Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth - The playbook for building high talent density teams | Adam Ward, Head of Talent at Cursor

Episode Date: August 9, 2026

Adam Ward is the Head of Talent at Cursor, one of the fastest-growing developer tools in history. Before joining Cursor, he founded Growth by Design, an independent recruiting and talent strategy firm that helped build teams at the most ambitious AI and technology companies in the world. Adam has spent more than 20 years building elite, high-talent-density teams across the industry and is widely regarded as one of the most effective and creative recruiters in tech.In our in-depth conversation, we discuss:1. Inside today’s “tale of two cities” talent market2. Why the traditional recruiting funnel—what Adam calls the “funnel of doom”—leads to mediocre hires3. Adam’s three-step playbook: scoping, mapping, and relentless pursuit4. The worst question to ask when sourcing great talent5. The rise of the forward deployed engineer—and how to become one6. The biggest mistake founders make when hiring their first recruiter—Brought to you by:WorkOS—Make your app enterprise-ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and moreMercury—Radically different banking, now with Command—Where to find Adam Ward• X: https://x.com/wardadamp• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adampward—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction(03:01) The state of the hiring market(06:41) What roles are trending up and what roles are trending down(11:25) The three-step hiring framework that changes everything(21:58) Getting the right people to actually respond(25:42) Keeping talent a top priority(29:16) Inside Cursor’s recruiting operation(32:19) How to relentlessly pursue top talent(35:42) “Caring is free”(38:33) The conversation most companies underestimate(39:19) Rethinking the atomic unit of a search(40:12) Other recruiting tactics(45:04) What the on-site is really for(49:35) The importance of work trials(53:10) The offer stage(57:53) Negotiations and comp(01:01:50) The details that actually close the deal(01:07:23) What it’s like working with an exec team who values recruiting(01:09:42) Talent density(01:11:18) The first recruiting hire most founders get wrong(01:15:00) Building incredible teams(01:18:12) The time between offer and acceptance(01:19:48) What’s next for the recruiting function(01:21:00) Lightning round—Referenced:• Cursor: https://cursor.com• Trilogy: https://trilogy.com• Brie Wolfson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brie-wolfson-17758724• Inside Cursor: https://colossus.com/article/inside-cursor• SpaceX: https://www.spacex.com• Joe Gebbia’s website: https://joegebbia.com• The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can’t stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-rise-of-cursor-michael-truell• The Pitt on HBO Max: https://www.hbomax.com/shows/pitt-2024/e6e7bad9-d48d-4434-b334-7c651ffc4bdf• The Bear on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/series/the-bear-05eb6a8e-90ed-4947-8c0b-e6536cbddd5f• Granola: https://www.granola.ai• Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai• 11 products I love, free for a year—the biggest Product Pass expansion in 2 years: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/productpass-summer2026launch• How to debug a team that isn’t working: the Waterline Model: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-debug-a-team-that-isnt-working• The high-growth handbook: Molly Graham’s frameworks for leading through chaos, change, and scale: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-high-growth-handbook-molly-graham—Recommended books:• Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ: https://www.amazon.com/dp/055338371X• High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People: https://www.amazon.com/High-Growth-Handbook-Elad-Gil/dp/1732265100• Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building: https://press.stripe.com/scaling-people—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [e-mail].—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. To hear more, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com

You have built and are known as someone that can build the most elite high talent density teams. Let's start with how people do it wrong, something you call the funnel of doom. Companies think about recruiting like a funnel. I am going to reach out to 100 people. 20% of those are high. By definition, that is not the top 20%. That is just the 20 people who you caught on a bad day. The way we all recruit is we kind of weed people out at each stage and we hire the remainder.

In your mind, like, hey, there are 50 people in the world who can do this. Let's go find those 50 people and you relentlessly pursue and you focus your energy on activating those people, not trying to find them out of the funnel of doom. The mistake that most companies make is they'll say, hey, Lenny, who's the best product engineer you know? That is the worst question you can ask. The better question to ask is, hey, Lenny, of all the product engineers you work with, who stands out to you as the person who's most collaborative with designers? or who can translate a framework into a product better than anyone you've ever seen. When you're looking for that first recruiting hire, is there anything you think it's important to look for? Recruiters are excellent at 90 to 110% capacity and are terrible outside of that.

If they only have half a recload, they kind of like are useless. But they're kind of great at this like edge of adrenaline rush busy. You want to find those people. What are some things you've learned about building incredible teams, keeping people working for you over the long term. When you look at candidate satisfaction scores, the number one thing that's always there is... Today, my guest is Adam Ward.

Adam is known in the Valley as the most effective recruiting leader at building elite high talent density teams. He co-founded an independent recruiting firm called Growth by Design, which cursor acquired fully last year, which is not something that you often hear, and is a testament to how good he and his team are, and how important talent is right now in today's market. Adam is now head of talent at Cursor,

helping them scale and build one of the most talent-dense teams in the world. Prior to starting his own firm, Adam led global recruiting at Pinterest, growing the company from 200 to over 2,000 employees, and before that, he led a global team of 65 recruiters across 10 offices at Facebook, helping them scale Facebook's tech org from 1,000 to over 10,000 employees. If hiring the best people is your number one priority,

as it should be, this conversation will open your mind up to what it takes to do that. Adam gets super tactical and extremely specific, and you're going to thank me for inviting Adam on this podcast to share all of this incredible advice. A huge thank you to Bree Wolfson, Janet Fishberg, Jill Macri, Mike Joyner, and Tim Kendall for suggesting topics and questions for this conversation. Before we get into it, don't forget to check out Lenny's productpass.com for a free year of the hottest and most beautifully crafted AI products in the world available exclusively to Lenny's newsletter subscribers. With that, I bring you Adam Ward.

Adam, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure. You've been doing this for 20 years now, hiring, recruiting, building teams. How different is the market we're in today? How crazy is the market, the hiring market we're in today? If there's a scale, it's an 11. But yeah, I do think there's like, there are similarities to some other markets we've been in over time.

You know, you mentioned the years. Like, there was a moment in time where a lot of companies were moving to mobile. And there was like, there literally was not a mobile engineer. Like an iOS engineer was not a thing, you know. But there was a scramble for talent to, you know, build your mobile app and things like that. Like there was this moment that like that was a thing. And it has like some, uh,

similarities to that market and moment. 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. And then they're like mobile boot camp, mobile engineer boot camps and all these things. And like now we're in like days.

We're in weeks. You know, there, there are no months or a year. measures right now. And so that what makes this like feel very different. The other thing that feels very different about this market is there's many people doing extremely well. It's the most competitive. As you said, 11 out of 10 for specific roles. A lot of other people are just really struggling, having a really hard to time fighting jobs. Yeah, it's a tale of two cities, really. You can read back-to-back headlines of, you know,

NBA salary offers. to a new grad PhD and the next line being a blue chip company laying off 10% of workforce. How can both of these things be true? And you see this shift of how companies are doing work and getting work done. And I really believe we're in this moment where there's this like resettlement of talent and labor and how work gets done. and I really believe that there will be a resalement and there will be a shift and this will come back but I feel like we're in like one of the largest gaps

of those worlds right now that I believe will, and I want to believe, we'll come back closer together. This episode is brought to you by our season's presenting sponsor WorkOS. What do OpenAI Anthropic, Cursor, Replet, Sierra, Clay, and hundreds of other winning companies all have in common? They are all powered by WorkOS. If you're building a product for the enterprise, you've felt the pain of integrating single sign-on,

skim, Rback, audit logs, and other features required by large companies. WorkOS turns those deal blockers into drop-in APIs with a modern developer platform built specifically for B2B SaaS. Literally every startup that I'm an investor in that starts to expand upmarket ends up working with WorkOS. And that's because they are the best. Whether you are a seat-stage startup trying to land your first enterprise customer or Unicorn Expanding Globally.

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and what are maybe less and less in demand? And you have a really unique perspective because not only you're a cursor now, but before that, you had your own independent agency working with a ton of different companies. So you got to see across a lot of different places. What's kind of trending up?

