A VC mutual introduced me to a founder who just raised 6MM and was assembling his founding engineering team.

The challenge: 6 founding engineering hires in under 90 days for his AI startup to build the MVP.

We started collaborating immediately in our first meeting by reviewing sample candidates I had proactively sourced, then agreed on a flat fee for all 6 roles, and I was off to recruiting the same day.

2000+ personalized reach outs later..

160 recruiter calls

39 interview loops

9 Offers Extended

6 Offers Accepted

RESULT: The founding engineering team reached a quorum in the office and is building an MVP in 90 days 🎉

It was an honor becoming an embedded extension of a bold new startup vision and recruiting A-players to build an awesome product! 

Afterwards, as a favor, I met up with the founder and head of engineering in Palo Alto to help with the Stanford career fair to recruit early career tech talent.

Challenges & Solutions

C:  Marketing cold candidates and selling an unknown company. 

S: Narrative construction and problem + total addressable market (TAM) framing for outbound recruiting campaigns and job description creation.

C: Hire #1 received an outside offer he couldn’t refuse in his first week and left the company. 

S: Leveraging the market map and pipeline that led to the initial hire, I delivered a FREE replacement in under 3 weeks as part of my replacement guarantee.

C: Job responsibilities not mapping to available talent. Scope creep narrowing addressable candidate market.

S: Weekly meetings where we debriefed on market insights and skillset availability to tailor distribute the tech stack and expertise across larger addressable candidate pools leading to faster fill times. Beyond discerning ‘must haves’ vs ‘nice to haves’.

C: Interviewer Bandwidth – we were leveraging the founders network for interviewers to help out in their free time. Most could only commit to one per week.

S: I took on the behavioral interviews. Recorded each interview with transcriptions. Then scored them with a founder approved scorecard.

C: Founder bandwidth for reference checks

S: I took on reference checks for all new hires to mitigate undetected risks and identify any additional information to help in ramping new hires.