Hiring: What's Currently Working
With AI hiring drama all over the news, it's clear the rules have changed when it comes to Silicon Valley's talent wars. The best people have always been sought after, but this is another ratchet up.
So if you're a Series A company, ready to scale your team, what should you do in the face of $100M offers from Big Tech? Here's what's currently working:
1. Embedded Recruiters
This is far and away the best option right now. You can bring on multiple folks if needed, iterate if it doesn't work out and our portfolio is finding these professionals can quickly fill your hiring funnel. Dover is the most popular marketplace for fractional recruiters.
2. Friends of Friends
Try to take one call or in-person meeting each day with someone talented from your past. Share your startup's incredible progress and vision, then ask if they know anyone you should talk to. You can also get folks talking about the best projects they've worked on and the people on those projects, but some won't appreciate you asking for an intro after their nostalgia journey.
3. Conferences
These work best for recruiting when you can combine a speech, with a booth and handouts offering a referral bonus (e.g. $5k for a successful hire). Even if you can't pull this together for every event, conferences remain one of the best places for high talent density.
4. Older Tactics
You may have luck with these older tactics but their use seems to be diminishing.
Hiring Marketplaces - There are less of these now and but you might find some talented people, the best ones push you to part time or fractional staff.
Contingency Recruiters - Using dozens of these concurrently used to work but now AI has polluted their outreach.
Social Posting - Now only works within your existing content marketing strategy. You should still post the jobs but don't expect an inbound genius unless you already have broad content distribution.
What hiring tactics are working best for you right now?
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