Recruiting

“If talent is number one, then there should be no obstacles to, in terms of effort or resourcing or time put in to get there, because that is paramount to your success. You just said that objectively. And so, you know, so if both can't be true, you know, you ca…”

“I think a lot of companies 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…”

“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 like condensed that, that, that activation timeline and effort.”

“Recruiting is a core competency for any company. It should never be outsourced.”

“Anyone who can solve attribution, like two problems in the world is attribution and recruiting. If you can solve one of these two problems, you're the king of the world.”

“As AI gets better and better I think there will be a time where you can say that AI will be as good and maybe even better in quality.”

“So really to emphasize the selling piece, that's the number one thing we see founders do wrong. Is in the first call, they're just interviewing the candidate rather than selling the company. You should flip that order. The first thing you do is sell the compan…”

“I think as soon as you're making multiple hires I like to think I can work on one hire really well at one point in time and my co-founder can do the same. And so if we're working on two hires, that's roughly where we're at capacity. And so if you're hiring mor…”

“I think that's the number one way that companies do benefit from having Sequoia on the cap table, is that, is talent and recruiting, and we can talk more about that, and I'm fascinated by recruiting, and recruiting dynamics, so I do think Sequoia helps with th…”

“There's a talent to recruiting the rebels, but you will never recruit them through a spokesperson, and you will never recruit them if you don't look them in the eye and tell them in the first person that you're going to keep your promises and you're going to d…”

“The future is going to, when it comes to recruiting, it looks a lot more like dating where it's like there's Two swipe rights equal a match. Then it's like a double opt in, like warm intro versus most of today, how a candidate finds a company is wildly random …”

“I spend 20% of my time one day a week, even now recruiting.”

“I think recruiting is one of those sort of trades that you need to learn by working as an apprentice with someone who's really good at recruiting.”

“My favorite hires that I've ever made are people that actually come from recruiting that want to make the transition into tech sales. And a lot of that is because They're super organized. They're making calls all day to people who are probably not in the marke…”

“Obviously they move fast, but they prioritize speed over everything else except in one area, recruiting. Max Ludgen kept the bar for talent exceedingly high, even if that came at the expense of speedy staffing.”

“If you're not spending 20% of your time in sales and 20% of your time in recruiting, you're failing as a founder. You need 20% of each. 20% in sales and 20% recruiting. Nothing else really matters at some level as a CEO, maybe not as founders, but as CEOs.”

“And Peter Thiel says recruiting is a core competency. It should never be outsourced.”

“When you're fundraising, you have to present a big picture. When you're recruiting, you have to present a big picture. When, even, even when you're just trying to keep your mental health of why is this so hard? You have to believe in that big vision.”

“Recruiting is a market that is endogenously high churn. Which means, because people start hiring, and then we hire the role for them, and they stop hiring.”

“But the way to find out anything about people is to fully surround where that person has been, okay? And, you know, if they've been at Company A, you know, you go find out who in my company was at Company A while this person was there, and let's go, I'm gonna …”

“If you build an audience, you can kind of leverage that into anything you want to do. Like you want to leverage it for recruiting, for fundraising, or for like marketing a business that you launch. And that is something that you can do over and over and over a…”

“And the first thing you're taught, like entry level recruiting one-on-one is recognized patterns of candidates that jump from place to place and don't give opportunities a full chance.”

“Any VP role is 50% recruiting, especially engineering and sales.”

“A lot more people err towards wanting to be on winners than are concerned about how much more growth is left there in that, in the company.”

“Recruiting is a constant drumbeat, and that goes extra when you're hiring at scale. That's why I believe you should always be recruiting. The more your business scales, the more tempting will be to delegate this task to others. Resist that urge, and never stop…”

“But if you're good at recruiting, it's really all that matters.”

“One rule I have for recruiting is, when you first hear someone's name, a clock starts ticking. I have seven days to make her an offer letter.”

“In his first 18 months, he's done close to a million dollars of sales. Just from recruiting. A one-person recruiting.”

“It's the reason why you fundamentally won't ever eliminate humans from the recruiting chain entirely. They'll always be in there somewhere.”

“I think investing, especially early stage investing, there is there is some science to it. There's some art to it as well. I think there's some experience to it as well, based on your own experiences and instincts. It's like recruiting, right? Let's say you're…”

“I sort of say in recruiting, a no is a maybe, and a maybe is a yes.”

“The very best people I've ever recruited in different places in my career have all taken at least months to recruit.”

“I've still Met only a handful of founders, I think, that spend enough time on recruiting, like Mark Zuckerberg is famously one of them.”

“You know, the only reason, so I guess if you have funding from a firm with a good reputation, that's worth announcing, not for the money, who cares? If for the recruiting ability, right?”

“Our premise is that is too important to screw up, to put through an ERP. I mean, that is your front of the funnel. You can't hire people, you hire bad people, you're screwing with your business.”

“So, you know, in the research we did, interviewing over 500 founders, recruiting was the number one pain point of almost all the founders”

“Anybody who mastered the skill of either recruiting or PR or customer acquisition for startups can leverage that skill at a firm, especially as more and more firms are looking to build platforms that add value.”