it, it's just like, "Ooh, this feels like home." We want people to feel that when they walk into the offices of Cursor, and that is a priceless moment. It can be a defining moment. It also could not hit, and it's good to suss that out early, too. But for a lot of people, it does hit, and we like that moment.
This resonates so deeply with early days Airbnb. I remember Joe Gebbia had the saying, "Just get them in the elevator." And this is because the office was on the second floor of this building. You had to go in this elevator to get in, and that was the whole strategy, just get them in the elevator.
Yeah. Yeah. That was more than half the battle.
Along these lines of breaking bread and home court, I know this might be one of the reasons you guys have a Cafe Cursor right there near the office, and now it's happening all over the world. I think Ben leads this work, but there's all these cafes popping up all over the world.
Yeah, I think it's been interesting. Obviously it's very much focused on the product and the user, but he and that team have done a really good job of taking that vibe and putting it into a moment. If you've been in the Cursor office, it almost feels like you're in a Hogwarts library. It's very warm and soft, and cafes bring that energy as well. And so we've tried to lift that and drop that in really around the world.
And there's also a lot of chalkboards at the office.
A lot of chalkboards. Again, it has this disarming, warm feel that I think really exudes our Midwest vibes. That is sometimes how I describe Cursor. Very hard working, very ambitious, but at the same time the work speaks for itself, and understated as well. And so I think a lot of our office helps evoke those vibes, too.
This episode is brought to you by Mercury. Radically different banking loved by over 300,000 entrepreneurs. And now with Command. I've been a customer of Mercury's for over 6 years. I have never once thought about leaving. Mercury is basically what happens when banking is built by product people, not by bankers. They make it so easy, dare I say fun, to send invoices, move money around, set up virtual cards for folks on my team. Does your bank have an API, a terminal-native CLI, or an AI-ready MCP server? I don't think so.
And just recently they launched Command, a conversational interface built directly into Mercury, which acts as your financial operator. I've been using Command to transfer money around, to figure out what categories I've been spending the most money in, analyze my cash flows, and just today I used it to find out how much I've made from a specific sponsor over the past year. I just asked, "How much have I made from X over the past year?" 10 seconds later I have an answer. It is so freaking cool. Visit mercury.com to learn more and apply online in minutes. Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., members FDIC.
Okay, so if people have been following along, we're working our way through the funnel. This is kind of my strategy here. So we've talked about how to figure out what you're looking for, figure out who these people are, how to get them talking to you. So you've got them in the interview stage. What are some things you've learned about how to increase your signal on the person and identify if they're a good fit and someone you want to make an offer to?
Yeah, some of it's a little fundamental, which is research has shown that work samples are the highest predictor of success at a company. But yet most companies are still spending a lot of time doing one-to-one, across-the-table assessments. And so I think we are famously known for doing long on-site experiences for some of our roles, where they do a project and they get to work side-by-side. So that gives us a very strong signal. It also gives the candidate tremendous signal.
And so I think this is where most companies get it wrong on the on-site. They're almost always buying. This is like, we are assessing, we're extracting information. We're not giving much back to the candidate. And I'm a big fan of the power of self-selection. Really good self-selection serves really good inputs and data. And so we want that experience with the candidate to feel more two-way than most.
So we really think about crafting that on-site experience through who they might meet. We talked about that, really clearly handpicking who they might meet for those interviews. We do a lot of work sample and project type
of work to give us good signal, but we also really curate who's greeting them, who's sitting beside them for lunch. Like, we always try to put it around a meal, a dinner, or lunch, or a breakfast. And everything is really curated to make that as high quality an experience for them and get them the data, but also us getting data from people that we feel like are the most going to connect with that person.
Who runs point on this sort of experience? Is it a recruiter or is it the hiring manager?
I would say I think it's the recruiter primarily as the quarterback, but they're pulling lots of levers. And so the hiring manager is probably going to have the most insight into some of those people. Our recruiting coordinators are tremendous, and they do a lot of this hosting with us as well. And so our recruiting coordinators of course do some scheduling, but they're probably doing more of this candidate shepherding. So imagine a candidate was with us for a day or two, there's lots of moving pieces and helping them move from a workstation where they might be doing a project into lunch, back to that, helping them get their environment set up. So there's a lot of people in play. We ask our recruiter to be the quarterback, but a lot of the insights come from hiring managers and execution with the coordinator, too.