What's most in demand and what's maybe softer now? Yeah, 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, can be for like some audiences in a company, a very technical and maybe overwhelming product

or helping companies think about moving from token maxing to like optimizing, maxing to optimizing. And so that's like a, I think, a new skill as CFOs start to get the bill coming in. You know, companies are able to help partner with them to think about what's the best solution for them. So that's a really unique skill because you are, you're deeply technical yourself. You understand the product, but you can also walk into a,

room with executives and leaders and help conjugate some of that and then even deploy that, help them deploy that into their workforce. I think that's like a real supply demand issue right now. I think maybe the thing that is waning, I would say, is like the specialized technical person. The person who is, I all, you know, it's because I think you almost see this like squeezing together of engineer product design in some ways where we would love a designer who could actually do be more of like a design engineer, right? 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 the same way along that vein might also be like the new grad, which just hasn't had enough like experience to be able to do that where a product like cursor or others can do some of that work right now. This is extremely interesting. I haven't heard it put it this way before.

Interestingly, with the FDE role, it feels similar to the mobile example you shared. Very few people have actually been for deployed engineers. So what's kind of the look of a person that can become an FDE? Yeah, I actually think it is that engineer. It is that person who maybe was like a full stack engineer in like a three to five years ago is now maybe actually that forward deployed engineer. Right. And so, and you talk to some of these folks, and they actually like, it kind of unlock something in them. Like they're kind of like moving out of the terminal and moving in into like the company, you know, and into the customers and clients.

And for the right person, that's super energizing kind of unlocks another chapter or like maybe an unexpected chapter in their career. That's interesting. I was expecting you to say AI researchers. So this is interesting. And imagine because there's not as many of those roles. I think so. I think I think it's just that's a very defined set. And so I feel like it's a very clear bracket of what that is and how many there are and where they are. And I think this like, I think that sometimes the bigger challenges are the nebulous things or the new, the very new things that I think are sometimes just as challenging as the scarcity ones of an AI or ML engineer. Just as a final question along these lines, what about just the core product design engineering roles? Are those kind of steady as they've been?

Is one increasing, decreasing? How's that looking? I think they're hot. I think they're, but I think there's, you probably see a lot of conversation out there around this, you know, where I think we're getting a little bit back in a good way to the craft of things. And so if you think about what AI can do in the design world, it can also create a lot of slop in its own way. And so I'm an optimist. Just off, you'll, you'll probably hear that throughout. Same. And I think, and I think it's just a better way to live. But I think what I will hopefully, help us get back to the craft of what we do, you know, and maybe an appreciation for it. And I see that in the design world, too. And is that in saying ICs are more in demand and especially ICs that have good taste, good judgment?

I think so. Yeah, I think like, you know, we've seen this for maybe the last 12th, the rise of the power I see. Yeah. And the recognition and appreciation for that work, I think, as I come like almost in a full circle moment for them. But like I think taste, decision making, problem solving, these characteristics, curiosity in all the good ways, I think are coming back up to the surface. Awesome. Okay. So let me let me kind of zoom out and frame the conversation that I'm hoping we have broadly. You have built

and are known as someone that can build the most elite high talent density teams. So many people kept telling me you are the person that does this better than anyone. else. This is every company's and founders dream, build the highest talent density team. So I'm going to go through this in a sequence. Let's start with something you call the funnel of doom hiring. Talk about the funnel of doom. What is the funnel of doom? Yeah. And this is a concept I got to recognize my very first as an intern, actually, in 1998 at a company called Trilogy, which is somewhat of an infamous company around recruiting and it's kind of where I learned a trade.

My very first manager, Jeff Daniel, we did this campus tour around the country talking to CS students, and that's where I first heard the term. He coined that term, so I had to acknowledge that. But I think, well, the funnel did forever, almost forever as you think about the recruiting history, companies think about recruiting like a funnel,

you know, maybe akin to a sales funnel, right, where they think about different stages, pasture rates and things like that. And when you think about how most companies have recruited over these last several decades, it's really been Canada's come from kind of three buckets. They apply. They are activated or sourced or they're referred. But if you kind of think about like, for a lot of companies who think about talent density, typically referrals and sourcing or activation of passive.

talent is really the focus. And when you kind of even narrow further on this like source talent, this is how most companies think about it. I am going to reach out to 100 people. 20 people will reply just for round numbers. So 20% of those will reply. By definition, that is not the top 20%. That is just the 20 people who you caught on a bad day for them.

Good day for you. Bad day for them. And so you're starting with a suboptimal set. You're not starting with the top 20% even if you're, you're not starting. with the top 20%, even if this way we all recruit is we kind of weed people out at each stage and we hire the remainder. So this remainder hiring is the output of the funnel of doom. And when you say that out loud, you're like, that's kind of messed up.

If I think about building a talent-dense company over time, is that really the best approach? Or does that kind of get me like just above average over time, 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 as you get to volume. And so we just think about this in a different way is like what if you had confidence out front of who the top 20% was and then you use your assessment process to validate that thesis of who those are. That seems like about, you know, so there's this funnel due, but there's like within a funnel doom, there's just a pillar of excellence. What if you started with the pillar of excellence and went from there

versus having this wide funnel. Because imagine how expensive that is to do remainder-based hiring and you can hire the person who drops to the bottom. I love this, especially hearing this. This is how hiring has been forever. And just here you describe it, it's clear this is not optimal.

Why hasn't this changed ever? There is something detrimental about comparing it to a sales funnel. Because 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 irrational unit of a candidate.

And so to believe that things are transactional and linear and pass through in the same ways, I think is a bit of a fallacy. But sales has been a. around for hundreds of years, a long time. Recruiting as a craft or in like this is like 50 years, 40 years. You know, so we're behind on it. But like as humans, we often try to relate a problem to another problem that we know. And so I think this connectedness to sales has been somewhat detrimental to companies as they

think about doing this in a more strategic way. So let's follow this thread and help make it very clear what you're describing here. The way I've heard you describe this is you treat every hire as an executive recruiting sort of hire. And the goal is to go for the top 1% of people out in the world versus kind of who kind of drops in the funnel. Talk more about just that kind of way of thinking about it. So if you've ever worked on like a senior specialized hire leadership role done well, there's roughly like three main steps. One is scoping. And so if you think about going after the 1%, the most important step is getting really clear on what one

means to you. And so 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, what great looks like.

And so when you think about scoping, if we can just dive into that cornerstone piece, really good scoping is thinking about, um, what are like the skills and experiences you're looking for, you stack, rank these things. You get really clear objectively before you talk to any candidate. But it sets up your entire process. It sets up your sourcing strategy. It sets up your pitch for them because you're asking questions like, why is this role important? What would success look like?

It really helps you craft those things. It also helps you set up your assessment process and like what you're going to be assessing against. And it helps you think about kind of that close of like why this person and why this role is going to have big impact here. So that really, that I think, piece of the hiring process, process is underinvested in, but in a leadership search that is often like known to be a really strong cornerstone. So let's say you take like this like really good scoping and then you kind of

you pair it with really good market mapping intelligence and signals that to give you confidence of who the very best people are. So when you're doing a leadership search, for example, you're like, okay, there's really in your mind like, hey, there are 50 people in the world who can do this. Let's go find those 50 people. Right. And so that kind of that approach, I think, think you can do a scale. If you do that really good scoping, you get really clear on what that looks like. And then you take that, that like lists of 50 people, those targets and you relentlessly pursue and you focus your energy on activating those people, not trying to find them out of the funnel of doom, you know, large population.

Amazing. I imagine everyone listening to this is going to be like, we need Adam on our team ASAP. Unfortunately, you're locked in at a company. And so we're going to do our best to try to extract as much wisdom as we can in this conversation because you have a job. So this is great. So kind of the three steps here that you walk through, how to approach hiring from this perspective, the way that executives are hired, this idea of going after top 1%. So step one was be very clear on what top percent looks like.

So just to kind of mirror back what you just shared, be clear on the skills you need and kind of stack rank. Here's the skills we need from this person, what experiences we're looking for. stackering that, talk about why this role is impactful and just why this is so important. Is there anything else there just to flesh that up? I mean, those are the general buckets. Like every company will have other specific things that really matter. But yeah, those would be, yeah, those would be the things.

