Recruit top talent as the founder

1. The constraint and what graduates it

Recruiting is how you find people and hire them to work for your company.

Item	At this stage (250 to 500 people)
The constraint	The best talent is not responding to your recruiters, or to anyone besides you. Put the other way it is given: the best talent does not respond to ordinary recruiting efforts from anyone but the chief executive or founder
To graduate	The founder attracts talent directly: the founder starts drawing in the people for the highest-level roles personally, and sells them on why they should help build the company and its vision

In the view here, this part is fun. Summed up, the founder becomes the chief recruiting officer.

2. Why it has to be you

You are the magnet. The people you need on the team now are highly specialized and very hard to find. Not many companies reach this size, and you are competing with all of them for the same people, to get them to work for yours. So at this point the pull has to come from you.

You are the head-hunter. You are the company's head-hunter, and its chief salesperson: you sell people on the company's growth and its vision. This, it is said, cannot be stressed enough. It cannot be outsourced to a recruiter, and nobody else can do it for you. Nobody, it is said, will respond to anyone more than to the founder or chief executive of a large company that is growing fast.

Why the door opens. When you knock on their door, they might not know you personally. But they have seen your name, or heard of you, or even just seen your marketing or an ad, and they open the door simply to see what is going on. Getting that door opened is what being the founder or the chief executive buys you.

3. What you are selling

When the company was smaller, you were selling customers, and you were selling the people who joined your team. Now you are selling top-level talent on the vision of the company: a vision big enough that their own vision for their career fits inside it. That is given as the real reason it matters so much, at this point, that you are the one bringing them in.

4. Who you are courting

They do not need the job. These people are highly autonomous, they do not need this job, and they will have many more questions. Most people who get to this level in their careers, with this kind of talent, build their whole life around the job. So for them a move is not a change of job, a different nine-to-five. It is a change of life: they are orienting themselves to a new mission, on a new rocket ship.

They bring more than themselves. You are looking for rainmakers: people who bring a rolodex of contacts that can get you into huge new areas of distribution, or into new geographies where they already have the handshakes and know every key stakeholder, or who bring whole teams that will move with them.

Not the frontline. You are not recruiting frontline roles, or managers, or directors, and sometimes not even leaders; that is not really where you play anymore. The point was pressed by one owner of a company this size, as one that needs to be made clear.

They join you as teammates. An idea offered as applying basically only to very big businesses: there, a person of this kind comes on as a teammate, working alongside you rather than under you. Someone at this level has a hundred other places that want them, and finds recruiters in their inbox daily. That is also why it falls to you, the founder, to break through every other recruiter and head-hunter filling that inbox. The favor is done by them, not by you: they are the ones who come aboard and build the company.

They are hungry. They are called weapons. They know who they are, they have a huge track record, and they are still hungry. This is not someone who feels they have made it in their career. They are very mission-driven, with work at the center of their whole life, so they want to be sure your intensity, intelligence and drive at least match theirs.

5. How long it takes

Months, or years. Seen that way, it makes sense that you might have countless conversations with these people over months, or even years. In one practice here, conversations are going on now with multiple people who take months to persuade to leave where they are and join the business. That is a claim about that practice.

Treat it as courting. Think of it as courting. It is like dating: you date before you marry.

Well-known cases. These are offered as examples.

• One well-known founder says, over and over, that it takes 12 to 18 months to hire the top people away from his competition. Put generally: landing the person the company needs in order to grow might take 12 to 18 months.
• Another well-known founder took the executive he wanted out to dinner for a year, reportedly maybe every two weeks, and it was a lot, to persuade that executive to join. Joining turned out to be one of the best decisions that executive could have made. It is also argued that one reason that company did so well is that its founder put together a team of the right people to make it happen.

A second reading. Another figure for this stage is sometimes 6 months, 12 months or more of courting one person, to get them to move their entire world over to your business.

6. Your recruiting team goes on working

This might raise a question: are you now the head recruiter? No. You are going after high-value targets, and you will still have a team of recruiters at this point. Your ordinary recruiting goes on as well: you still hire individual contributors, managers, directors and the rest in the usual way. The ones who respond only to you are the very best talent, the people who can really take the business to the next level.

7. Why it is worth your time

The view given: a lot of founders would make the time to close a contract worth 10 million, $15 million or 20 million dollars. Yet winning over one person of this caliber, to build a department, a product division or whatever else it might be, could generate 10 times that kind of wealth for the business. So it is called absolutely worth your time.

8. Where this sits

• At the size before, 100 to 249 people, the founder stays in hiring through a short final interview: SOP 174 — Standardize selection and the founder's final interview.
• Much earlier, at 20 to 49 people, going out after candidates who are not looking, for roles above any the business has hired for before: SOP 163 — Head-hunt and interview for higher-level roles.
• Outside recruiters who each fill one kind of role, and the roles no recruiter can fill for you: SOP 166 — Track candidates in one system and use specialist recruiters.
• The kinds of fit a candidate is checked for, as first set up: SOP 149 — Prioritize and niche down at five to nine people, section 9.
• Whether to hire a skill in or grow it inside: SOP 44 — Buy or build talent.

9. What this page does not decide for you

• How to make the first approach. Not established on this page.
• What the vision pitch should say. Not established on this page.
• Which leaders the founder leaves out. Leaders are named as sometimes outside the founder's own search. Not established on this page.
• How the tenfold figure is reached. This page gives no figure for the working behind it.

10. What this page does not cover

Compensation packages and employment law are not covered on this page.