It's interesting just how much of the experience and process changes with this worldview of: every person we are talking to is very special, they're very rare, and these are the best for this role. And so it's clear how much of it trickles down into thinking deeply about every touchpoint along the journey versus the typical journey.
And imagine that you have teams and an employee base who understand that well, because they went through it. So you get over this tipping point moment with the company where they had that experience. So they recognize, acknowledge, and now they're part of it. How fun is that, right? They had a great experience, now they get to help deliver that for this next batch of people. So you kind of create this flywheel opportunity once you get over that initial hump.
I just remembered actually, I had a friend applying for a job at Crossover and he said it was the best candidate experience he's ever had.
That's amazing.
Just remembered that.
And so by definition, we thought about doing a lot of scoping of really great people. Not all of them are going to be a fit for us, by their choice or ours. But every one of them can walk away as a net promoter. And again, by definition, they're some of the best. Those promoters weigh more and count more than others because they're influential, they're great, they're known to be good. And so they may never come back to us, but they might tell you, who now tells his audience, or they might tell you, and then you mention something at a barbecue, and now it becomes this groundswell and you start to build a little stronger magnet, and that activation becomes a little bit less hard if you do that well.
Absolutely. The work trial piece: I saw an interview with Michael Truell talking about this, and he said they tried to get rid of it because it obviously adds a lot of load and some people don't want to be doing these things, and he said that it just totally tanked their signal and they had to bring it back.
Yeah, it's a huge commitment of time, you can imagine. But if talent is your number one thing, then that is a good investment of time. We all have a role to play in recruiting at the company. Not everyone is carved out for, or best at, work trial work, but some are. Some can do the lunch. Some can do the greet. So there's lots of different ways that people can play a role. But yeah, when we ran that experiment, because it is quite expensive and it is also a big ask of candidates, we really struggled to have confidence in our decision. Again, this is a confidence-building function. And so we are excited to bring it back.
So a good learning there is: if you are not doing this, you're lacking significant signal.
Possibly. Yeah, I think so. I don't think there are a lot of maximums or absolutes in this business. But I think for a lot of companies, it's hard to think of a better way than doing side-by-side real work to get those signals. Obviously, in this case some of it is a technical signal, but imagine the amount of core values and collaboration and other signals you get over a stretch of time that can be arguably more important than the specific technical skill.
What do you do for PMs or, I don't know, go-to-market or ops people? Is there something like that?
Yeah, we have a version of this across functions. The go-to-market team does a challenge where there's a problem they work through together, like a challenging customer and things like that. And that's often one-to-one with the hiring manager. Product does a similar project type together as well. So we have versions of that that I feel are tailored to the function, but also the role and things like that as well. So we try to be uniform across this, because these functions are very different.
One of the classic criticisms with the work trial is you're doing work for the company, and it's like, I would just solve problems for you for free.
Yeah.
What's the velocity on the problem they tackle, say, engineering or PM?
Yeah, there's a set of problems they can choose from. And so we feel like they have some direction and discretion. We also are very open to right-sizing it for them based on where they are and their availability and time, to a certain extent. So we try to be flexible and understanding around that. And we'll sometimes use Saturdays too. We understand it can be hard to take time away on a traditional work week, and so we totally get it. It's a big ask, a big commitment. We think it's worth it, but we're also willing to schedule it when that works for them.
So there's this conflict around a lot of time and effort that could feel slow. But when they're ready to go, we are fast. Right? We make up that time. So if you and I were having an initial screen and you're like, "Yeah, I'll be able to talk in two," I'm like, "Open up your calendar. I have their calendar. Great, you're going to talk to them in an hour." Right? So once they're ready to go, you've got to capitalize on that. You can't create openings for second-guessing. So when we go, we go, but it might take a lot of time to get up to that moment.
Moving ourselves further down the funnel, what's the moment when you decide we're going to make this person an offer? Is there something that you look for specifically, or just what's the process, like a hiring committee meeting or something else?
Yeah, we debrief as immediately as possible as a team. Each function has a little bit of a different hiring process, but we don't have hiring committees; it is hiring manager led. They get lots of input from the team. And remember the role of the hiring manager: it's not a democracy. The hiring manager is holding that group accountable for helping get them the right inputs to make the best decision, hire or no hire. And so we try to frame it in that way. Make sure we get really good signal on it. And we try to move really quickly. So debriefs are typically same day if not next day, and then we make that decision, and then that decision goes to the founders for stamping.
