Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
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?
00:19:10 · Adam Ward, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:19:10] S1: Those are the general buckets. Every company will have other specific things that really matter. But yeah, those would be the things. And remember, things you're not asking are what companies are they from? These are objective, somewhat transferable things versus trying to piggyback off of someone else's process or definition of great. Because we just said almost every company's doing this wrong or has company doing funnel 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 it to yourself to 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. [00:20:01] S0: So you're saying specifically don't focus on, and it's a trap to focus on the logos on the resume. [00:20:06] S1: I think so. Yeah. There are clearly vintages of companies when you're like, "Hey, this team at this company at this time did fantastic things." And possibly because that person was on that team at that company at that time, they are great. Possibly. That can be shorthand, but both companies jump to that almost immediately. [00:20:30] S0: 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 something else?
00:20:30 · Lenny Rachitsky, Adam Ward
[00:20:30] S0: 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 something else? [00:20:38] S1: I think it's a combination of things, but I think where we typically start is a set of people who we trust in terms of having high taste in talent. But I think the mistake though, and 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 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 this broad question of who's the best person. [00:21:36] S0: And I imagine that maps to step one, which is where you map the skills, experiences. [00:21:40] S1: Correct. So the questions you're asking are mapping back to 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. You're like, "Ah, Lenny mentioned them, but so did Sally. Let's put this person on the list, on the target list."
00:21:40 · Adam Ward, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:21:40] S1: Correct. So the questions you're asking are mapping back to 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. You're like, "Ah, Lenny mentioned them, but so did Sally. Let's put this person on the list, on the target list." [00:21:59] S0: 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? [00:22:09] S1: So if you think about, let's pull out the set of characteristics. Okay. The characteristics of someone we want is really curious, systems thinker, whatever they might be, maybe two or three things. Then you're thinking about what companies also share that approach to how they hire. And you could literally probably do a quick Boolean or AI String and be like, "Hey, look at all the job openings in the world among these 100 companies, which ones also say these characteristics matter?" So you kind of think about, "Ooh, where could they have maybe picked up some of these skills for a company who also said that matters as well?" And so then you start to build 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.