And remember, those are all, these are things you're not asking are, what companies are from? These are the kind of these are objective, somewhat transferable things versus trying to trying to piggyback off of someone else's process or definition of great. Because we just said almost every company is doing this wrong or has kind of been doing funnel or doom. So why would we mirror or map someone else's process that we feel like maybe wasn't perfect? 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 that maybe you don't have full. confidence in any way. So you're saying specifically don't focus on, and it's a trap to focus on the logos on their resume. I think so. Yeah. There are clearly vintages of companies when you're like, hey, you know, this team at this company at this time did fantastic things. And possibly because that person was on that team at that company that time, they are great, possibly. That can be like

shorthand. But that, but both companies jump to that almost immediately. Awesome. Okay. Step two is mapping out and finding basically the top 50. What are tools that help you do that? Is it like LinkedIn? Is it some else? I think it's a combination of things. But I think I where I where we typically start is a set of people who we trust in terms of having high taste in talent. And so. But I think the mistake though, and that's not that's not that's an obvious point. But the mistake that most companies make is they'll say, hey Lenny, who's the best. product engineer you know. That is the worst question you can ask. The better question to ask is, hey, Lenny, of all the product engineers you worked with, who stands out to you as the person

who's most collaborative with designers? Or who can translate a framework into a product better than anyone you've ever seen? You kind of have to put these very specific characteristics or skills or needs for your team And then that's way easier for you to conjure up people that way than like this broad question of who's the best person. And I imagine that maps to step one, which is where you map the skills experience. So the questions you're asking are mapping back to those, that cornerstone work that you did in step one.

So when you ask very targeted questions to a set of people, you actually start to triangulate around the same names. Like, ah. Lenny mentioned them, but so did Sally. Let's put this person on the list, on the target list. Okay, so part of the strategy here is you talk to people you trust who are awesome, whose tastes you trust, ask them these questions. What else helps you find these people in the world? So if you think about, let's pull out like the set of characteristics. Like, okay, the characteristics of something we want is like really curious, systems thinker,

whatever they might be, maybe two or three things. Then you're like thinking about what companies also share that approach to how they hire? And you could literally probably do a quick bullion or AI string and be like, hey, look at all the job openings in the world among these hundred companies, which ones also say these characteristics matter. So you kind of think about, oh, where could they maybe picked up some of these skills for a company who also said that matters as well? And so then you start to kind of build like company lists that aren't the normal list you have. But they might show up there too, but let's validate it through the things that we objectively said we wanted for us. It's so interesting systems thinking has come up on the four last four podcasts I've done. Such a trending up attribute people are looking for these days.

Yeah, I think it's like always been there in a little bit, but I think it's just become really accentuated now in this era. When you hear the term systems thinking, what's kind of a way you describe what that actually means when people hear that term? I learned this pretty early maybe in the second company I worked for. and it comes around to a fundamental question of what problem are we trying to solve, right? And so when I think about systems thinking or what I'm sitting around, what is like the fundamental root problem that we're trying to solve? And then how do we take this larger problem and break into really small pieces? And I fortunately have worked with like engineers most of my life.

And I just really have learned and I admired how they can take something's really big and break it in and kind of start to tackle that problem, that problem. As long as you're anchored in to like what is the overall thing. that we're trying to solve here. Awesome, very helpful. People always hear these terms are like, yeah, yeah, I'm a great systems thinker. And so it's always helpful to just hear from different people

what that actually means. You know, I think system thinking sounds very strategic, but actually I think it's extremely tactical. The very best systems thinkers take these things and put them into like very small tactics and start to remove each, you know, tactic by tactic kind of remove the problem, remove the blocker.

So to close the thread on this step of finding these incredible people, what I'm hearing is mostly it's kind of sit around, talk to people and just jam in a dock probably of here's people that people recommend, here's companies to look at. Yeah, and there are tools and there's LinkedIn. There's all these things too. But I think the most valuable one is the most time intensive one, which is spending time and digging into people's networks. We've shared this before, but people on my team whose entire job is to dig into our current employees network. You could automate that. You could use an AI tool and have walked them through a facilitation of it,

but nothing beats you and I sitting down every other week for six weeks in diving into people. You're like, hey, last session, you gave me these three names. I tracked down like, but what about this person? You're like, oh, yeah, they were great too. I'm like, oh, well, you kind of go back to back. By the way, I'm also holding you accountable for you sending out notes. and what did they say? Oh, they didn't reply. You're going to send another note. And so kind of this like one to one hand to hand cultivating of signal, I think is really important. Of course, those signals go into like a system and a database, but the extraction, I think, is a hugely personal and effective approach. This all sounds very time intensive and slow and lots of work. How do you, you know, there's a reason companies don't,

hire this way, treat everyone as an exec, because they're not execs. They're, you know, I see engineers, PMs. How do you talk about that tradeoff of taking this approach, knowing that it's going to take a lot more time and effort? Yeah, yeah. And so, I mean, I usually, like, will ask a question. So founder, like, you know, and all the things are important to you, where does talent fall into that list? And like, oh, it's number one. Like, talent is the most important thing. Okay. So if talent is a no more thing, like, there, it is not about time or, like, this is the most, this is where the focus should be. And so 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 it is paramount to your success. You just said that objectively. And so, you know, so if both can't be true, you know, you can't say, hey, this is most important thing and I'm going to outsource it or I'm going to hand it over to a. recruiting organization to do. If it's the number one thing, that's like that is your focus. Like hearing that, obviously correct. Why would you not do that? And then there's like, holy shit, everything's on fire all the time. I have to make time for all this stuff, all these meetings. And it's just like, is there anything you do to help keep a founder and a team on track

and just sticking to this plan knowing it's so much work in time? Yeah. I mean, typically the founder's keeping the company on track around that, the very best companies. And so, and part of it, keeping on track means like keeping top of mind, you know, there's also the adage of what gets measured gets done. So if it's an important thing, we measure it, just like we might measure uptime or we might measure customer satisfaction or we might measure revenue and we hold those teams accountable. We also hold hiring managers and leaders and organizations accountable to hiring.

And so keeping it top of mind, but putting in the right systems around rewards and recognition and all those things around it will help people keep as a priority. But if you aren't measuring it, they will hand that over. They will shirk that responsibility to somewhere else. Yeah,

one of your big pet peeves is having the recruiters, not basically empowering the recruiters and hiring managers not being deeply involved in the process. Yeah. I think a lot of companies, recruiting owns the hiring goal. And I'd 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 recruiter's goal is really about helping provide confidence to that hiring manager to make the right decision. They're a confidence engine. They're not a decision-making engine. And so I see a lot of companies where they lose the thread is when they essentially hand over the function of recruiting. the act of recruiting to a function of recruiting. Right?

And so no one should care more about a hire. No one gets the joy or the pain of a good and bad hire than that hiring manager and that team. So why then is a recruiter or recruiting organization holding that accountability when they actually don't, they don't have the decision making, let alone the benefits or pain or cost of a good or bad hire? I want to come back to this.

It's like a different funnel, but I'll call it a funnel. Would you still describe it as a funnel, but the funnel of non-dome? Is there another term? Because it's still kind of a funnel. Yeah. Yeah. There could be, not all funnels are bad. So yeah. Funnel of talent density. Yeah. So coming back to the how to discover the best people. Luckily, there's this incredible post out there about how Curser approaches hiring by Bree Wolfson that was very helpful in helping me prep for this talk. And another tactic that she shared of how Curser finds the best people is there's a Slack channel called hiring ideas. and people on the team just share. Here's someone we might want to hire.

It's super active. You know, we could pull it up right now. Let's check out. Let's see if people are recommended. Yeah, maybe we can get some audience input on it. So the general gist is someone will come across something impressive, a product, a post, overheard at a barbecue, and they'll drop that person's profile or that ex post.

into the in Hiring Channel and it becomes a rallying effect around ooh I've heard of them I know here's how we get together here's what I think is compelling to them you almost like create this quick like strategy of how we might engage this person

and imagine working out a place where the company just is wired that way where people like are excited and enthusiastic and like love the thrill to hunt and like to go want to work with great people and so we're just like very fortunate to have that as like an ongoing tailwind. But that's like that was like an early expectation, if you will.

An early almost like, how do I say? It's almost like social credibility in the company to be able to like surface someone here is great and then people come in and help out and try to get them into the process. So as recruiting like that's like such a get like we are not initiating that. We're not dropping in a profile. How does anyone know this person? This is non-recreting folks in the company dropping in ideas and then the company rallying behind it.