Awesome. Okay. Then you get to the offer stage. There's a bunch of stuff here, but one is just, there are many massive offers happening these days. Okay, so say you made an offer to one of these top 50 people and they're like, "Okay, but I also got this offer from Anthropic for a bazillion dollars." How do you handle that? And also, is that super frustrating, or is it like, "Oh wow, more signal this person is incredible"?
Yeah, I think it can be both. There's room for both. I think the goal is to not be selling at the close. We're trying to sell throughout. And so if you think about the craft of recruiting, the craft of recruiting is up front getting really clear on this person's motivations, and why they might make a move and for what. And then making sure that that entire experience hits those pieces. So the end is a culmination, not a start. Right? It feels almost like a natural outcome of it, where it's just like an assumptive next step of, "Yeah, and here's the offer that we talked about a lot," versus starting the clock or starting the conversation on a close.
I think we try to get back to those motivations, so we might think about how we would differentiate against intrinsic size-wise, or the role, or the team, or the people you work with. We really try to focus on the intrinsic things, not the extrinsic things, which is very hard to do when you're getting NBA player-like offers and salaries, and sometimes bigger than that. But we really try to focus on people who want to be here. And often when people are thinking about their job search and what might be next, they maybe start with a set of things and we maybe help them discover other things along the way. And we might discover at the end that this actually is not the right fit, and that's okay, and we feel good about walking away from that. But often it's about helping them discover through that journey that maybe this actually is the right place.
How often do people take a job that doesn't have the highest comp? Is that common or is that rare?
Yeah, I think you're trying to mitigate comp as a reason people come or don't come. And often that means it's not the highest number. We've all probably talked with people who at some point in their career chased just the largest number. And I think what you realize six months in is that just becomes your new level of comp expectation, comp life. But you're not excited about the people you work with or the work you're doing. And so we try to mitigate that as a piece, but I think that happens a lot.
And also rightfully so: we've probably lost people where maybe we were the highest one and they went somewhere else, too. And if that's the right fit for them, this is going to sound a little Pollyanna-ish, but I fundamentally believe there are right people for right companies at the right time. And if they discover at the end of that that we're not, that's the right call for them. And as a recruiter, if they're not the right fit, I literally have to redo that work in six months. I don't want to redo that work. I'd rather figure that out right now and have that more open conversation.
You should build an agent that helps you figure out which company is the right fit for you right now, at this time, because that sounds really valuable.
That would be super interesting.
Something that I've heard Anthropic does that I've never heard anyone do, similar to Tesla: they don't let you negotiate. They're just like, "Here's the offer." Do you feel like that's an only-Anthropic thing that they could do because they're just Anthropic, or is that something you think about?
I mean, I've thought about it. Over time different companies have done that. And I think what I respect about it is you make that call and you stick with it, and there's a commitment to it. But every company's different, and the approach is... So I respect it, and I think about it, but it may not be right for us.
From the candidate's perspective, what are some mistakes that people make when they get an offer that shoot themselves in the foot?
The general advice I give to candidates is when you think about your offer and if you're negotiating, it has to fit a line of logic. Right? And so if you are asking for a certain piece of compensation or a certain other piece of it, what is it rooted in? Walk me through the logic behind it. I think that makes it easy for that person to understand, but also easy for them to communicate that forward to maybe a different decision maker as well. So I see candidates who are maybe a little bit all over the place on that, where earlier it was this and now it's this, and it's kind of the add-on type of thing, versus a candidate who's coming in with, "Here's the four things that are important to me," and being clear and consistent with it from the outset as much as you can. Not all things can be there at the outset. That makes it very logical and easy for the company to engage with that.
Versus just finding random excuses for more income.
Correct. And I think what a company generally knows is if we're intrinsically not their top choice... Right? And so we're trying to win heads and hearts here. We're not trying to buy that out.
How mind-blowing are these comps these days? I imagine you've seen so many.
Yeah. I think it's all true and worse, or higher. I think the open question for a lot of us at the AI companies is where does it go from here? How does this end? Nobody knows. But it does feel like the unit of measure that matters the most is the most fixed and finite, which is time. It is a race against the clock to get the model, the talent, and that is the thing that matters the most, the most precious. Clearly for some companies there's more money and more other things, but time is the most fixed and important asset right here in this market.
