Strategies for Building a Talent Pipeline for Startups

Too many founders "wing it" when building their teams—leading to misaligned hires, wasted time, and missed opportunities. If you’re serious about scaling, you need to be as deliberate about hiring as you are about building your product. Here are key lessons I’ve learned at Greylock about early startup hiring to help founders build world-class teams: • Hone your pitch. The best founders clearly articulate an exciting vision for their product or business that entices candidates. • Process makes perfect. From defining the role you're hiring for all the way through full interviews, every step should be measurable, repeatable, and scalable. Track what works, adjust what doesn’t, and document the entire process. • Candidate experience matters. How you treat candidates affects your brand, reputation, and future hires. Treat every candidate as if they will get an offer. Even those who don’t should leave feeling positive enough to refer others. • Take the long view. Every interview is a long-term relationship opportunity. Even if they’re not the right fit today, the candidate could become a valuable connection later. • Quality over quantity. Don’t cast a wide net—target a relevant candidate pool. Do your homework and approach them in a tailored way. High volume creates noise and inefficiency. • Be brutally transparent. Don’t sugarcoat the risks and challenges of a startup. The best candidates value honesty and will appreciate knowing the truth, how they’ll be supported, and how they can grow. • Always be recruiting (ABR). Top founders dedicate time to sourcing and reaching out to candidates. Early hires often come from the founding team’s network, but as that dries up (and it will), recruiting becomes harder. Invest in recruiting activities and leverage dependable resources like VCs, agencies, and investors. • Work with a talent partner.  A strong talent partner from your VC firm or network is more than a resume pusher; they’re a guide who can advise and deeply understand your needs while focusing on quality and fit. • Master the preclose. When you extend an offer, don’t rush. Schedule a call to share the exciting news and intent to prepare an offer. Express enthusiasm, revisit motivations, and address open questions. This is also the time to align on comp expectations. A thoughtful approach ensures a successful close. • Bring your best offer upfront. Lowballing or forcing candidates to negotiate can drive top talent away. Leverage startup compensation data, be transparent about your compensation philosophy, and offer competitive packages that reflect the risk and stage they’re joining. Invest in people so they become "unrecruitable." • Onboarding and beyond. Once the offer is accepted, the job isn’t done. Onboard well, and continue to support them as they grow within the company. What’s the biggest hiring lesson you’ve learned? Let’s discuss in the comments! #startup #talent #recruiting #growth

Founders are often advised to “hire the best people,” which sounds good in theory but isn’t realistic for most. Here’s why this advice misses the mark: Early on with Chezie, I posted an engineering role with a $120K salary. A Silicon Valley leader straight-up told me, “That’s pretty low; you’ll have trouble recruiting.” And she was right. Most applicants were junior devs, not the “rockstar” hires investors envision. And as I saw other founders making high-profile hires, I noticed a pattern: nearly all of them had raised millions in funding. When investors tell you to “hire the best,” they’re often picturing someone with a resume from Stanford or Google—a “best” that’s incredibly costly and exclusive. This advice overlooks talent from less traditional backgrounds and ignores the financial reality for most founders, especially those who are bootstrapping or underfunded. Here’s what worked for us instead: 1. Redefine “best” - The “best” hire isn’t just someone with a prestigious resume; it’s someone who believes in your mission, fits your budget, and has the skills to grow with you. 2. Hire strategically, not full-time - Before making a full-time hire, exhaust software solutions and part-time contractors. Scale up only when absolutely necessary. 3. Be transparent about compensation—Listing salaries and equity openly filters out mismatches and helps you attract the right candidates who are on board with your mission. My advice to founders? Hire the best YOU CAN AFFORD. Focus on making every hire count without breaking the bank. Want to learn more about building a world-class team on a startup budget? Subscribe to my newsletter, Equity Shift: https://lnkd.in/eJjCSSCe

Most companies don’t have a talent problem. They have a standards problem. You’re not going to build a high-performing org by posting job descriptions and hoping the right person applies. 10x talent doesn’t scroll job boards. They’re not passively “open to work.” They’re building. Leading. Winning. If you want them, you have to go get them. Hope is not a strategy. Employer branding won’t help you. Here’s how high-performing exec teams do it: 1. Build a talent pipeline like a sales funnel. Track top 10% of the market by name. Nurture relationships early. Assign follow-ups like you would in enterprise sales. 2. Write the 6-month press release before you hire. If you can’t clearly articulate what success looks like in six months, you’re not ready to hire. 3. Use the bar-raiser model. No one gets hired unless they raise the average quality of the team. Period. 4. Move fast—with precision. 10x talent has options. Don’t lose them to your own process. 5. Be a magnet for talent. Great people follow great leaders. Be the kind of operator they want to bet on. Read that again. Build the engine. Top talent isn’t looking for a job. They’re already in motion—with their next three plays mapped out. Your job is to understand their arc—and show how your opportunity helps them go further, faster. That’s not recruitment. That’s acceleration. And when it’s done right, it’s a double win.

We fired our in-house recruiter and went back to founder-led hiring. It was the best decision we made all year. 6 months ago, we hit product-market fit and thought: "Time to hire a recruiter." Classic startup mistake. We brought someone in-house, thinking founder-led recruiting was "unscalable." What we discovered: The opposite was true. The recruiter experiment failed hard: - Top talent gets 20+ recruiter messages daily. They ignore most of them. - Quality candidates want to hear from founders, not middlemen. - Top of funnel quantity dropped. Quality dropped even more. - Worse: The few people who made it through didn't work out. We put the most important ingredient for any startup, talent density, at grave risk. So our Head of Product, Amr Shafik, and I launched "Project A Team" - taking recruiting back into founder hands. Enter Juicebox: Our GTM Engineer Joseph Good swore by this tool. Amr and I dug in and got instantly hooked (truly it feels like a video game - shoutout to David Paffenholz 🧃 and the entire Juicebox team). Here's our new playbook: 1. Founder-led personalized outreach: Alex, Amr, and I personally message every candidate. No generic AI slop pitches. 2. Target a mix of "diamonds in the rough" with 10x seasoned operators: Undiscovered talent hungry to prove themselves + experienced early-stage veterans (who are typically not looking to leave until you get them pumped). 3. High velocity, high touch follow-ups: The best candidates take 3-5 touches to get on a call. Most aren't actively looking. They need to feel connected to the founder story and mission, even to take a peek. 4. FOMO-driven messaging: We share our momentum, our customers, our growth trajectory. Top talent wants to join a rocket ship. 5. Find mutuals: the best candidates need a permission structure to take a big risk. Get a good word from the people they look up to and respect, and you'll win them over every time. 6. Amazing coordination: This only scales if you have dialed in recruiting coordination. Shoutout to Kendalle C. (who truly wears a dozen hats brilliantly at AirOps) for seamlessly managing the founder ↔ candidate experience and makes the process a dream for candidates. The results in 2 months since Project A-Team launched: - Step function improvement in candidate quality - 3x increase in qualified candidate ToF - Hires = Nothing but A+ players - First back-to-back $1M+ ARR months - Shipping great product faster than ever Don't assume founder-led recruiting doesn't scale. Talent density above all else.