Amazing. So this is just a really good way to just resume out again, the way most companies hire. There's this funnel. People apply. People refer and they kind of work through and you try to reach out and kind of work through and pick a few people at the bottom. And your point there is this is like not the top people because they're not going to reply to you.

They're not going to make it through the funnel. You don't even know what you're hiring for a lot of times. Right. Correct. Correct. And by the way, like, you know, all the hiring ideas aren't always great ideas. They aren't always right for us. But it becomes this almost like tangential injection into the hiring process that is often a great outcome. And so just to maybe make very clear how different this approach is, is basically it's the opposite. It's figure out who are the best top 50 people for this role in the world and then relentlessly pursue them. Yeah. So let's talk about that part of it, how to actually relentlessly pursue people. What are some tactics and stories there of just how you convince these top people to actually talk to you and then join? Yeah.

Yeah. And I think one of the things you said a few minutes ago is around, hey, this can be a very slow process, right? And if you're at like a zero point, you're at day zero, that can feel like a slow. It can't feel like a slow burn. But imagine over multiple days, you're actually planting all of these seeds. with potential top 50 people, they're going to come to harvest at different rates. But you've got to plant the seeds.

You've got to start. And because it will take weeks for some months for others. I have stories of years. We've worked on candidates. But you have to start the clock on that. And so how we think about this, like, relentless pursuit is you'll often reach, you know, one step is just getting them into a conversation, getting a response, getting some kind of engagement.

But most people will tell you, if you get them, it's like not good timing, here's all the reasons I can't do it. And you're like, hey, I'm not asking you to interview. I'm not asking you to consider a role. I'm asking for our next conversation. And so when you say, hey, you know, it's not really good timing for me right now. Maybe in the late fall, you're like, hey, I told her that was great. But also can you come by for, you want to come by for a coffee and see the office, right?

Can you, can I introduce to this other person on the team who's really fascinated by your work? Can you chat? But so you know it's not, let's say it is true. They can't join until late fall. That doesn't mean you're not connecting them and having conversations on a weekly basis and working that piece. And it can only move it forward by doing nothing and actually talking to them in the late fall. At best, you get them, even if they're still interested. then or someone else hasn't grabbed them. So we think about this continual touch point approach

to them to getting them into process. But that could, again, we're willing to do that over days, weeks, months, and sometimes years. When you reach out to someone, imagine working a cursor, now part of SpaceX. It's like, oh, this is interesting and cool. And you know, it's like, we never know, maybe you'll work out someday. A lot of companies, and you've worked with other companies that are not as interesting of a brand and as successful. Is there any advice for folks to get someone over the line to even talk that works. I imagine it's all very particular and nuanced, but just any advice there. Yeah, I think it's really spending a lot of time up front to get a sense of what could be engaging for them. So who might that be and what might that topic be?

And so there's a number of excellent people in a world who aren't on any platform. There's no information about them. But most, you can get a couple nuggets. 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 than it does the actual messaging. 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'd like condense that, that activation timeline in effort. I've heard that you often say, caring is free. Yeah.

Talk about that because it feels like that connects throughout this entire process. Yeah, I think there's like all kind of tactics out there that are varying degrees of cost, but out caring other companies that like when I've built recruiting teams, that's something that we've always talked about. Like we can care more about that candidate than anyone else. That's in us. That's within us. We can do that.

And I think like 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. And so the more that we can care for our candidates and demonstrate that, I think, is an unfair advantage. And it's in all of us. And so that is like an effort and that is an extra step type of thing. It's the extra intentionality that you take that I think in a very somewhat feeling like transactional business like recruiting. If you're doing this like step by step funnel,

do you kind of get caught up in the steps. You get caught up in the numbers game. I need to reach out to 100 to get to 20. I need to have 10 higher manager screens to get four on site. You know, you get caught up in the numbers and you lose the human element. You're looking for the one. You know, so I try to remind my team, like, we're trying to hire one person for this role here, not 10. So don't get caught up in the 10. Focus on the one. That is such a big reframe in this way of thinking. As you said, instead of this funnel of we need 200 people at the top to get one the bottom, you're just like, here's the 50 people that would be the best 50 in the world for this. We just need one of these 50. It feels a lot more, a lot more doable. And we're building,

hopefully we're building relationships with dozens of other those that could be. So when you talk about this being slow, we're planting seats, planting seeds, we're planting seeds. And I think the other thing often happens when you kind of get into this funnel of doom mentality is I think you become overly consistent in your hiring approach. And we are very comfortable with, bespoke and ad hoc hiring. That doesn't mean we don't have like similar stages for consensual, but like who that next conversation is, what they, you know, might focus on.

I think we get a little robotic sometimes in recruiting with that. And we have like, so a lot of companies as they get into like higher volume hiring, they might like, hey, we have a pool of these interviewers who can do this type of interview. And they just like let fate decide. They let availability decide who has that next conversation. but the savvy recruiter or the savvy hiring manager is like, ooh, they mentioned this thing. Who on our team has that shared interest in that pool?

Can we like be a little bit more prescriptive and can we orchestrate a much better Canada experience by taking the extra thoughtful step of who might have a better conversation together? It's so interesting hearing just how important that initial contact is for the rest of the process and how much of this is for future seat planting versus even immediately.

Yeah, I think like we put so much. much energy to the on-side interview, which I totally get. But honestly, the most important one is that hiring manager first conversation. And so it kind of feels like this like 50-50, like, hey, half the people you talk to hiring manager should come on. And like, we kind of like, I think we underestimate the importance of it. Because this is like who you're going to work with. This is the person who should care. This person is going to make the hiring decision. And so they should be asking the most important questions. They should be getting, pulling out the most important motivators from that candidate. And I feel like we sometimes maybe, we put it into a third.

minute thing often. It's like 30 minutes and it feels like so important to the rest of that process. Especially if instead of we just need this funnel and work through a bunch of people, this is one of the 50 in the world that could be the best for this. You might meet three times, right? You might meet four times as a hiring manager person before that person actually is like, you know, fully in process. The way Bree described this in her piece is that you treat hiring as the atomic unit of hiring is the person, not the job spec and not the role. Correct. And I think that that makes it incredibly frustrating. Imagine for my team because you're like, oh, what's the process?

And you're like, well, like, you know, it's like it's like almost like a decision tree. It could go many different ways based off of this conversation. And so, but when you are not caught into the numbers game, it feels a little bit less scary when you're really focused on how do we get that person here versus how do we, are they the right person for that job. And because they're on this list, they're innately very popular and in demand. Is there anything else that works for getting them excited to talk and interested other than, you know, soft, warm intro with things you've shared. Yeah. I mean, we've done lots of like tactics, I think, to get them involved. I mean, one thing I just love is breaking bread. 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 just. And a just. joining act that I think is just so important. So that could be a coffee. It could be a lunch. It doesn't be super formal. But I just think it is this humanizing activity that I think is really important. So we try to we try to center around food and drink as much as possible.

I think we've done other things I think are very useful, which is like if they are one of these 50 people, they might be somewhat famous or while respected. They probably have an expertise, having them come in and give a talk to the team. having them come in and do like a fun side project. Like some, these people, they love, they love to kind of like share and like learn and they're curious.

And so, but also it's like, it demonstrates increased interactivity between the two teams around quality and kind of gives them this like realistic preview of being there. We try to play home games as much as we can, bringing them into the office. But we also understand some of the folks like early on

might want to go to a neutral site of a coffee shop or something too. But 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 lives, you kind of walk onto a campus and you get that feel in your gut, you know? And you can't really describe it, but it's just like, oh, this feels like home.

We want people to feel that when they kind of walk into the offices of cursor. And like, that is like a priceless moment. And by the way, it's also like a, it can be like a, a defining moment. It also could not hit. And that's, it's good to like suss that out early too. But for a lot of people,

it does hit. And we like that at a moment. This resonates so deeply with early days Airbnb. I remember Joe Gabby had the saying, just get them in the elevator. And this is because the office was on the second floor of this building.