Just coming back to the AI researcher trend, it's crazy how these people used to be just off on the side building these AI models, ML models, not that exciting to anybody, and now they're the most in demand.
And I remember I helped build out the research group at Facebook, before they really hired PhDs, advanced degrees, much at all. This is 2010 or something. And I remember meeting this set of academics, really, who were getting this growing frustration of their work never making it outside the halls of academia. And so I'm very excited for that population to have this moment. They've been arguably the underpinning of technical innovation for decades. And they're having their moment. Well, well deserved.
Kind of along those lines, to close out the funnel of, let's call it the funnel of joy instead of the funnel of doom...
Yeah, love it.
I heard from one of your candidates, here's the quote that I got: that you and your team's ability to close and convert candidates with offers to accept is extraordinary. What are some things you do that help get someone over the line who's on the fence?
Yeah, so I think there's a couple things there. One, I'll just re-mention quickly, which is that the closing is happening throughout the
process. In terms of like who they're meeting and motivations and like we're removing objections along the way.
So that's one. I think the second is closing is a team sport. And so, when we have a candidate, particularly like a high-profile, high-caliber, there are often daily stand-ups around that candidate about what we're doing to get them to yes. And that might be 10 minutes, but it's not the amount of time, it is like a focused energy every day around what we are collectively doing. And so that could be the hiring manager, recruiter, but also could be former peers. You know, there's like lots of people who influence that, and we try to just be very intentional about making sure that person feels cared for and belong and coming here and like staying on top of things.
The third thing I think is we just try to make it very personal. And so, just this week, you know, 2 days ago I just saw, and we try to share these stories internally, too. Cuz this is how builds the culture of recruiting. We kind of share these stories back to the company.
But someone was sharing we were working on a candidate in New York and we learned through getting to know them that they went to a performing arts high school and were a classically trained violinist. And we were just kind of very into like stringed instruments. So this person, I found this like specialty instrument store in New York City and bought this like kind of unique Turkish guitar, almost violin guitar thing. And they were meeting for like a dinner where they got the offer and they presented that gift to them.
And so it was a couple hundred dollars maybe, right? Not a lot of money. Particularly relative to like the size of offer and the size of impact that we thought that, you know, that someone's going to have. But it's like it's the thoughtfulness and the touching uniqueness of it and the personal moment of that that like I think stands out. And I think when a candidate thinks about having the best candidate experience, often they feel like wow, this felt like tailored to me. This felt unique to me.
I know there's also a Slack channel that gets created for each candidate.
Every candidate. Yeah, so I think when you talk about the stand-up, sometimes that's also strategy and updates and like, and so there's the same rallying effect to activate, is no different at the close, and each candidate has their own channel.
Just so much of this just keeps going back to intentionality around every specific candidate and not treating it like the funnel, but just this is the atomic unit, this person. What can we do throughout the entire process to make them get excited and see if it's a fit?
Which is hard to do when you're doing at scale at the funnel of doom. So when you are thinking about a hundred candidates for every role, then this is not, that does not scale. But when you're narrowing that down to a small percentage of people that you've been kind of laying groundwork with over time, it comes because now people are moving faster through those steps and it's a smaller number of people. So, the time that you're taking, you know, holistically for that funnel, you're just displacing, putting it in different places.
It's so interesting and it's such a different approach. I've never heard of anyone hiring this way.
Yeah, and we had this like thesis when I was at Growth by Design, you know, around like we think there's this different way to do this. We'd seen all these companies over time and worked with labs and all these things, we're like, "Wow, like these companies are literally at the cutting edge of a technical revolution here. Probably the most exciting one we've seen in millennia, and they were recruiting in a web browser way." And we're like, "If a company like had this willingness to commit this time and effort as this collective force, they could really have an unfair advantage when it comes to talent."
And when you think about companies over time, whether they become this iconic logo or one that we no longer recognize, it often isn't the first company, the fastest to market, the first idea. It's actually execution. And execution comes down to having the right talent at the right time. And when companies figure that out, they're like, "Ooh, this is the most important thing and this is how we're going to approach it." And so, when we met Cursor, we're like, "This could be fun."
Cursor is actually such a great example of exactly what you're describing because it feels like throughout the entire history of Cursor, it was always just like, "How are they going to survive? There's these model companies building these things, the IDEs, like people are moving away from IDEs," and it's been incredible to watch Cursor execute and get ahead of each of these shifts. Whenever people doubt that there's an opportunity here, it just keeps growing and killing it.
