Adam Ward: evaluation

Transcript context

…Oh, man. So along those lines, I've heard from a bunch of people that you just have a huge followship on your team. There's a lot of heads of talent from other companies that decided to join your team to be ICs. What are some things you've learned about building incredible teams, keeping people working for you over the long term? Yeah. One thing I learned is, at each place my team has looked different, because the company, how they think about recruiting or the product is different. And so the Cursor way demanded a different type of team. It demanded this level of recruiter and who understands the leadership recruiting motion, who's not going to get caught up in the numbers game of the funnel do. They have this confidence and they have a network that they can tap into. And so I think we talked a lot about hiring managers, other people networks, but seasoned great recruiters have their own networks too. You have a couple of recruiters in your life that you trust that you probably would seek advice on, and so we try to collect those people too, because they can be as influential in tapping their networks as a technical leader, for example. Then I just think about three attributes of someone who I want on my team. One, I want people who are excellent humans and excellent in what they do, and I'm not willing to trade that off. We are going to spend most of our waking hours during the week together, and we should all be selfish enough to want to work with great people, great humans. The second is, I look for people who have a chip on their shoulder, something to prove, love the craft. They have this internal drive and motivation to be excellent. And that can show up in lots of ways and I try to get to that. And then the third thing is, I look for people who put team over themselves. And so this is really important clearly for the team I built now. They could be running recruiting lots of places. But what they've realized is that no one really aspires to get to middle management. We end up there. But what they did realize is they love the craft of recruiting and they love to be challenged. They love to learn. They want to work with great people. And so when I would go out to my network and I'm like, "Hey Lenny, who are three people you know that are excellent humans and excellent recruiters, they just have this natural drive or chip on their shoulder, and they put team above themselves?" You're like, "Oh, you should talk to Janet." You can conjure those things up. And so we've really tried to build a team of those folks here, and I'm really excited about the people we've collected. It's a good sign when I'm just like, "Wait, I want to work for Adam. This sounds really great."…

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