Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:13:21 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Ward
[01:13:21] S0: 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're going to be in, but any other advice? [01:13:32] S1: Yeah. I think number one is that they are curious and business focused. They're an early member of the team. They 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 often that means that they have all these interesting... 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, and I think these sometimes get switched, is just high motor. Someone who understands the grind that it will be and the pace that it works and is down for it. And that doesn't mean they have to be younger, or it doesn't mean anything. It's just that they love working at this edge of overwhelmedness. And so I often think about my team as we want the water level to be right here, and so you're breathing. And if you've met any recruiters, recruiters are excellent at 90 to 110% capacity, and are terrible outside of that. If they only have half a rec load, they are useless, or if they're way overwhelmed, also just overwhelmed. But they're great at this middle ground of edge of adrenaline rush busy, and you want to find those people.
01:13:32 · Adam Ward, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:13:32] S1: Yeah. I think number one is that they are curious and business focused. They're an early member of the team. They 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 often that means that they have all these interesting... 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, and I think these sometimes get switched, is just high motor. Someone who understands the grind that it will be and the pace that it works and is down for it. And that doesn't mean they have to be younger, or it doesn't mean anything. It's just that they love working at this edge of overwhelmedness. And so I often think about my team as we want the water level to be right here, and so you're breathing. And if you've met any recruiters, recruiters are excellent at 90 to 110% capacity, and are terrible outside of that. If they only have half a rec load, they are useless, or if they're way overwhelmed, also just overwhelmed. But they're great at this middle ground of edge of adrenaline rush busy, and you want to find those people. [01:14:59] S0: Oh, man. So along those lines, I've heard from a bunch of people that you just have a huge followship 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?
01:15:19 · Adam Ward
[01:15:19] S1: Yeah. 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 the leadership recruiting motion, who's not going to get caught up in the numbers game of the funnel do. They have this confidence and they have a network that they can tap into. And so I think we talked a lot about hiring managers, other people networks, but seasoned great recruiters have their own networks too. You have a couple of recruiters in your life that you trust that you probably would seek advice on, 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. Then I just think about three attributes of someone who I want on my team. 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 all be selfish enough to want to work with great people, great humans. The second is, I look for people who have a chip on their shoulder, something to prove, love the craft. They have this 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 lots of places. But what they've realized is that no one really aspires to get to middle management. We end up there. But what they did realize is 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 they put team above 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.
01:17:44 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Ward
[01:17:44] S0: It's a good sign when I'm just like, "Wait, I want to work for Adam. This sounds really great." [01:17:47] S1: And I try to be this balance of... Because recruiting is sometimes around inspiring your team, but it's a deeply operational function. And so I've tried to find this balance of where I can be in the weeds, operational, understand it, be in it with them, but also sometimes lift out and help paint the bigger picture too. [01:18:12] S0: 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 any nugget you want to double down on?
01:18:12 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Ward
[01:18:12] S0: 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 any nugget you want to double down on? [01:18:26] S1: I mean, one thing that we didn't talk about, which I think is happening I'm seeing more of is reneges on offers. And so I think a lot of companies get to the yes of the offer acceptance, and there's often 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 accept, which is we are a button seat business in recruiting. And there's a big window there where someone has like, "Huh, they accept the offer," and we 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, make sure they show up. The second is 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 essentially create community around them. We'll send them a Cursor laptop, because it feels like a presumptive you've joined kind of way. We do these dinners, we do these touch points. One is help to make sure that delivery happens, but also to feel like they start to get excited too. They start to visually realize what it's going to look like. [01:19:32] S0: Wow. That is so brutal to have gone through the entire funnel. Got the offer, made the offer, accepted the offer.
01:19:32 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Ward
[01:19:32] S0: Wow. That is so brutal to have gone through the entire funnel. Got the offer, made the offer, accepted the offer. [01:19:37] S1: Yeah. [01:19:39] S0: 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. [01:19:47] S1: Correct. [01:19:47] S0: Yeah. 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 noticed of, wow, this is changing in the hiring landscape? [01:19:56] S1: I think maybe the other trend, I think we see the rise of the talent engineer. I don't know if you've seen that out there. The function within a recruiting team who is a possibly former engineer who's building tools and things like that. And my warm take, not a hot take, my warm take is every recruiter should be a talent engineer. 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 were often beholden to begging for engineering time to build us tools or functions or features. And now that's in us. 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 leaning on someone else on the team to help them build a tool, if that makes sense. [01:20:52] S0: Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree. It's interesting. There's go-to-market engineers. Every function is going to have their version of engineer over time.