I mean, it's not too long ago it was like tab autocomplete, you know, on it, and like now we're in the fully cloud agents and it's just... But just remember the time span is like once. You know, the condensed nature of this is just wild.
I came to the office at one point, and I got a tab button, and now it's just like no longer even a thing.
Yeah. Now it's just cute. Yeah, now it's just on the shelf. Yeah.
And just talk. Something that one of your colleagues wanted me to ask you is just what is it like to work with an exec team who truly believes recruiting is the most important thing?
It's a gift. And at times incredibly frustrating. So the gift part of it is like, imagine how much they care. Like trying to convince a founder to go have a conversation or to do anything recruiting, like that is not a problem here. And like we've, you know, worked with companies where you're like trying to like pull them in to things. So it's a true gift.
The, you know, the challenge is like they're in it, you know, like they understand it. Like the Cursor team hired their first 80 people, roughly 80 people, on their own. They know how to do it. They know how hard it is, which is great, but also like they love it and they're in it, and they want to do it. And so there can be zero ego about this of who owns, you know, who has what piece, and like it's an all hands on deck. And so sometimes that can be confusing on who's doing things, and things that, you know, you find out about after the fact that happened, but like, I don't know, I'll take that every day. That is extremely net positive, but there's always like a counterbalance to such an advantage like that.
So interesting. That's like CPOs often are frustrated for that reason where the founders are always in there in their
Yeah, but they care. You know, like I'll take the effort and care with that tax any day.
And then one of your hot takes is that the recruiting team should be the highest paid team within the company.
Yeah, one of them. Yeah, if not the. I mean, if you think about the impact that they're having, and like, you know, I feel like there's a supply and demand crisis around really strategic recruiters because of the somewhat transactional nature we've made recruiting over time. And so, I just think there's a really small supply of recruiters who can function at this level and at this approach and style. And so, like any other labor market, it's a cost of labor thing and there's just very few of it. And so we think that they have tremendous impact, but it's like a really rare skill set.
Something I wanted to ask you that I forgot to ask is, we talk a lot about talent density. How much of it is about the person specifically versus the team that you assemble around them?
Yeah, I feel like where companies overly focus is like an individual. And unless they are a team of one, it's actually like, you know, if you think about amazing leadership and amazing managers, they're actually quite great puzzle builders. And they think about building these teams that are complementary together and then help them excel. And so, talent density is not a single piece unless like the numerator and denominator are both one. You know, and so, but that's not the case. Often, this is one over how many people. And so, talent density is actually a collective nature of individuals and humans. But often, because you are recruiting one human at a time, I think sometimes we get overly focused on that specific 10Xer thing, you know?
And I actually like to think a little bit more around exponential, around 10X of like a team versus an individual. I don't think you can have a 10X person on a bad team. It just like doesn't exist. You know, like I used to think when we were at my last company, we can't be a great client service provider if we don't have a great client. There's like just a bar there. And similarly, a person that might be excellent is going to be throttled if they're not on a strong and supportive team.
That makes sense to me. Okay, I'm going to ask you a bunch of random questions. Again, I think people are going to be hearing this and be like, I need Adam immediately when we need help. And they're not going to be able to get that cuz, you know, you got a job. So, I'm going to try to extract as much as I can while we're here. Say you're an early-stage company, thinking about hiring, setting up your hiring approach, what are kind of the most common ways that early-stage companies and founders eff up their early team and hiring?
Yeah, I think the thing they try to do is do this silver bullet hire, which is a first like head of talent, and they kind of collapse two competing skill sets into one.
Okay, so generally as a founder, when you're ready to hire your first recruiter, you're probably behind on hiring. There's a problem to solve there. You're behind on hiring. So, then maybe there's like a debt of roles to fill. 5, 10, 15. But you also are hiring someone at this stage cuz you want them to build like a system. Like they might be like, "Wow, like I want to build something like Adam's talking about." So, you're trying to hire someone who can also put in the right pieces to help scale out. And like those are competing interests. Because a person who wants to come in, like just any new hire, they want to like prove out, they want to make hires, but they might not put in the system, or they might put in the system, but not make any hires, and now you're like not sleeping. And so, they try to collapse this into one role, and generally that's a mistake. And so, we recommend kind of decoupling those things.
