The Ledger, every show

“And one of them, yeah, if not, I mean, if you think about this impact that they're having that and like the, 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 rec…”

“And we want that like super deep technical engineer that has a little bit more stronger product sense. And so you kind of see that. So I think the people who are maybe like very narrow, very deep and like overly specialized in a way are waning like in like, in…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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 in another rationa…”

“If you've ever heard that phrase, like, I will, I'll know what, I'll know it when I see it. I'll know what great looks like. You actually, you won't. You won't see, you won't know, because you haven't spent, like, the time objectively identifying what that, wh…”

“And your company is different. Your product is different. And so you owe 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 th…”

“I think the most valuable one is the most time intensive one, which is spending time and digging into people's networks. I, 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 auto…”

“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 feel like we put so much energy to the on-site interview, which I totally get, but honestly, the most important one is that hiring manager first conversation”

“The role of the hiring manager is, you know, it's not a democracy. Hiring manager is holding their, that group accountable for getting, helping them get them the right inputs to make out the right decision, to make the best decision, hire or no hire.”

“So when you are thinking about a hundred candidates for every role, then this is, 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 ar…”

“I don't think you can have a 10 X person on a bad team. It's just like doesn't exist.”

“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, can keep competing skill sets into one. Okay, so when you are, generally as a founder, when you're ready to hire your first re…”

“If you've met any kind of recruiters, recruiters are excellent at 90 to a 110% capacity and are terrible outside of that, right? If they only have half a rec load, they kind of like are like useless. Or if they're like, you know, way overwhelmed, also just ove…”

“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.”

“I think that really the difference here is like everything here is like just so compressed. So that mobile moment was, Two years, maybe, you know, where, like, there's no mobile engineers, then there are, like, mobile boot camp, mobile engineer boot camps, all…”

“I really believe we're in this, like, moment where there's this, like, resettlement of talent And labor and how work gets done. And I really believe that this, like there will be a resellment and there'll be a shift and this will come back. But I feel like we'…”

“I think one thing that's really in demand is this, and there's lots of different names for it, but there's like forward deployed engineer, this like technical person who can partner with a sales team and partner with a customer to deploy what is a, you know, c…”

“The mistake that most companies make is they'll say, hey, Lenny, who's the best, ah, product engineer you know? That is the worst question you can ask. The best, the better question to ask is, hey, Lenny, of all the product engineers you've worked with, who st…”

“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 Then it does the actual messaging and the, right? 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 like condensed that, that, that activation timeline and effort.”

“Over the history of time, when you look at candidate satisfaction scores, the number one thing that's always there is the company generally wanted me. They generally like they made it feel like I belong there.”

“We try to play home games when we can, because you have the power of the team. Right, you have the power. And so, you know, one analogy I think about is, like, when you, sometimes when you walk on, when some people are considering university early in their liv…”

“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.”

“I think this is where most companies get it wrong on the onsite. 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.”

“When we ran that experiment you know, because it is quite expensive. 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.”

“We don't have hiring committees. It is hiring manager led. They get lots of input from the team.”

“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.”

“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, because they can be as influential in tapp…”

“One thing that we didn't talk about, which I think is happening, I'm seeing more of is reneges 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.”

“There was a world where the models were coming out every three or four months. We're down to a number of days between models”

“Having a meal with someone is One of the most human and leveling things that you can do. You know, sharing a meal across the table is just a disarming act and a joining act that I think is just so important.”