You had to like go on this elevator to get in. And that was the whole strategy. Just get them in the elevator. Yeah. Yeah. That was like more than half the battle. Along these lines of breaking bread And Homecourt, I know this might be one of the reasons you guys have a cafe cursor right there near the office, which was, and now it's like happening all over the world. I think Ben leaves this work, but there's all these cafes popping up all over the world. Yeah, I think it's been interesting. Obviously, it's very much focused on the product and the user, but he and that team have done a really good job of taking that vibe and putting into a moment. And if you've been in the cursor offices, it almost feels like you're in a, um,

hogsworths library. It's very warm and soft. But cafes bring that energy as well. And so we've tried to kind of lift and lift that and drop that in really around the world. There's also a lot of chalkboards at the office. A lot of chalkboards. It's like has this like some like it's like again like this like disarming warm feel that I think really kind of exudes our like Midwest vibes. That is like kind of sometimes how I describe cursor, you know,

very hardworking, very ambitious, but at the same time, the work speaks for self and understated as well. And so I think a lot of our office helps invoke those vibes too. This episode is brought to by Mercury, radically different banking loved by over 300,000 entrepreneurs and now with command. I've been a customer of Mercury's for over six years. I have never once thought about leaving. Mercury is basically what happens when banking is built by product people, not by bankers. They make it so easy, dare I say fun, to send invoices, move money around, set up virtual cards for folks on my team. Does your bank have an API, a terminal native CLI, or an AI-ready MCP server? I don't think so. And just recently, they launched Command, a conversational interface built

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Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and column NA members FDIC. Okay, so if people have been following along, we're working our way through the funnel. This is kind of my strategy here. So we've talked about how to kind of figure out which you're looking for, figure out who these people are, how to get them talking to you. Say you got them in the interview stage. What are some things you've learned about how to increase your signal on the person and identify if they're a good fit and so many want to make an offer for you? Yeah, some of it's a little fundamental, which is 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. And so, you know, I think we are famously known for doing long onsites experiences for some of our roles, where they do a project and they get worked side by side. So that gives us a very strong signal. It also gives them the candidate tremendous signal. And so 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. And self-selection, really good, self-selection starts with really good inputs in data.

And so we want that experience with the candidate to feel more two-way than most. So we really think about crafting that onsite experience through who they might meet. I mean, we talked about that. We really clear, like hand-picking who they might meet for those interviews. We do a lot of work sample and project type of work to give us good signal. but we also really curate who's greeting them, who's sitting beside them for lunch. Like we always try to put it around a meal, a dinner, or lunch, or a breakfast. And everything is really curated to make that as high quality experience for them and get them the data.

But also us getting data from people that we feel like are most going to connect with that person. Who runs point on this sort of experience? Is it a recruiter or is it the hiring manager? I would say, I think it's the recruiter primarily as the quarterback. But they're pulling lots of levers. And so the hiring manager is probably going to have the most insight into some of those people. Our recruiting coordinators are tremendous. And I think we probably, they do a lot of this hosting with us as well.

And so our recruiting course, of course, do some scheduling, but they're probably doing more of this candidate shepherding. So imagine a candidate was with us for a day or two. There's lots of moving pieces and helping them move from. a workstation where they might be doing a project into lunch, back to that, helping them get their environment set up. So there's a lot of people in play. We ask our quarterback and our recruiter to be the quarterback, but a lot of the insights coming from hiring managers and execution with the coordinator too.

It's interesting just how much of the experience and process changes with this worldview of every person we were talking to is very special and they're very rare. and these are the best for this role. And so it's clear how much of it trickles down into thinking deeply about every touch point along the journey versus the typical journey. And imagine that you have teams and employee base to understand that while they went through it. So you get over this like tipping point moment with a company where they had that experience. So they recognize, acknowledge it. Now they're part of how fun is that, right?

They had a great experience. Now they get to help deliver that. for this next batch of people. So you kind of create this like flywheel opportunity once you get kind of over that initial hump. I just remembered actually. I had a friend applying for a job at cursor and he said it was the best candidate experience he's ever had.

That's amazing. Just remember that. And so by definition, we thought about like doing a lot of scoping of really great people. Not all of them are going to be a fit for us by their choice or ours, but every one of them can walk away as a net promoter.

And again, by definition, they're some of the best. Those promoters weigh more and count more than others because they're influential. They're great. They're known to be good. And so they may never come back to us, but they might tell you who now tells this audience or they might tell you who then you mentioned something at a barbecue and like now it becomes this like ground swell and you start to build a little stronger magnet. And that activation becomes a little bit less hard if you do that well.

Absolutely. The work trial piece, I saw an interview with Michael Terrell talking about this and he said how they tried to get rid of it because it's obviously adds a lot of load and some people don't want to be doing these things. And he said that it just totally tanked their signal and they had to bring it back. Yeah, it's a huge commitment you can imagine of time. But if talent is your number one thing, then, you know, that is a good investment of time to do it. You know, we all have a. role to play in recruiting at the company. Not everyone is like carved out or, you know, best to do work trial work, but like some are, you know, but some can do the lunch. Some could do the greet. So, you know, so there's like lots of different ways that people can play a role. But yeah, when we ran that experiment, you know, because it is, 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. So good learning there is it's like, if you are not doing this, you're lacking significant signal. Possibly. Yeah, I think so. You know, and I think there, I don't think there's a lot of maxims or absolutes in this business. But I think for a lot of companies, it's hard to think of a better way than, you know, doing side by side real work to get those signals. Obviously, some of it, you know, in this case is like a technical signal.

But imagine the amount of like core values and. collaboration and other things you get like other signals you get over a stretch of time that can be arguably more important than the specific technical skill what do you do for like pms or like i don't know go-to-market or ops people is there something like that we have a version of this across and so the go-to-market team does like a challenge where there's a probably work through like a challenge to get like a challenging customer and things like that and that's like often like one-to-one with a hiring manager product does the same thing similar project type together as well. So we have like versions of that that I feel like are

titrated to the function, but also the role and things like that as well. So we try not to be like a uniform across this because these functions are very different. One of the classic criticisms with the work trial is you're doing work for the company and it's like, we're just solving problems for you for free. What's the philosophy on the problem they tackle, say engineering or PM? Yeah, there's a set of problems they can choose from. So, you know, And so we feel like they have like some direction and discretion. We also are very open to right sizing it for them based on where they are and their availability in time to up to a certain extent. So we try to be flexibility, flexible and understanding around that.

And we also, you know, we'll sometimes use Saturdays too. You know, so like we understand it can be hard to take away time away on a work week or a traditional work week. And so we totally get it. it's a big ask, a big commitment. We think it's worth it, but we're also willing to schedule that when that works for them. So there's this conflict around a lot of time and effort that could feel slow. But when they're ready to go, we are fast, right? We make up that time.

So if you and I were having an initial screen, you're like, yeah, I'll be able to talk to how many, you're like, open up your calendar. I have their calendar. Great. You're going to talk to them in an hour. right so like you like move once they're ready to go you got to capitalize on that you can't create openings for them to kind of have second guessing so when we go we go but we it might take a lot of time to get off to that moment moving ourselves further down the funnel what's kind of the moment when you decide we're going to make this person an offer is there something that you look for specifically or and or just what's the process like a hiring committee meeting is some else yeah we we debrief as as immediately as possible um as a team each function has a little bit of a different hiring process of what that looks like. But we don't have hiring communities.

It's hiring manager led. They get lots of input from the team. And remember the role of the hiring manager is, you know, it's not a democracy. Hiring manager is holding that group accountable for helping the get the right inputs to make out the right decision, to make the best decision, hire and no hire. And so we try to frame it in that way. making sure we get really good signal on it. So we try to move really quickly.

So debriefing typically same day, if not next day. And, you know, kind of like they make that decision. Then that decision goes to the founders for stamping. Awesome. Okay. Then you get to the offer stage. There's a bunch of stuff here. But one is just there are many massive offers happening these days.

Okay. So say you made an offer to one of these top 50 people and they're like, okay, but I also got to suffer for Amanthropic for a bazillion dollars. How do you handle that? And also just, is that like super frustrating or is it like, oh, wow, more signal this person is incredible? Yeah, I think it can be both. There's room for both.