So, that means you still might will to one person, but can you get some help with the other one? I'm going to hire the person who's going to put in the right system, but I'm going to partner them with a contingent recruiter or something else to like make some short-term progress while they kind of like teach the company how to do this through these roles that they fill that they're helping orchestrate. Or vice versa, I might bring in someone to help us put in the right foundation, which like we did at GBD, and then they get to hire like a really high-powered IC recruiter who can connect execute.
Amazing. That makes all the sense in the world. When you're looking for that first recruiting hire, is there anything else you think is important to look for? I know it depends on maybe which of these two buckets they're going to be in, but any other advice?
Yeah, I think number one is that they are like curious and business-focused. They're an early member of the team. They got to be really curious and understanding of how the business works and how each of those hires is going to change the slope of the business. And so, you know, often that means that they have all these interesting, it shows up in lots of ways, curious people, but I think that's the number one thing I think of.
The number two one, and I think these sometimes get switched, is just like high motor, you know, someone who like understands the grind that it will be and the pace that it works and is down for it. And that doesn't mean they have to be younger, or it doesn't mean anything. It's just that they love working at this edge of overwhelmness. And so I often think about my team is like we want the water level to be like right here.
And so you're like you're breathing, but, you know, if you've met any kind of recruiters, recruiters are excellent at 90 to 110% capacity and are terrible outside of that. Right? If they only have half a req load, they kind of like are like useless. Or if they're like, you know, way overwhelmed, also just overwhelmed. But they're kind of great at this like middle ground of like edge of adrenaline rush busy. And you want to find those people.
Oh, man. So, along those lines, I've heard from a bunch of people that you just have a huge followership on your team. There's a lot of heads of talent from other companies that decided to join your team to be ICs. What are some things you've learned about building incredible teams, keeping people working for you over the long term?
One thing I learned is at each place my team has looked different. Because the company, how they think about recruiting or the product, is different. And so, the Cursor way demanded a different type of team. Right? It demanded this level of recruiter who like understands the leadership recruiting motion, who's not going to get caught up in the numbers game of the funnel. Like they have this confidence and they have, you know, a network that they can tap into. And so, I think we talked a lot about hiring managers' and other people's networks, but seasoned great recruiters have their own networks, too. Like you have a couple of recruiters in your life that you trust, that you probably would like seek advice on, you know? And so, we try to collect those people, too, cuz they can be as influential in tapping their networks as a technical leader, for example.
So, and then I kind of just think about like three attributes of someone who I want on my team. So, one, I want people who are excellent humans and excellent in what they do. And I'm not willing to trade that off. We are going to spend most of our waking hours during the week together. And we should all be selfish enough to want to work with great people, great humans.
The second is I look for people who have a chip on their shoulder, something to prove, love the craft. They have this internal drive and motivation to be excellent. And that can show up in lots of ways and I try to get to that.
And then the third thing is I look for people who put team over themselves. And so this is really important clearly for the team I built now. They could be running recruiting at lots of places. But what they've realized is that no one really aspires to get to middle management. We kind of end up there. But what they did realize is like they love the craft of recruiting and they love to be challenged, they love to learn. They want to work with great people. And so when I would go out to my network and I'm like, "Hey Lenny, who are three people you know that are excellent humans and excellent recruiters? They just have this natural drive or chip on their shoulder and like they put team over themselves." You're like, "Ah, you should talk to Janet." You know, you can conjure those things up. And so we've really tried to build a team of those folks here and I'm really excited about the people we've collected.
It's a good sign when I'm just like, "Wait, I want to work for Adam. This sounds really great."
And I try to be this balance of, because recruiting is sometimes around inspiring your team, but it's a deeply operational function. You know, and so I've tried to
find this balance of where I can be like in the weeds, operational, understand it, be in it with them, but also sometimes lift up and help like paint the bigger picture, too.
Amazing. Adam, we've covered so much ground. We've gone through the whole funnel and more. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you wanted to share, anything else you want to leave listeners with, any nugget you want to double down on?
I mean, one thing that we didn't talk about which I think is happening, I'm seeing more of, is renegs on offers. And so I think a lot of companies get to the yes of the offer acceptance and there's often like a gap of time. And the more senior they are, often it's, you know, beyond a couple weeks. We think about a second motion happening after offer accept. Which is, you know, where we are a butts-in-seats business in recruiting and there's like a big window there where someone has like, ah, they accept the offer and we kind of like go on to the next one. But what are we doing between offer accept and join?
