Adam Ward: evaluation

Transcript context

…Again, I think people are going to be hearing this and be like, "I need Adam immediately. We need help." And they're not going to be able to get that, because you've got a job. So I'm going to try to extract as much as I can while we're here. One is, say you're an early stage company thinking about hiring, setting up your hiring approach, what's the most common ways that early stage companies and founders f-up their early team in hiring? Yeah. I think the thing they try to do is do this silver bullet hire, which is a first head of talent, and they collapse two competing skill sets into one. Okay. So generally, as a founder, when you're ready to hire your first recruiter, you're probably behind on hiring. There's a problem to solve there, you're behind on hiring. So maybe there's a debt of roles to fill, five, 10, 15. But you also are hiring someone at this stage because you want them to build a system. They might be like, "Wow, I want to build something like Adam's talking about. " So you're trying to build this, hire someone who can also put in the right pieces to help scale out. And those are competing interests, because a person wants to come in and like just any new hire, they want to prove out, they want to make hires, but they might not put in the system. Or they might put in the system, but not make any hires, and now you're not [inaudible 01:12:41]. And so they try to collapse this into one role, and generally that's a mistake. And so we recommend decoupling those things. So that means you still might hire one person, but can you get some help with the other one? I'm going to hire the person who's going to put in the right system, but I'm going to partner them with a contingent recruiter or something else to make some short-term progress while they're in to teach the company how to do this through these roles that they feel that they're helping orchestrate, or vice versa, I might bring in someone to help us put in the right foundation, which we did at GBD. And then they could hire a really high-powered IC recruiter who can execute. Amazing. That makes all the sense in the world. When you're looking for that first recruiting hire, is there anything else you think is important to look for? I know it depends on maybe which of these two buckets they're going to be in, but any other advice?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.