Building a Talent Team from 0 to 100 Engineers
A lot of founders claim they have one of the highest talent densities, but if you look at how much time they actually spend on recruiting, or on hiring a good recruiter, it's very low.
There are only so many "1% talent" people, so it's ironic that everyone claims the same thing.
One of the most difficult problems in startups is hiring a great recruiter. Many founders come out of this with the same struggle: the recruiter doesn't actually know how to recruit.
Almost all recruiters come from a big tech background. They know how to move a funnel, and their taste in talent is very low.
- know a lot of smart people
- be respected by smart people
- love to consistently meet with people
In this piece I'll go into more detail on how a company at every stage should think about hiring a recruiter.
The two buckets of talent
To understand recruiting you first have to understand people. I put talent into two buckets.
Bucket A – underpriced talent. This is by far the hardest category and the most difficult to solve. The reaction you get when you open this person's profile is "how the fuck did they get into this company?" They didn't come from a fancy college, and they haven't done any insane competitions or a quant internship. They're just normal people, probably from the least expected place. When you dig deeper into their past work, you find why they may be exceptional.
To really understand this category you have to think from first principles. For robotics hardware talent, a great way is hiring a bunch of FRC and VEX world champions (this is still underpriced), just like how many frontier companies have been hiring math and physics Olympiad winners to do research. There's other stuff like Redpwn for security, sneaker devs for infra, game hack clients for low level, roblox game dev for product eng. Another way to find this is to truly understand technical ability and be willing to look for interesting projects. The rest is betting on people, which I believe Ramp did best. It's rare to find companies that actually bet on slope over credentials and the ability to contribute immediately.
Bucket B – SF bubble talent. These are the priced-in talent, what I call the "unicorn" hire: the top engineers and researchers at frontier labs, high talent density startups, or the best engineers in big tech.
One of the biggest mistakes founders make with Bucket B is the company. People automatically think you're good because of a logo. That is a rookie mistake. Just because you work at a frontier lab doesn't make you a unicorn hire. To figure it out you need to find who's actually the best, e.g. the core contributors of Grok 4 or o1.
Everything in between is a "good" hire. Not exceptional, but good.
So how do you hire recruiters?
Bucket B is extremely focused on people and relationships. If you know one of the main core contributors of Grok 4, you'll figure out who else did that and get a warm intro.
Bucket A is probably what most recruiters don't spend time on, because it doesn't seem "worth" their time.
Early stage
For an early stage startup, hiring a recruiter that only does recruiting doesn't make sense. The company isn't going to scale fast enough to need a recruiter rather than a generalist who understands recruiting, partnerships, and ops. Recruiting at the early stage must be treated as executive search, and the founders will usually do most of the work here.
A lot of early stage founders work with a recruiting agency. That's usually the wrong choice, especially if you're trying to stay in stealth. A recruiting agency is just a version of the big tech recruiter that really understands how to do massive outbound. I'm sure we've all gotten that recruiting email from an agency. It's very annoying, and it'll make you lose a lot of brand credibility if they spam on behalf of your company.
If you're talent, you should never work with a traditional recruiting agency. They don't care about you and will maximize for cash. They don't understand your needs and only care about how to close you so they can get paid. They won't work with great founders either; the truly 99th percentile company will not work with a traditional agency. Most importantly it most likely will get leak (they submit you to multiple companies and it will spread fast)
So what should early stage founders do? Work with investors, especially younger, junior investors. They are always on the ground and have access to great talent. And this goes out to all junior and angel investors: send the best talent to your portfolio companies!
~10 engineers
By the time you reach ~10 engineers, it's time to bring on an in-house recruiter.
At 10 engineers there's going to be more recruiting ops structure, and now there are many referrals you can mine. From 10 to 50, most hires will come from your network and referrals, so the right hire is someone who truly understands mapping out talent and is more events and network driven. These people mostly come from an ops background or a VC background.
Talent engineers
The dream recruiting hire is a great engineer who loves recruiting. I'd say any engineer who comes out of a high talent density startup and is interested in doing venture may be a good starting point.
Companies are starting to have full-time engineers do recruiting and calling it a "talent engineer." Talent engineer can mean a lot of things, but viewing recruiting from an engineering perspective is the most common answer.
The only moat of an engineer doing recruiting is:
- they probably know a lot of smart engineers
- they can vet technical ability
- they can build tools that automate the majority of recruiting
But most engineers don't even understand the basics of recruiting and waste their time on ops stuff rather than focusing on the most important part, which is closing and finding people in their network.
50–100 engineers
For startups at 50–100 engineers, it's important to hire people who can run executive search and recruiting ops to handle inbound and day-to-day operations. Usually acquiring a good agency makes sense here.
What we do at Bo Le
At Bo Le Capital we work with founders from inception on building out founding teams. We run a separate recruiting agency that works with growth stage companies. We do full stack recruiting and run the talent function end to end. Every year we work with a selective set of companies, many in stealth, and we forward deploy into these companies.
If you're an engineer
Work with VCs, but as I mentioned in my previous essay, there's a lot of bias. Trust your smart friends and always ask for advice. Most importantly, trust your instinct and always optimize to work with the best people. Don't FOMO into logos or money. It's always the work and the people.
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