And there's two key parts of that. One is like make sure that they show up. The second is like a bit of a pre-boarding and helping them have a fast ramp by staying connected with them. So, we'll do dinners with other people who have accepted. We try to essentially create community around them. We'll send them a Cursor laptop. You know, kind of feels like a presumptive you've-joined kind of way. We do these dinners. We do these like touch points. One is help to make sure like that delivery happens, but also to feel like they start to get excited, too. They start to kind of visually realize what's it going to look like.
Wow, that is so brutal to have gone through that entire funnel. Got the offer, made the offer, accepted the offer, we're in and just no. Oh man. And you're saying this is a trend, I imagine, because just the market is so hot and they're getting better offers, offers that they didn't expect.
Correct.
Yeah. I love I feel like there's this lake of things we didn't talk about. Is there anything else, any other trends, things that you noticed of like, wow, this is changing in the hiring landscape?
I think maybe the other trend I think we see like the rise of the talent engineer. I don't know if you've seen that out there, you know, the kind of the function within a recruiting team who is a possibly former engineer who's like building tools and things like that. And my warm take, not a hot take, my warm take is like every recruiter should be a talent engineer. Like the things that recruiters now have at their fingertips that they could build in Cursor or other tools is really phenomenal.
And in earlier companies I was in, we were often beholden to like begging for engineering time to build us tools or functions or features. And now that's like that's in us. Like we have that right now in our team. And so I want a future state of my recruiting team to feel like they are talent engineers. Versus, you know, leaning on someone else on the team to help them like build a tool, if that makes sense.
Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree. It's interesting. There's go-to-market engineers, like every function is going to have their version of engineer.
Yeah.
Over time. Engineers engineers. Well, Adam, with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?
Yeah. Yeah.
All right. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?
Yeah, this is super nerdy. So there's two. There's one of it's like that I read in undergrad that has stuck with me. And it's Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. And you know it's kind of the rise of EQ as an important piece of it. And I just feel like emotional intelligence right now, more than ever, is so important in this like AI age. And so it was like super transformative to me way back then and I think it's like really important now.
And the other one I love for founders is just the High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil. I'm a big fan of a book where you can just jump to a chapter and get an answer. And it's not this like linear piece you got to work through. And so I think it's such a great reference guide on different problems. And you know, for the most part, building companies, the components are the same. You know, the core principles, even when that came out several years ago, I still think hold true. So I like the High Growth Handbook.
A Stripe Press shout-out. High Growth Handbook. I imagine you've read Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson. It feels really up your alley.
Yeah. Love her.
Yeah. Another Stripe Press. Amazing. I love that, yeah, Elad's book is still useful. Like I don't know how many years later.
Amazing.
Yeah.
Favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed?
Yeah, I have not seen a movie in years. I feel like my life is at like 20-minute chunks. But I have been watching a series, The Pitt. And I'm from Western Pennsylvania, so from like the Pittsburgh area, and not only is it extremely well done, but two, it makes my life feel less frantic. Yeah.
It's about the only thing that can make my life feel less frantic, is living an hour in an ER and like all they go through. And I often, you know, try to tell my team around like the gravity of things. I was like, "Hey y'all, like we get to work for this amazing company and product things, but people are not living and dying every day by decisions that we make. In The Pitt, they are, you know?" So, it kind of just gives us like leveling part. And then third, I think they just like capture the ethos of that region, which is like my core, which is like Western Pennsylvania blue-collar grinder. And I just think they do a really good job of capturing that. So, I've been watching that when I can on some airplanes.
I love that for most people that show's very stressful and for you it's calming because it's less stressful than your life.
Just the relative nature of things is helpful.
And like have you watched The Bear, 'cause I feel like that'd be another example?
Yeah, I think if I was probably a Chicago guy, that would probably resonate. Although, I have seen it. Yeah.
Oh, man. Okay, a couple few more questions. Do you have a favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love other than Cursor?
Yeah, I think one is like semi-recent, one isn't. I'm a huge Granola fan. I think I was super early on Granola, and I love that they continue to innovate. And really just did, yeah, just great product decisions, easy to use. They're great on feedback, too. If you've ever given them feedback, they're phenomenal. The second I've been using a lot is Wispr, Wispr Flow. And just trying to get out quick notes to my team. I am better at this than this in terms of like my thoughts. And so Wispr's been amazing on the go to drop notes to my team.