I think that the goal is to not be selling at the close. We're trying to sell throughout. And so if you think about the craft of recruiting, the craft of recruiting is up front getting a really clear on this person's motivations and what might be why they might make a move and for what and then making sure that that entire experience hits to those pieces. So at the end is a culmination, not a start, right? It feels like almost like a natural outcome of it. Where it's just like, oh, this is almost like this just like a sumptive next step of, yeah,

And here's the offer that we talked about all along. And so we versus like kind of starting the clock or starting the conversation on a close. I think we try to get back to those motivations. So we might think about how we would differentiate against inothropic size-wise or the role or the team or the people you work with. We try to think about, we really try to focus on the intrinsic things, not the extrinsic things, which is very hard to do when you're getting MBA players like offers and salaries. and sometimes bigger than that. But we really try to focus on people who want to be here. You know, and often when people are thinking about their job search

and what might be next, they maybe start with a set of things. And we maybe help them discover other things along the way. And we might discover at the end that actually this is not the right fit. And that's okay. And we feel good about walking away from that. But often it's around helping them discover that actually maybe this is the right place through that journey. How often do people take a job without, that doesn't have the highest comp? Like, is that common or is that rare? Yeah, I think you're trying to mitigate comp as a reason

people come or don't come. And often that means you're not at the, it's not the highest number. And I think, you know, we've all probably talked with people who maybe at some point in their career chase just the largest number. And I think what you realize six months in is like, that just becomes your new level of like comp, you know, comp life, but you're, you're not excited by the people you work with or the work you're doing. And so we try to kind of mitigate that as a piece, but I think it happens a lot. You know, and also rightfully so, you know, we've probably lost people where maybe we were the highest one and they went somewhere else too.

And like, if that's the right fit for them, this is going to sound a little polyamic. But like, I fundamentally believe there are right people for right companies at the right time. And if they discover at the end of that that we're not, that's the right call for them. And like, as a recruiter, if they're not the right fit, I literally have to redo that work in six months. I don't want to redo that work. I'd rather let's figure that out right now and have that more open conversation. You should build an agent that helps you decide and figure that out, which company is the right fit for me right now in this time. Yeah.

Because that sounds really valuable. That would be super interesting. something that I've heard Anthropic does that I've never heard anyone do similar to Tesla they don't have it they don't let you negotiate they're just like here's the offer do you feel like that's like an only anthropic thing that they could do because they're just anthropic and or is that something you think about I mean I've thought about I see you know over time different companies have done that and I think what I respect about it is like you make that call and and and you kind of stick with it and there's a commitment to it. But every company's different and I think the approach is, so I respect it, but think about it, but it may not be right for us. From the candidates perspective, what are some mistakes that people make when they get an offer that kind of shoot themselves in the foot? Generally, the advice I give to candidates is when you think about your offer and if you're negotiating, it has to just fit a line of logic. Right? And so

if you are asking for a certain piece of commentation or a certain other piece of it, like what is it rooted? Walk me through like the logic behind it. And like how like that, I think that makes it easy for the person to understand, but also easy for them to communicate that forward to maybe a different decision maker as well.

So I see candidates who may be a little bit all over the place on that. Where early on is this and now it's this and kind of the add-on type of thing versus a can who's coming. in of like, here's the four things that are important to me and being clear and consistent with it as much from the outset as you can. Not all things can be there at the outset. That makes it very logical and easy for the company to kind of engage with that. Versus just finding random excuses for more common. Correct. And you know, I think what a company generally knows is like we're not their top, we're intrinsically not their top choice.

Right. And so we're trying to win head and hearts. here and it's not we're not trying we're not trying to um we're not trying to buy that out how just like mind-blowing are these comps these days i imagine you've seen so many yeah i think it's all true and worse um or higher i think the the open question a lot of as the AI companies are like how does this like where does it go how does it go from here like how does this end nobody knows uh but it does feel like the unit of measure that matters matters the most is the most fixed and finite, which is time. It is a race against the clock to get the model, the talent.

You know, and like that is like the, that is like the thing that matters the most is the most precious. Clearly for some companies, there's more money and there's more other things, but time is like is our, is the most fixed and important asset right here in this market. Just coming back to the AI researcher trend, it's crazy how these people use to be just like off on the side building these AI models and no models not that it's exciting to anybody and now they're like the most in demand and i remember i helped build out the research group at facebook before they had they just not hire PhDs even you know advanced

degrees really much at all and um you know this is uh 2010 or something and i remember meeting just like this set of academic really, who were getting this growing frustration of their work, not ever making it outside of the halls of academia. And so I'm very excited for that population to have, like, this moment. You know, they've been arguably the underpinning of technical innovation for decades, and they're having their moment and, like, well, well deserved. kind of along those lines to close out this, the funnel of, let's call it the funnel of joy instead of the funnel of doom.

Yeah, love it. I heard from one of your candidates, here's the quote that I got, that you and your team's ability to close and convert candidates with offers to accept is extraordinary. What are some things you do that help get someone over the line that are kind of on the fence? Yeah. So I think there's like a couple things there. One, I'll just rematch it quickly, which is that the closing is happening throughout the process. in terms of like who their meeting and motivations and like removing objections along the way. So that's one.

I think the second is closing is a team sport. And so when we have a candidate, particularly like a high profile high caliber, there are often daily standups around that candidate about what we're doing to get them to yes. And that might be 10 minutes. but it's not the amount of time. It is like I focused energy every day around what we are collectively doing. And so that could be the hiring manager recruiter, but also could be former peers.

You know, there's like lots of people who influence that and we try to be very intentional about making sure that person feels cared for and belonging to and coming here and it's like staying on top of things. The third thing I think is we just try to make it very personal. And so just this week, you know, two days ago, I just saw, and we try to share these stories internally

too, because this is how builds the culture of recruiting. We kind of share these stories back to the company, but someone was sharing, we were working on a candidate in New York, and we learned that through getting to know them, that they went to a performing arts high school, and we're a classically trained violinist, and was just kind of very into, like, stringed instruments.

So this person, I found this, like, specialty store in New York City and bought this kind of unique Turkish guitar, almost a violin guitar thing. And they're meeting for like a dinner where they got the offer and they presented that gift to them. And so it was a couple hundred dollars maybe, right? Not a lot of money, particularly relative to like the size of offer and the size of impact that we thought that, you know, that someone's going to have. But it's like it's the thoughtfulness and the touch and the uniqueness of it in the personal moment of that. that like I think stands out.

And I think when a candidate thinks about having the best candidate experience, often they feel like, wow, this felt like tailored to me. This felt unique to me. I know there's also a Slack channel that gets created per for each candidate. Every candidate. Yeah. So I think when you talk about the standout, sometimes that's also a strategy and updates. And like, and so there's the same rallying effect to activate is no different at that close.

And each cana has their own channel. Just so much of this just keeps coming back to intentionality. around every specific candidate and not treating it like the funnel, but just this is the atomic unit, this person. What can we do throughout the entire process to make them get excited and see if it's a fit? Which is hard to do when you're doing at scale at the funnel of doom. So when you are thinking about 100 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 come because now people are moving faster through those steps and it's a smaller number of people.

So the time that you're taking, you know, holistically for that funnel, you're just displacing and putting it in different places. It's so interesting. And it's such a different approach. I've never heard of anyone hiring this way. Yeah. And we had this like thesis when I was at Growth by Design, you know, around like there's a, we think there's this different way to do this. We'd seen all these companies over time and work with labs and all these things are like, wow, like these companies are literally, at the cutting edge of a technical revolution here. Probably the most exciting one we've seen in millennia, and they are recruiting in a web browser way. And we're like, if a company had this willingness to commit this time and effort as this collective force,

they could really have an unfair advantage when it comes to talent. And when you think about companies over time, where they become this iconic logo or one that we no longer recognize, it often isn't the first company, the fastest to market, the first idea. It's actually execution. And execution comes down having the right talent at the right time. And when companies figure that out, they're like, oh, this is the most important thing. And this is how we're going to approach it.

And so when we met Cursor, we're like, this could be fun. Cursor is actually such a great example of exactly what you're describing because it feels like throughout the entire history of Cursor, it was always just like, how are they going to survive? There's these model companies building these things, the IDs shit, like people are moving away from IDs. And it's been incredible to watch Cursor execute and get ahead of each of these shifts

whenever people doubt that there's an opportunity here and just keeps growing and killing it. I mean, it's not too long ago. It was like tab autocomplete, you know, on it. And now we're in a fully cloud agents. And it's just, but just remember the time span is like months. The condensed nature, this is just wild. I came to the office at one point and I got a tab button and now it's just like no longer even.

