Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:11:00 · Adam Ward, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:11:00] S1: I think so. Yeah. I think we've seen this for maybe the last 12 months, the rise of the power of IC. And the recognition and appreciation for that work, I think has come almost in a full circle moment for them. But I think taste, decision-making, problem solving, these characteristics, curiosity in all the good ways I think are coming back up to the surface. [00:11:25] S0: Awesome. Okay. So let me 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 founder's 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?
00:11:59 · Adam Ward
[00:11:59] S1: 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 to 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 and he coined that term. So I had to acknowledge that. But I think what the funnel did forever, almost forever, as you think about the recruiting history, companies think about recruiting like a funnel, maybe akin to a sales funnel where they think about different stages, pass through rates and things like that. And when you think about how most companies have recruited over these last several decades, it's really been candidates come from three buckets. They apply, they are activated or sourced or they're referred. But if you think about 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 even narrow further on this 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 that's what. And then the 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 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 volume. And so we just think about this in a different way is what if you had confidence upfront of who the top 20% was, and then you use your assessment process to validate that thesis of who those are? That seems like a better... So there's this funnel doom, but there's within a funnel doom, there's this pillar of excellence.
00:14:32 · Adam Ward, Lenny Rachitsky
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 hire the person who drops to the bottom. [00:14:47] S0: I love this, especially hearing this. This is how hiring has been forever. And just hear you describe it, it's clear this is not optimal. Why hasn't this changed ever? [00:14:59] S1: There is something detrimental about comparing it to a sales funnel. Because in a sales funnel, 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 then another rational unit of a candidate. And so to believe that things are transactional and linear and passed through in the same ways I think is a bit of a fallacy. But sales has been around for hundreds of years, a long time. Recruiting as a craft or this is like 50 years, 40 years. So we're behind on it, but 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.
00:14:59 · Adam Ward, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:14:59] S1: There is something detrimental about comparing it to a sales funnel. Because in a sales funnel, 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 then another rational unit of a candidate. And so to believe that things are transactional and linear and passed through in the same ways I think is a bit of a fallacy. But sales has been around for hundreds of years, a long time. Recruiting as a craft or this is like 50 years, 40 years. So we're behind on it, but 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. [00:16:01] S0: 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 who it drops in the funnel. Talk more about just that kind of way of thinking about it.
00:16:19 · Adam Ward
[00:16:19] S1: So if you've ever worked on a senior specialized hire leadership role done well, there's roughly 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 1% means to you. And so if you've ever heard that phrase, "I'll know it when I see it. I'll know what great looks like." Actually, you won't. You won't know because you haven't spent the time objectively identifying 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 what are 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 of what you're going to be assessing against. And it helps you think about that close of why this person and why this role is going to have big impact here. So that I think piece of the hiring process is underinvested in, but in a leadership search that is often known to be a really strong cornerstone. So let's say you take this really good scoping and then you pair it with really good market mapping intelligence and signals 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." And so that approach, I think you can do at scale if you do that really good scoping, you get really clear on what that looks like. And then you take that list 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 or doom large population.
00:18:24 · Lenny Rachitsky
[00:18:24] S0: 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 the three steps here that you walk through of 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 mirror back what you just shared, be clear on the skills you need and stack rank, here's the skills we need from this person, what experiences we're looking for and stack rank that. Talk about why this role is impactful and just why this is so important. Is there anything else there just to flesh that out?