Listen to this, Adam. You may not know this.
I don't.
Subscribers to my newsletter get a year free of not only Cursor, but also Granola and Wispr Flow
Not know that.
30 other incredible products, Replit and Google and Lovable, and it's out of control. So, if you like any of these products, lennysproductpass.com.
That was not a plant at all. That was just, yeah, I did not know that.
It's just we have all the best products for free for a freaking year, including Cursor. So, there you go. lennysproductpass.com.
Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life?
Yeah. I think there's like three things that I come back to and I, you know, try to instill in my kids, too. So, one is like work hard. I think the value of hard work is hard to understate. And something like I grew up in. Second is like do great work. So, let's not confuse the two.
And third is like be helpful. And I think like one thing I've really tried to do, and you know, maybe part of the reason I was able to help build this team, is I've really just tried to be helpful. And if you talk to founders out there, anyone, I will answer their emails. I will jump on a 10-minute call with them. And I want to think that people come to me for help and advice and like it's the right ones. And so that's just now, like I'm now getting to reap some of that, of people who like want to, you know, come to work on the team, but so those three things I've really tried to live by.
That is an awesome set of principles to live by. Clearly it has contributed to your success. I'm going to steal them all. Those are really good. That's like a good tripod of things to be focused on.
You talked about being a dad. Final question. People said you're an expert on the importance of a well-placed dad joke. I'm not going to ask you to do a joke unless you want to, but more so just like what's something you've learned about raising kids, 'cause I'm a dad, 3-year-old. What's just like a thing you have learned about raising great kids?
It's humbling. You know, they will challenge you in ways you don't expect. They are like mini mirrors of you sometimes. So it's like a feedback mechanism. And it's like such a joy, honestly. And I'm very lucky to have an amazing wife and partner who at times, most times, takes the unfair, you know, load of it. But yeah, it's definitely my greatest joy.
That's such a good summary. That's exactly how it feels. Very challenging at times, but the greatest joy.
But just think about your career though. When you look back on your career, of your most enjoyable times, you were a little bit over your skis. You were thrown into something unexpected that you weren't ready for. And you like figured it out. And in the moment it was a series of ups and downs, stacking S curves, but you'll look back and be like, "Wow, that was like one of my career highlights." But you were really over your skis.
Molly Graham, who's been on the podcast and did a couple newsletter guest posts, she has this concept she calls the J curve, which is your best roles are just you join and you go way down and suck at it for a while, and then you come back up, and that's the best experience you've ever had.
Molly is, yeah, Molly has gold out there, for sure.
She's so incredible. Working on a new guest post right now, might have come out by the time this comes out.
Love it.
With that, two final questions, Adam. What do you want to plug? Anything you want to point people to? And how can listeners be useful to you?
I think they're one and the same. I mean, I'll plug, I mean, I would love people to try Cursor. I think it's incredibly exciting things that we're coming out with. And we're really proud of it. Some things in the pipeline, too. I'm not super out there online. I think I'm on LinkedIn a little bit, but I really honestly try to let my work and our team speak for what we do. But I'm always down to be helpful, back to the last point. So, I really do get pure energy and joy from helping people. And so, I know at some point that will come back in some kind of way or form. Don't expect it to, but that's just where I get that drive from.
Just to plug Cursor a little bit. Not only is just the design and experience of Cursor awesome, the best feature for a lot of people is you could just switch between models extremely easily. So, instead of getting hooked on Codex or Claude Code, use Cursor, and then a new Opus comes out, and you, GPT comes out, and you could switch and just play around with it immediately versus switching the product.
Yeah, there was a world where models were coming out every three or four months. We're down to a number of days between models, and people I know who love to build products want to be working with the best tools at any given time. And so, you know, our agent allows you to choose the right model. And I think for a lot of companies, also cost is a rightful consideration now. And so, it really comes around optimization of using the right model for the right task. And so, that's kind of just landing into Cursor's sweet spot.
Yeah, and you guys are also now just building state-of-the-art models sitting on SpaceX's data centers, like a whole new world for Cursor.
I mean, getting to train on the world's largest data center has just unlocked our models. So, it's been amazing.
What a time to be alive.
That's crazy.
Adam, thank you so much for being here.
Thanks for having me.
Bye, everyone.
Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.
Article published · Updated