Hiring is one of the first problems founders have to solve, and early on, time is the constraint.
You are likely doing all of the recruiting work yourself, and while you can technically outsource parts of it, you generally shouldn’t. You are the best person to evaluate early hires, and the quality of those hires matters disproportionately.
Given this constraint, a hiring process built around generating a large volume of candidates is not the answer. It requires more time than most founders have and shifts your focus toward managing pipeline instead of making hires.
Instead, your goal is to spend your time on people who are likely to respond and convert through the hiring funnel. This means prioritizing candidate conversations where there is already a level of context, interest, or connection.
Where your time should go
The question is how to actually prioritize the right candidate conversations. In practice, this comes down to two things:
- How much effort it takes to generate a candidate conversation
- How likely that candidate conversation is to lead to a hire
The effort required to generate candidate conversations varies significantly by channel:
- Immediate network: very little effort
- Extended network: low effort, typically through people you already know
- Agencies: low effort, but requires significant cost
- Sourcing: high effort, requiring outreach to a large number of candidates
The likelihood that those conversations convert into hires also differs. If you look at qualified candidate conversations per hire, the differences are meaningful:
- Immediate network: ~5:1
- Extended network: ~10:1
- Agencies: ~10:1
- Sourcing: ~15:1
- Inbound / job boards: ~20:1
When you account for both effort and conversion, the differences between channels become much more pronounced. Where you should spend your time becomes clear.
Work through your network
The most efficient place to start is your network, but only if you actually work through it by identifying and speaking with every relevant candidate you can reach through it.
Most founders don’t actually do this. They do a quick pass, think of a few people, reach out, and move on. They assume their network isn’t strong enough, when in reality they haven’t worked through it in a systematic way. As a result, they move too quickly into channels where each conversation is less likely to lead to a hire.
The value in your network comes from going deeper, not just reaching out to the obvious people.
A simple way to do this is to map your network by categorizing each person into one of five buckets:
- Hire + Known
- Hire + Unknown
- Maybe + Known
- Maybe + Unknown
- No Hire
Every relevant person should fall into one of these buckets. From there, the process is sequential.
You start with the Hire + Known group, where you can reach out directly. The goal is to actually speak with every person in that bucket, not just reach out. If someone doesn’t respond, you follow up. If needed, you use other connections to get in touch. You don’t move on until you have a clear outcome for each person. Reaching out isn’t enough. You actually need to speak with each person.
Once that group is exhausted, you move to Hire + Unknown. Here, you rely on your network to get introductions. As you have conversations with people in the first group, you should also be asking for referrals, which will continue to expand this set.
In most cases, these two groups are enough to make your initial hires. Only after you’ve worked through them should you move on.
Closing
Early hiring comes down to where you spend your time. Your network is the most efficient place to start, but only if you actually work through it.
Most people move on before they’ve actually exhausted it, and end up wasting more time to get to the same outcome.