Yeah, now it's just cute. Yeah, now it's just on the shelf. Yeah. I just talk. Something that one of your colleagues wanted me to ask you is just what does it like to work with an exec team who truly believes recruiting is the most important thing? It's a gift and at times incredibly frustrating. So the gift part of it is like imagine that how much they care. like trying to convince a founder to go have a conversation or to do anything

recruiting late, that is not a problem here. And like we've, you know, all works with companies who, you know, where you're like, you're trying to like pull them in to things. So it's a true gift. The, you know, the challenge is like, they're in your shit. Like, they're in it, you know, like, they understand it. Like the cursor team hired their first 80 people, roughly 80 people on their own. They know how hard.

They know how hard it is, which is great. But they also like they love it and they're in it and they want to do it. And so there can be zero ego about this of who owns, you know, who has what piece and like it's an all hands on deck. And so sometimes that can be confusing on who's doing things and things that, you know, you find out about things after the fact that happen. But like it's like, I will take that every day. That is extremely met positive.

But there, you know, there's always like a counterbalance to, uh, such an advantage like that. So interesting. That's like CPO's often are frustrated for that reason where the founders are always in their shit. Yeah. But they care. You know, like I will,

I'll take the effort and care with that with that tax any day. And then one of your hot takes is that the recruiter, the recruiting team should be the highest paid team within the company. 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. demand crisis around really strategic recruiters because of the somewhat transactional nature we've made recruiting over time. And so I just think there's a really small supply of recruiters who can function at this level and at this approach and style. And so like any other labor market, it's a cost of labor thing. And there's just very few of it. And so we think that they have tremendous impact, but it is like a really rare skill set.

Something I wanted to ask you that I forgot to ask is we talk a lot about talent density. How much of it is about the person specifically versus the team that you assemble around them? Yeah, I feel like where companies like overly focus is like an individual. And unless they are a team of one, it's actually like the, you know, if you think about amazing leadership and amazing managers, they're actually quite great puzzle building. and they think about building these teams that are complementary together and then help them excel. And so talent density is not a single piece and less like the numerator and denominator are both one. But that's not the case.

Often this is one over how many people. And so talent density is actually a collective nature of individuals and humans. But we often, because you are recruiting one human at a time, I think sometimes we get overly focused on that specific 10x. Xer thing, you know. And actually I like to think a little bit more around exponential, around 10X of like a team versus an individual. I don't think you can have a 10x person on a bad team. It's just like doesn't exist.

You know, I think, you know, like I used to think when we were like at my last company, we can't be a great service provided if we don't have a great client. We can get, there's like just a bar there. And similarly, a person that might be excellent is going to be throttled if they're not on a strong and supportive team. That makes sense to me. Okay, I'm going to ask you a bunch of random questions. Again, I think people are going to be hearing this and be like, I need Adam immediately. We need help.

And they're not going to be able to get that because you've got a job. So I'm going to try to extract as much as I can while we're here. One is say you're an early stage company thinking about hiring, setting up your hiring approach. what's kind of the most common ways that early stage companies and founders F up their early team in hiring? Yeah, I think the thing they try to do is do this Silver Bullet hire, which is a first head of talent. And they kind of collapse two competing skill sets into one. Okay, so when you are generally as a founder, when you're ready to hire your first recruiter, you're probably behind on hiring. There's a problem to solve there.

you're behind on hiring. So maybe there's like a debt of roles to fill, 5, 10, 15. But you also are hiring someone at this stage because you want them to build like a system, like just like they might be like, wow, like I want to build something like Adam's talking about. So you try to build this like hire someone who can also put in the right pieces to help scale out. And like those are competing interests because person who wants to come in and like just any new hire. They want to like prove out. they want to make hires, but they might not put in the system, or they might put in the system,

but not make any hires, and now you're like, not simply. And so they try to collapse this into one role, and generally that's a mistake. And so we recommend kind of decoupling those things. So that means you still might hire one person, but can you get some help with the other one? I'm going to hire the person who's going to put in the right system, but I'm going to partner them with a contingent recruiter or something else to, like, make some short-term progress while they can kind of like teach the company how to do this through these roles that they fill that they're helping orchestrate or vice versa I might bring in someone to help us put in the right foundation which like we did at GPD and then they could they hire like a really high powered

icy recruiter who can kind of execute. Amazing. That makes all the sense in the world. When you're looking for that first recruiting hire, is there anything else you think is important to look for? I know it depends on maybe which of these two buckets they were going to be in, but any other advice? Yeah, I think number one is that they are.

curious and business focused. They're an early member of the team. They've got to be really curious understanding of how the business works and how each of those hires is going to change the slope of the business. And so, you know, often that means that they have all these interests in a way. It shows up in lots of way, curious people. But I think that's the number one thing I think of. The number two one, which I think, and I think these sometimes get switched,

is just like high motor, you know. someone who like understands the grind that it will be and the pace that it works and is down for it. And that doesn't have to mean they have to be younger or or it doesn't mean anything. It's just that they love working at this edge of overwhelm this. And so I often think about my team is like, we want the water level to be like right here. And so you're like, you're breathing. But, you know, and if you, if you've met any kind of. recruiters, recruiters are excellent at 90 to 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 overwhelmed. But they're kind of great at this like middle ground of like edge of adrenaline rush busy. And you go, you want to find those people. Oh, man. So along those lines, I heard from a bunch of people that you just have a huge. follow ship on your team.

There's a lot of heads of talent from other companies that decided to join your team to be ICs. What are some things you've learned about building incredible teams, keeping people working for you over the long term? One thing I learned is

at each place my team has looked different because the company, how they think about recruiting or the product is different. And so the cursor way demanded a different type of team. It demanded, this level of recruiter and who understands a leadership recruiting motion,

who's not going to get caught up in the numbers game of the funnel of doom. Like they have this confidence and they have, you know, they have a network that they can tap into. And so I think we talk a lot about hiring managers and other people networks, but 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 tapping their networks as a technical leader, for example. So then I kind of just kind of think about like three attributes of someone who I want on my team. So one, I want people who are excellent humans and excellent in what they do. And I'm not willing to trade that off. We are going to spend most of our waking hours during the week together. And we should be all be selfish enough to want to work with. great humans. The second is people who I look for people who have a chip on their shoulder, something to prove, love the craft. They have this as like internal drive and motivation to be

excellent. And that can show up in lots of ways and I try to get to that. And then the third thing is I look for people who put team over themselves. And so this is really important, clearly, for the team I built now, they could be running recruiting at lots of places. but what they've realized is that no one really aspires to get to middle management. We kind of end up there. But what they did realize is like they love the craft of recruiting and they love to be challenged. They love to learn. They want to work with great people.

And so when I would go out to my network and I'm like, hey, Lenny, who are three people you know that are excellent humans and excellent recruiters? They just have this natural drive or chip on their shoulder. And like they put team up with themselves. You're like, oh, you should talk to Janet. You can conjure those things up. And so we've really tried to build a team of those folks here. And I'm really excited about the people we've collected. It's a good sign when I'm just like, wait, I want to work for Adam.

This sounds really great. I try to be this balance of because recruiting is sometimes around inspiring your team. But it's a deeply operational function. You know, and so I've tried to find this balance of where I can, be like in the weeds operational, understand it, be in it with them, but also sometimes lift out and help like paint a bigger picture too. Amazing. Adam, we've covered so much ground. We've gone through the whole funnel and more. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else that you wanted to share anything else you want to leave listeners with

and you nugget you want to double down on? I mean, one thing that we didn't talk about, which I think is happening I'm seeing more of is renegs 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. And the more senior they are often, it's beyond a couple weeks. We think about a second motion happening after offer except, which is, you know, we are a button seat business in recruiting. And there's like a big window there where someone has like, ah, they accept the offer

and we kind of like go on to the next one. But what are we doing between offer accept and? join. And there's two parts of that. One is like make sure they show up. The second is like a bit of a pre-boarding and helping them have a fast ramp by staying connected with them. So we'll do dinners with other people who have accepted. We try to create essentially create community around them. We'll send them a cursor laptop. You know, kind of feel like a presumptive you've joined kind of way. We do these dinners. We do these like touch points. One is to help to make sure like that delivery happens. But also to feel like they start to get extended too. They start to kind of visually realize

what's going to look like. Wow. That is so. brutal to have gone through that entire funnel, got the offer, made the offer, accepted the offer, and just, you know, oh, man. And you're saying this is a trend. I imagine because just the market is so hot and they're getting better offers, offers that they didn't expect. Correct. Yeah. I love, I feel like there's this lake of things we didn't talk about. Is there anything else, any other trends, any other trends, things that you've noticed of like, wow, this is changing in the hiring landscape. I think maybe the other trend. I think we see like the rise of the talent engineer. I don't know if you've seen that out there. You know, the kind of the, the function within a recruiting team who is a possibly former engineer who's like building tools and things like that. And 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. And in earlier companies I was in, we're often beholden to like begging for engineering time to build us, tools or functions or features. And now that's like, that's in us.

Like, we have that right now in our team. And so I want a future state of my recruiting team to feel like they are talent engineers. Versus, you know, leaning on someone else on the team to help them, like, build a tool. If that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree. It's interesting. There's a good market engineers.

Like, every function is going to have their version of engineer. Yeah. Over time. Engineers, engineers. Well, Adam, with that, we've really. reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready? Yeah, yeah.

All right. What are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most other people? Yeah, this is super nerdy. So there's two. There's one that I read in undergrad that has stuck with me. And it's emotional intelligence by Daniel Goldman. And, you know, it's kind of the rise of EQ as an important piece of it. and I just feel like emotional intelligence right now more than ever is so important in this like

AI age. And so it was like super transformative to be way back then and I think is like really important now. And the other one I love for founders is just the high growth handbook by Eli Gill. I just think it's said, I'm a big fan of a book where you can just jump to a chapter and get an answer and it's not this like linear piece you got to work through. And so I think it's such a great reference guide on different problems. And you know, for the most part, building, companies, the components are the same. You know, the core principles, even when that came out several years ago, I still think hold true. So I like the high growth handbook. A stray press. Shout out. High growth campbook. I imagine you've read Scaling People by Claire Hughes-Johnson.

Yeah. Love her. Yeah. Another straight press. Amazing. Amazing. I love that. Yeah. Elad's book is still useful. Like, I don't know how many years later. Amazing. Yeah. Favorite recent movie or TV show you really enjoyed? Yeah, I have not seen a movie in years. I feel like my life is at like 20 minute chunks. But I have been watching a series, The Pit. And I'm from Western Pennsylvania. So from like the Pittsburgh area. And not only is that like it's not only is it extremely well done.

But two, it makes my life feel less frantic. Living our, it's about the only thing. that can make my life feel as frantic is living an hour in an ER. And like all they go through. And I often try to tell my team around like the gravity of things. I was like, hey y'all,

like we get to work for this amazing company and product things. But people are not living and dying every day by decisions that we make. And the pit they are. You know, so it kind of just gives us like leveling part. And then third, I think they just like capture the ethos of that region.

which is like my core, which is like Western Pennsylvania, a blue collar grinder. And I just think they do a really good job of capturing that. So I've been watching that when I can on some airplanes. I love that for most people. That shows very stressful. And for you, it's calming because it's less stressful.

It's just the relative nature of things that's helpful. Like, have you launched the bear? Because I feel like that'd be another example. Yeah. I think if I was probably Chicago guy, that would probably resonate, although I have seen it. Yeah.

Oh, man. Okay, a couple, a few more questions. Your favorite product you've recently discovered that you really love, other than cursor? Yeah, I think it's two. I think one is like semi-recent and I'm a huge granola fan. I think I was super early on granola and I love that they continue to innovate. And really just, yeah, just great product decisions, easy to use. They're great on feedback too.

If you've ever given them feedback, they're phenomenal. The second I've been using a lot is whisper, whisper flow. and just trying to get out quick notes to my team. I am better this than this in terms of like my thoughts. And so Whisper's been amazing on the go to drop notes to my team. Listen to this, Adam.

You may not know this. I don't. Subscribers to my newsletter get a year free of not only cursor, but also granola and whisper flow and 30 other incredible products, Reflot. and Google and lovable and it's out of control.

So if you like any of these products, ladiesproduct pass.com. That was not a place at all. That was just, yeah, I did not. It's just we have all the best products for free for a freaking year, including cursor. So there you go, ladiesprudicbast.com. Okay, two more questions. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to in work or in life?

Yeah. I think there's like three things that I come back to and I try to and still in my kids too. So one is like, work hard. I think the value of hard work is hard to understate and something like I grew up in. Second is like, do great work.

So let's not confuse the two. And third is like, be helpful. And I think like one thing I've really tried to do and, you know, maybe part of the reason I was able to help build this team is I've really just tried to be helpful. And if you talk to founders out there, anyone, I will answer their emails. I will jump on a 10-minute call with them.

And I want to think that people come to me for help and advice and like it's the right ones. And so, and that's just has now, like, I'm now getting to reap some of that of people who like want to, you know, come to the work on the team. But so there's three things I've really tried to live by. And that is an awesome set of principles to live by. Clearly it has contributed to your success. I'm going to steal them all. Those are really good. That's like a good tripod of things to be focused on.

You talked about being a dad. Final question. People said you're an expert on the importance of a well-placed dad joke. I'm not going to ask you to do a joke unless you want to. But more so just like what's something you've learned about raising kids? Because I'm a dad, three-year-old. What's just like a thing you've learned about raising great kids? It's humbling.

You know, they will challenge you. in ways you don't expect. There are like many mirrors of you sometimes. So like that's like it's a feedback mechanism. And it's like such a joy, honestly. And I'm very lucky to have an amazing wife and partner who at times, most times takes the unfair load of it. But yeah, it's probably, it's definitely my greatest joy.

That's such a good summary. That's exactly how it feels very challenging at times, but the greatest joy. But just think about your career, though, the thing, when you look back on your career of your most enjoyable times, you were a little bit over your skis. You were thrown into something unexpected that you weren't ready for and you, like, figured it out. And in the moment, it was a series of ups and downs, stacking S curves. But you'll look back and I'd be like, wow, that was like one of like my career highlights.

but you are really over your skis. Molly Graham, who's been on the podcast and done a couple of newsletter. Guest posts, she has this concept. She calls the J-Curve, which is your best roles are just you join and then you go way down and suck at it for a while. And then you come back up and that's the best experience you've ever had. Molly is, yeah, Molly has gold out there for sure. She's so incredible. Working on a new guest post right now might have come out by the time this comes out.

Love it. With that, two valid questions. Adam, what do you want to plug anything you want to point people to? And how can listeners be useful to you? I think they're one and the same. I mean, I'll plug. I mean, I would love people to try Cursar. I think it's incredibly exciting things that we're coming out with.

And we're really proud of it. Some things in the pipeline, too. I'm not super out there online. I think I'm on LinkedIn a little bit. But I really honestly try to let my work in our team speak for what we do. But I'm always down to be helpful back to the last point. So I really do get pure energy and joy from helping people. And so I know at some point that will come back in some kind of way or form.

Don't expect it to. But that's just where I get that drive for me. Just to plug cursor a little bit, not only is just the design and experience of cursor, awesome, the best feature for a lot of people is you could just switch between models extremely easily. So instead of getting hooked on Codex or CloudCo, it used cursor. and then a new opus comes out, a new GPT comes out, and you could switch and just play around with it immediately

versus switching the product. Yeah, there was a world where models were coming out every three or four months. We're down to a number of days between models. And people I know who love to build products want to be working with the best tools in any given time. And so, you know, our agent allows you to choose the right model. And I think for a lot of companies, also cost is a rightful consideration now.

And so it really comes around optimization. I'm using the right model for the right task. And so that's kind of just landing into Cursor's sweet spot. Yeah. And you guys are also now just building state-of-the-art models building sitting on SpaceX's data centers, like a whole world for cursor. Yeah, getting to train on the world's largest data center

has just unlocked our models. So it's been amazing. What a time to be alive. That's great. Adam, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening.

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